City Council - Regular Meeting

Morning.

Hello. Cancel her.

I'm going to look at you.

i'm kidding about that i was like are you kidding me you're not

Happens.

He texted me. He's like, can I get away without a tie?

I said, yeah, no more ties.

I'm not wearing it.

I'm not dressing up.

Whatever.

I got a jacket.

Good morning.

Can't complain.

Thank you.

I know you want to look there.

I've been all over that Yeah, she hit me up as we were looking at stuff yesterday. I got back to her. I am talking to her right after this conversation, right after this today. You know what? I got to go home right after this. So when I talk to Jenna today, I'm going to have her pull up board with me so I can just walk her through so she can show me where that number's coming from. Okay.

all right good morning everyone and welcome to the thursday april 30th 2026 florida supervisors meeting we are going to start our meeting today with the flag salute and dexter is going to lead us to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all Okay, we're going to jump right in. I'm just gonna warn you, I think there's a couple shots in this thing, and that's not normal for me, so who knows what's gonna happen today. All right, we're gonna start with our first presentation, which is gonna be IT.

Good morning, Board of Supervisors. I'm Jarrett Thiessen, Placer County CIO. And along with me, I've got Dieter Wittenberg, Assistant CIO, Chad Fenstermacher, who is our Fiscal Manager, and Shanna Stahl, who is our Accounting Supervisor. So I just want to start off by thanking the talented staff of the IT department and IT staff across the entire county for the great work that they do. All the accomplishments that we're going to talk about today is all a direct result of their expertise and the skills. It's truly the best team I've had the pleasure of working with in my almost now 30 years of working in the IT industry. And I also want to thank the board and the CEO for giving me the opportunity to serve as Placer County CIO. I really enjoy working here. Just had my 11th year anniversary and hope to get another 10 in here, as long as you guys will allow it. SO I'M GOING TO JUMP INTO THE PRESENTATION NOW. SO THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT IS THE CENTRAL IT AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS PROVIDER FOR PLACER COUNTY DEPARTMENTS. IT'S COMPOSED OF TWO FUNDS TWO COST CENTERS AND 19 PROGRAMS. THE COST CENTERS ARE BOTH INTERNAL SERVICE FUNDS AND INCLUDE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FUND AND THE COUNTYWIDE RADIO FUND. Our mission in the IT department is to cost-effectively provide a wide range of technology services essential for customer departments to effectively deliver quality and timely support to our citizens.

Peter will take the slides. Trying to figure out how to use it.

I'm laser focused. I'm laser focused over here.

I'm actually kind of mortified that I said there's a couple of shots in this. I mean a couple of shots of espresso.

So let me just put that on the record before we move on.

Good clarification.

So moving into the accomplishments, we're going to start off first with artificial intelligence readiness. So over the past year, we've been focused on building governance, security, and data foundations needed to safely adopt AI across departments. This includes establishing guardrails around how AI can be used, ensuring that data is properly protected and aligned with emerging regulatory and compliance expectations. This effort also included training staff on how to use AI responsibly, while helping them understand the benefits, such as improving productivity and reducing manual and repetitive work. In addition, we have begun preparing for and deploying tools like Microsoft Copilot, which you heard about yesterday a little bit. These tools are being introduced in a controlled and intentional way so we can support the growing demand for AI-driven services while maintaining strong oversight. I want to thank on our staff, Richard Johnston and his team for their expertise and leadership in advancing this work. And I also want to thank Robert Lee and the security team for developing and adopting the county's AI policy and standards. The second one is a very large effort, which is our website redesign and ADA digital compliance efforts. So over the past couple of years, county staff have been focused on meeting the new DOJ digital accessibility requirements. This has truly been a monumental effort countywide, and thanks to a 12-month extension that we just received from the DOJ, this work will continue for the next 12 months. um i want to specifically thank wendy williams becca demas and tomas vera for their leadership in guiding the website redesign so we outsource our website hosting and content management to civic plus and within that contract we get every so often we get a redesign so we thought because of doj requirements And it's been a while, it was about six years since we did a redesign, that we would do the redesign and incorporate the new DOJ requirements into that design. So Wendy and Becca definitely, and Tomas led that effort. So while our website, our web pages themselves are today compliant with the DOJ requirement, we have about 50,000 documents that are attached to our website, mainly PDF documents that require remediation. And that's kind of where the focus of our effort has been over the past several months. So going forward, that effort will also continue. But to address those PDFs, we purchased a tool through CivicPlus called DocAccess, and that tool, when you pull up a PDF on our website today, there's a toggle on that, and that toggle You can see the original document and a conforming alternative version of that document, which gives us kind of temporary. We've got that in place for the next two years, but it allows us to not have to go back and remediate every single document. What I also like about that tool is it gives us 24 by 7 support, which is included with the tool. So if somebody, if a citizen opens a PDF and they need additional assistance, they can call a number. There's a little document ID next to the phone number. They give the person the document ID. The support person can pull up that document and walk them through that, you know, whatever their questions are on that document. So that's a really nice enhancement that we've implemented. So while departments are continuing to remediate the high priority and frequently accessed documents to ensure long-term compliance and usability, they're also building internal capabilities by learning how to create accessible content from the outset so we can remain compliant going forward. The third one is our Microsoft G5 uplift. This doesn't sound like much, but this is a multi-year effort to be able to increase, uplift our licensing from G3 to G5, which gives us access to a whole suite of security and analytics products from Microsoft. So in February, we renewed our Microsoft contract and we upgraded that licensing at that time. And this upgrade will move us from a productivity focus licensing model to a fully integrated security compliance and analytics platform. It will allow us to consolidate multiple tools into a single platform over time. We'll look to do that to reduce our cost while significantly enhancing our cybersecurity posture and analytics capabilities in the future. We were able to absorb the majority of that cost of the upgrade through application consolidation. That's where the planning came in over the last three years. you

All right, I'll take the next two. So the network in what says SD-WAN, which is software-defined networking firewall upgrades, were completed on the SD-WAN product. The replacement was a replacement of our legacy routers. And that phase one was really just the equipment replacement. Phase two will be coming that will add additional resiliency and redundancy for all of our remote sites. So we're excited about implementing that. And then earlier this year, we did complete the internal and external firewall replacements, which will really allow for additional capacity and security features supporting the increasing the cloud-based applications in use by the county. On the public safety radio improvement side, our radio team worked with Motorola to do a system upgrade this last summer. A feature called Smart Connect was added, which really allowed us to integrate internet and and cellular services into the radio system, and a purchase of the Apex Next radios, which is a next generation radio from Motorola that Sheriff Wu, I think they received a grant for this last year, and purchased radios that take advantage of that feature and allow A DEPUTY THAT MIGHT BE IN AN AREA WHERE THE RADIO COVERAGE MAY NOT BE GOOD OR COMPROMISED BECAUSE THEY'RE IN A BUILDING THAT DOESN'T ALLOW FOR CELLULAR SERVICES TO COME THROUGH. TAHOE IS NAMELY AN AREA WHERE WE SEE A LOT OF THAT AND BEING ABLE TO AUGMENT WITH CELLULAR AND WI-FI SERVICE SO IF THE BUILDING HAS WI-FI THEY COULD UTILIZE THAT TO COMMUNICATE BACK TO DISPATCH. SO VERY EXCITED ABOUT that enhancement for our sheriff and for our deputies ultimately for their safety and the communication for our citizens. Back to you, Jerry.

So looking ahead, we're seeing several emerging priorities that will shape the future of our or the focus of our coming year. So the first one is increased interest in agentic AI capabilities. So departments are beginning to move beyond basic AI tools such as content generation or simple copilots and are now exploring systems that can take action on their behalf by automating workflows or supporting decision making for staff. For example, this could include automating routine tasks like document processing, responding to common service requests, assisting with case management, or helping staff navigate complex systems more efficiently. These capabilities have the potential to significantly improve productivity, reduce manual effort, or enhance service delivery to our residents. So at the same time the shift introduces new considerations agentic AI systems are more autonomous meaning that they can interact with data and systems and processes in ways that require a higher level of oversight and that's going to be our focus. This is an area we expect to continue growing rapidly and one where we'll need to stay both proactive and disciplined in our approach. The second item is the need for a 24 by 7 security operations center. So cyber threats are continuing to grow and they are also introducing AI into the cyber threats and they're growing in both volume and sophistication. And they're no longer occurring just during normal business hours. They're increasingly automated, persistent, and designed to exploit any gaps in monitoring and response time. So to effectively protect county systems and data, we need to continuously monitor and respond to threats outside of the traditional workday. So we intend to outsource this function, and we're working on creating an RFP now, but we did build the cost into our budget. And what we would get by a 24 by 7 security operations center is real-time monitoring, immediate incident response, and proactive threat hunting. So today this work is being done during business hours or through on-call support staff. We've got four staff that are on call every day in the evening and on the weekend. And that model has served us well, but I don't think it's sustainable given the introduction of AI and how they're interacting with with kind of the landscape of threats going forward. So we wanna outsource that. So moving to- Jared, sorry, quick question.

Go ahead. Did you say you did build it into the budget or you did not? We did, yes. Oh, okay, thank you.

Sorry. Moving towards a 24 by seven model ensures that we are investing in the operational capabilities needed to protect the county and our data. And the third one, which I can't talk too much about at this time because we are in the middle of a procurement, but it will be coming to you soon, but we've been working with HR and procurement on looking for ways to upgrade our current applicant tracking system and introduce some new capabilities that we don't currently have today. I'm going to defer to HR to provide the detail either during their presentation or when the item comes forward next month to you. The funding for this system is included in the information technology budget, and based on the cost proposals that I've seen, we've got the cost covered for the features and the functionality that HR and the departments are looking for.

All right, I'll take the next two here. So the broadband FFA grant, thanks to your board, we received a lot of support for the broadband grants over the past four years. The FFA grant is the state grant that we received that in late 24 was awarded to us. And then we subsequently awarded the contract to astound in early 2025. The construction deadline for this is December of 26. We do have Uh, some concerns about the timeline. This project is significant. This, uh, just to remind you, this is Applegate, Cape Horn, Magra and Alta. So, uh, Supervisor Gustafson, this is obviously all within your district. Um, but there are there are a lot of challenges that we have found, uh, in these in the. Build out here, and if it is public utility easements that are lacking, for example, which is more prominent than we expected or astound expected, along with significant not only rail crossings. I think there's 18 rail crossings and 11 freeway crossings through Caltrans. A lot of permit. related uh items there that that take time so we're monitoring that one closely uh their uh the provider has put a lot of resources towards this but time is a little bit against us we're watching how this is going and uh we will work closely and we've already begun uh begun conversations with the puc about potential extension but we do not know what that looks like so wanted to at least highlight that around that particular grant the other grants that we awarded previous to that and again we got a jump start here in our county because of your support are going really well again there are similar challenges within those but we had enough time with the arpa deadline which is december of 2026 to really make good progress because we began early So excited about what we're seeing there. I think the only thing that we might see a delay on there might be MetaVista and Supervisor Gustafson. We'll talk about that. That's partly because of that. FFA grant and the need to get that one done based on timing. So they are putting some resources there that will potentially delay some of that. So I'll work with you so we can communicate with the community and talk about what that looks like. But we don't see a huge delay, but there will be one that might move that into 2027. All right, moving on to the Placer County Fire Department command channel. This is one that we have really picked up our conversation with the Placer County Fire Department. We recognize that incidents today are being done on their dispatch channel. So when a call comes in to Grass Valley Fire Department, they will not only handle that call at the beginning, but continue to work on that dispatch channel. and that is a challenge for us with the increased calls uh for here at the county obviously uh number uh the numbers have been growing steadily over the years uh we're we're excited to look at an uh at the option of bringing a dedicated dispatch channel i'm sorry incident channel to them uh which other jurisdictions around us have by the way so uh we're uh we're gonna work closely with them and we already have motorola working uh with us closely on uh what that might look like and uh hope to achieve that here in in the coming year or years depending on what the project looks like but uh those are two items that we wanted to bring or two additional items we wanted to bring forward and welcome any questions on any of those all right

I had a, Madam Chair, I had a quick question, Dieter. Are any of these funds in jeopardy of us losing them if we don't meet that deadline? And if so, do we have substitute projects ready to go?

So the FFA grant specifically, we don't have a substitute project. In fact, they wouldn't probably allow for that, to be quite frank with you. Just that application process took a couple of years to go through, right? So our hope, a couple things here. uh we hope we get an extension naturally right that would be what we would be going after if needed again they are working feverishly to try to achieve as much as they can on that project um i think the other side of that might be astound and what will they do and contribute because that project the $23 million grant was the majority of the project costs. So I do believe is we have a pretty strong partnership with them that they will continue to build that. But those are conversations I think we're going to work through and have with them in the event that that funding goes away what does that look like so we're going to go after as much of that funding as we can in the timeline hope for an extension and then we'll realize uh you know with the stallions partnership the hope would be they would continue that effort uh because there will there's a lot of effort that's already been put into it that they would complete that right well if there's an opportunity where we need to contact

those above us to understand the geography and the nature of this area. I mean, this is the whole problem with rural broadband, right? I mean, a lot of challenges with it, so, okay.

We're working with Joel Joyce on talking to the CPC, and we're talking to CPC directly already about, you know, How do we go about getting an extension? What is the probability of us getting one? And they're pretty tight-lipped at this point. But they understand what the challenges are. I think they've got a good handle on that. So it's just a matter of working through that process. And then when the time is right, we'll put in an application. Great.

Thank you.

okay so next is our performance measures i'll just run through these really quickly so security threats mitigated 100 um we've got uh the best in breed tools uh in place today and a great security team that mitigates those uh network availability uh there was a little bit of a dip 99.5 any little outage uh has a big impact but we aim for 99.9 and then quarterly we send out um like fake emails to county staff, try to get them to click on various links in the email. And so our goal is to have less than 6.5% of people click on those. And you can see in 24, 25, we were at 11.3. So then that tells us we would need to improve our our knowledge and education of how to manage emails that are suspicious. So I know in this year, that number's down quite a bit, and we're much closer to the 6.5%. And then, just a couple last ones. So we're focused on delivering more analytics to the department. So one of the goals is to bring dashboards. So we had 326 dashboards deployed in 24-25. We're hoping to get that up to 406. We did purchase and we're testing an analytics platform called Snowflake with the HHS department, which has an AI interface where you can just, in plain English, interact with your data, with their data. And so we're going to be testing that. And if we're successful there, we'll start rolling that out to departments as well. And then Dieter talked about the broadband initiative. So at the end of 2425, we're at 5586 households that we have brought fiber to. And we're currently around like eight to 9000. And our goal, rough goal for that by the end of this fiscal year was handed over to Jen.

Good morning, Placer County Board of Supervisors, Mr. Clayton and Mr. Chatney. Thank you very much for having us here today. Before I get started and go into what everybody's favorites is a bunch of numbers, I would like to thank Lisa Holloway. Her collaboration and support of help building this has been very integral in getting everything here done, but also to a greater extent, the entire budget team and their leadership of Dan and Barbara. Without all of them, we wouldn't be here today. So moving into, like I said, everybody's favorite, we are looking at a total departmental budget of $38.5 million. Breaking that down a little bit further, You're looking at about 52.6% for our salaries and benefits, 43.4% for our services and supplies. That's what's used to support a lot of the things that Jared and Dea were just speaking to earlier. For example, our software purchases, our renewals, some consulting costs, or even the PC purchases. The other charges that you see on there are just for our A87. But more importantly, moving on to the capital piece, that $347,000 you see here, we went through a pretty extensive effort to provide an in-depth capital asset replacement plan. Again, like I was saying, I was working with Lisa on putting this together, and it's a long-term one. It took a lot of work to get everything put together. And so for next year, we do have $347,000 to help replace some of that aging infrastructure that we have out there to keep everything moving. Moving on to the revenues in that thin-lipped Pac-Man-looking PCC right there, $38.6 million of revenue in total, but for the majority of it, 98.4 of it is for our charges for services. That includes our core charges, our countywide systems, our countywide radio, along with any other internal or external billings that we have out there. The biggest majority is those charges for services. The other big one is the other financing sources. That is a general fund contribution for our countywide radio services program. And that is integral in helping support that aging infrastructure for our capital asset replacement plan. So that is where you're seeing that $500,000 there. All right, like I said, a bunch of big numbers here, actuals to actuals, and then moving on to adopted and submitted. 23 to 24 actuals when moving left to right to 24, 25, you'll see a pretty big increase. That increase is attributed to a seller contract purchase that we had that was $1.2 million. That was one time for two and a half years, but also in the 24, 25 actuals, you also see a lot of broadband actuals and revenue. That's not incorporated into our budget. It was obligated, encumbered a few years ago, and then as we use it, we pay for those invoices, and then you see that in the actuals. Moving on to the adopted and submitted, when looking at those two, that's pretty much our core operations. That excludes those big charges for the for the broadband that I was just mentioning. I don't want to forget in 2526, when we're here in a year from today, there is, to date, $4.2 million in actuals for the current year for the broadband. So when we come here next year, you're going to see that big, huge spike in our actuals for 2526 and moving on. the biggest jump between our adopted and our submitted is for our people our employees we had a big seven point i'm sorry yeah 7.5 increase or 1.4 million dollars for the cost of our people that wasn't just for our um gwis and everything like that but also a reduction in our salary savings i'll get to that a little bit later but we have been fully staffed and i'm pretty excited to share that Some of the other changes you'll see between the two, our countywide systems increased a total of $435,000. That includes for our board budgeting software upgrade that's mandatory, contract management that Derek had spoken to a little earlier, and also the applicant tracking. Those are all included in our submitted budget for next year. Our core increases are about $300,000. Jared had brought it up a little bit earlier. That is for our G5, or I'm sorry, Microsoft G5 uplift, some of the YubiKeys that we have for signing on securely, and then the other piece that he had spoken to, that 24-7 security operations center that's in the submitted budget for 26-27. Looking at our counterweight radio fund, pretty straightforward, not much of an increase in anything other than just the salaries and benefits. When looking at the actuals, I had brought up that capital asset replacement plan earlier. That's why you're seeing those increases and decreases in those actuals through those years. Some years we have lots of purchases, some years we have none. And that's what you're gonna see in there. With respect to the adopted to submitted, you can see it is fairly static from one year to the next. We had 300 and some thousand dollars in our current year adopted budget, and again, $348,000 in our submitted budget for those capital asset replacements for that aging inventory, or I'm sorry, aging infrastructure. Like I said, I was really excited. Looking at the last one here, we had 87 positions two years ago. We're up to 89. Last year, we were granted two additional positions for the current year. That was for our GRC analysts, our governance risk and compliance analyst, and then also for our GIS program to help support the county with any of those geographic questions that they have. It does note down there as of 4-17, we have a number of vacancies at zero, but that could go back as far as November of 25. We have been fully staffed since November, and hopefully we stay the same moving forward. Outside of that, that's all I have. If you have any questions, please let me know.

All righty, thank you. Questions or comments? Yeah, thank you for keeping all of us safe from the crazies online. We appreciate it.

There is so much they can do.

I was going to say they can't just, yeah, they can't deal with the content and comments.

Right. That's true. That's true.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much.

Next up we have General Services and Natasha Drain and her team.

Good start. Good morning, chair and members of the board. I am Natasha Drane, your director of the Department of General Services, or DGS. I am excited to share the work of the department and what our divisions have been doing over the last fiscal year and what we see coming up in the next fiscal year. Today I'm joined by Kylie Thompson, our AFOM, who will present the department's budget overview. I'm also joined by deputy directors Paul Breckenridge and Brad Boulez. We also have Colby Weiss, our fleet manager, and Keith Chambers, our supervising accountant with us as well. Before we begin, I'd like to thank CEO Daniel Chatney for placing his confidence in me to do this role on behalf of the board, our departments, and county residents. I'm incredibly grateful to be here and doing this work. I'd also like to thank the general services and CEO teams that were responsible for developing our budget and this presentation. So this is an exciting time for DGS as we build up a new department into a high-performing service organization. I'll speak more about that and our plan for developing the organization a little bit later in this presentation. But because this is a new department, I'd like to outline the DGS divisions and the services that are provided by them. With two exceptions, our divisions function as internal service providers to other county departments. That includes Capital Improvements, which is responsible for capital project planning and delivery. Our real estate team, which is responsible for acquisitions, dispositions, and lease management, among other real estate transactions. Our building maintenance team is responsible for facility preventative and corrective maintenance, as well as some deferred maintenance capital projects. Document Solutions runs our print shop, our mail service, does some warehousing, and as you know, they do some in-house graphics design work as well. Records Management assists with countywide record support. Procurement solicits and acquires county goods and services and manages our surplus. Fleet Services maintains our county fleet vehicles. We also have one internal support division, which is administrative services and is responsible for budget, finance, and HR. And we have one external facing division, which is museums, and you've had the chance of seeing the excellent work they've been doing in celebration of the county's 175th anniversary. As shown in this slide, DGS includes five funds, 10 cost centers, and 25 programs, and Kylie will talk more about that in her portion of the presentation. Okay, I'd like to highlight a few accomplishments from the past year with eight divisions providing very diverse services. This is only a snapshot and does not represent all of the accomplishments, of course, that we are proud of. I'd like to start with our capital projects team, which completed several high priority facility projects, including those listed. The South Placer Adult Correctional Facility in Roseville, which includes both the SB 844 Vocational Training Facility as well as the SB 863 Mental Health Facility. I'm happy to report that both projects were delivered on schedule and within budget. We also are pleased to report that the Auburn Library Modernization Project construction was also completed on time and within budget. A separate furniture contract is underway, which will enable the library to reopen this summer. I know you got a chance to hear a bit about that yesterday. We are really proud to support county departments, and in this case, the Sheriff's Office and libraries in delivering impactful services to the community. Next, our procurement team received its 23rd consecutive achievement of excellence in procurement award from the National Procurement Institute. That's a mouthful. Placer County is one of just 24 public agencies in all of North America with 23 or more consecutive wins. This is a great accomplishment for this team and we thought it was worth noting here. The building maintenance team is on track to complete 78 major maintenance and facility improvement projects. These projects range from replacing and repairing things like HVAC, roofing and lighting fixtures among other facility improvements. This team is working hard to maintain safe and functional facilities, though this can be challenging sometimes with older facilities, which we'll talk a little bit more about in the presentation. Continuing with accomplishments, the real estate services team facilitated several key transactions, including those that are highlighted here on the slide. The first is the home key acquisition for supportive housing. The second is the Confluence Preserve or Raccoon Creek acquisition of more than 597 acres of farmland, open space, and creeks. And streams rather that that is now part of the larger 4,200 acre confluence preserve This team also facilitated the facility use agreement for the Sheriff's Office post academy at the Rock Creek School campus Which we got the chance to see at the board a few weeks ago Records management launched a digital records management training in January of this year in partnership with IT targeting all employees to improve digital record handling This optional training actually achieved countywide participation, with some departments exceeding more than 50% participation rate, with 276 employees completing it so far. The training is still available to all staff. There's more to come from this team on available resources, so please keep your eyes peeled. The fleet team completed in the first half of fiscal year 25-26 2,785 work orders between both the Auburn and Truckee shops. This team has also taken in vehicle and equipment deliveries totaling more than $4.3 million. Fleet also transitioned the maintenance and repair for 12, or excuse me, 11 transit buses from a private contractor to fleet. Okay. I'd like to transition to discussing five of the emerging issues and priorities the department sees in the next fiscal year, including, first, the plan for DGS, secondly, the facility conditions, three, construction cost volatility, four, AB 339, and five, fleet electrification. First, there is a lot of interest in how to develop a new department. We've created a roadmap that will help build a strong foundation for long-term success. We're calling the roadmap the DGS Organizational Development Plan. Not a super fancy name. You're the first to hear about this plan. It's actually hot off the presses. I'd like to share the framework of this plan, which includes six goals. The first goal is leadership alignment. The success of DGS will begin with building a cohesive leadership team. This team sets the tone and direction for the rest of the department, and to get the entire organization aligned and moving in the same direction, its leaders must be aligned around the organizational purpose, direction, and priorities. We'll begin to build this team primarily through meeting regularly to promote collaboration, team building, and do some cross-divisional learning in time. And once we've built trust among this leadership team, they will develop the DGS identity centered on mission, vision, and values. Once developed, the mission, vision, and values will be shared with all DGS staff so that they can also provide their input. Down the road, this team will also assist with the development of a DGS strategic plan. The second goal is to continue advancing county priorities. While building the organization, our work, that is the services that we provide, will not stop. We will continue to deliver on county leadership and department priorities while we're developing the organization. Our goal is to evolve from being a service provider to being a strategic partner. The third goal is developing a culture of continuous improvement. We will aim to regularly evaluate and improve our processes, our services, and our outcomes, learning from our peers and other governmental agencies and counties, and adapting best practices where we think this makes sense, of course, for Placer County. The overall goal here is to improve satisfaction with DGS service delivery. The fourth goal is organizational identity and governance. We will define roles and decision making structures within the organization while establishing a collaborative customer service oriented culture. The fifth goal is performance management. We will refine performance measures to ensure that they are meaningful, that they are transparent, and that they are tailored to the needs of various audiences, including the board, the county executive, our department heads, and internally within our organization. The sixth goal is communication and change management, which I think is probably one of the more important of the goals. Clear communication, both internally and externally, about what we are doing and how we're doing it will be essential as we implement change and build this new department. Working through this framework, I believe that will set DGS up for success in the future, and we are really excited about the work. Okay, the next item refers to facility conditions and deferred maintenance. Our facility condition index continues to rise, indicating declining facility conditions. In addition to the FCI, we also look at the number of completed planned and unplanned maintenance projects. Over the last three years, we have completed more unplanned than planned projects. This tells us that some of our assets are past their useful life, and are failing before we can replace them. The board has heard a similar message in previous budget presentations, but I want to express that I see this as an opportunity to be strategic, and we can look at this challenge in multiple ways. First, DGS, in partnership with the CEO's office, can evaluate funding models for the deferred maintenance program, looking for opportunities to balance available funding with our maintenance priorities. That is to say that we can do a deep dive into how the program is funded, looking for opportunities to make adjustments. Second, DGS can also evaluate the county's asset portfolio in partnership with county leadership, looking for strategic opportunities to invest in our critical assets and scrutinizing holding onto assets with higher liabilities. Third, we can also consider opportunities for consolidation into vacant space. The good news is we're already doing this, and this was happening well before I arrived. This is, of course, related to our conversation around apartment moves. I went too fast. One more item here. All right, the next item is on construction volatility. With the current construction climate, our capital projects are challenged with shifts in construction labor rates, material prices, and longer lead times for key infrastructure and equipment. So our teams are closely tracking project estimates and budgets at every stage to safeguard those budgets and keep capital projects on track amidst these market shifts. Continuing with emerging issues and priorities, Assembly Bill 339 went into effect January 1st and requires advance noticing to recognize employee organizations when contracting out for certain services. And since the start of the year, procurement services submitted 109 AB339 requests to HR, with 13 requiring written notices to employee organizations. Now that procurement is beginning to understand the scope and impact of this legislation, that team is taking a more proactive approach with submitting reviews to HR with as much advance notice as possible to minimize impacts to procurement. And finally, following updates to the California Advanced Clean Fleets regulations, including the deferral of the 100% electrification requirement from 2027 to 2030, the fleet remains compliant with all applicable requirements through 2030. and as the county procures electric fleet in compliance with these regulations bgs in partnership with the department of public works transit have identified the need for an additional shop to service electric buses this project is identified on the cip future project list okay This slide on performance measures is the final slide that I'll be speaking to before handing it off to Kylie. The first item is related to our service level agreements or SLAs. These are the expected timeframes for the delivery of maintenance services. The building maintenance team has been working on a steady improvement in meeting its SLAs and is currently trending at improving on time service delivery by 8% year over year. The second item is related to museums. This team is seeing growth in visitor and student program participation year over year. Patron visits, which is all visitors to museums and programs, are up to more than 95,000 people. Student program numbers have more than doubled since fiscal year 2004-2005, with 4,343 current student participants in the field trip program. Over the last 25 years, annual visitorship has grown from 30,000 on-site museum visitors to over 84,000 today. And over the last eight years, the museum division has also grown to include two additional museums, including the DeWitt History Museum and the Fruitvale Schoolhouse Museum. Museums has handled this growth in visitors and programming well despite relatively flat growth in the education staff and with exhibits and museums maintenance staff remaining the same over the last 20 years. The division is also supported by a vast network of volunteers which were recognized recently at a luncheon. The next item is related to formal solicitations. We are seeing a downward trend in formal solicitations issued due to the county's ability to leverage cooperative purchasing agreements. Doing so allows the county to take advantage of the competitive bid process undertaken by other public agencies. They do all the work of doing the competitive bid. They develop the contract, and then we get the chance to use that contract. By doing that, it creates efficiency in procuring goods and services for our county. And finally, the last item is related to print requests. DocSolution completed 3,357 print requests in fiscal year 2024, 2025, which is more than they projected they would complete. This tells us that the demand for services is strong, but the number of print requests does not fully reflect their workload. This team is also tracking, which is not on the slide, the number of sheets printed in-house, delivering more than 4.7 million in fiscal year 2024. 25, which is over 1 million more than the year prior. OK. With that, I'm happy to take any questions you have of me before passing it over to Kylie.

Madam Chair. That's okay. First off, welcome, it's great to, I know you've tackled a big job in consolidating departments and working together and building a team, so thank you for taking that on. Specifically, in the, is it FCI? Yes. Ratings, it's a concern of mine that obviously, working in the domes all the time. I am very well aware of maintenance issues. But there's also buildings that are empty that we aren't using that we need to surplus or do something with. Up in Forest Hill, there's what we inherited from PCWA sitting there. I'm getting community requests for it. So I just would love to sit down and talk about those in the future. They're not urgent. Well, the DOMS is urgent, as you know. But some of these are opportunities, and I don't think we've had the staffing or the vision to, I mean, we've got so much work on new facilities, and some of these older ones have just, fallen down, so I am hugely supportive of your efforts in trying to bring that index back down, is that right? Bring that index back down, and putting aside the capital we need to actually do the renovations, so I appreciate your leadership in that as well. Thank you. Thank you.

So this slide and the next represent all division cost centers within Department of General Services. So that's all of us. I thought it, yeah, I'm thinking it might need to be. Is that better? I don't wanna talk so loud. So this slide, I don't know if you heard the first part, this slide represents all of our divisions all combined. So because we're new, the numbers have been updated to reflect the cost centers all of our cost centers. So this slide and the next are the same. So basically that's all of our teams, admin, real estate, I won't go through all of them, but everybody combined. So our expenditure is at 8.2, or sorry, 82.6 million. So we'll start with our largest, which is our services and supplies. At 50.3 million, that is about 10% of our total expenses, primarily is our professional services, utilities, building maintenance, janitorial contracts, fuel, equipment parts, obviously all those things are trending upward in pricing. Our second largest on this slide is our salaries and benefits. So this is about 23%, which includes, obviously includes the approved merit and benefit increases for our 115 staff allegations. And at 10%, we have our other financing uses, which is our capital project. Then we have other charges at 4.8, which mainly consists of cost plan 887, which obviously fluctuates over the years. Next slide, please. So our submitted revenue at 52.9 million. So this is our ISF division charges for services. So basically this bucket of 39.3 represents around 61% from building maintenance, 33% fleet, dock solutions of five, and then a little bit from records management. Our miscellaneous revenue is primarily the vehicle replacement program. The non-operating revenue is around 3%, which is our cost plan procurement. The other financing sources at 8.9 is the most significant component of that is our general funding, which includes the major maintenance costs. Then we have 868K, changing from millions to K, which is the use of money property, which is primarily our leases of county-owned facilities, which our real estate team manages. And then we also have in that bucket is the veteran memorial halls and the rentals of those, which is our building maintenance division manages the use of those. Then we have intergovernmental. It's a small amount, but it's from the Judicial Council of California for maintenance of the court facilities. And finally, the last part of that is the funds from the state of California for the South Placer Jails, the SB 863 and SB 844. Those obviously are wrapping up, so that won't be something we'll see next year. And saving the best for last. didn't make the slide, but $12,000 for museums donations, which is put to great use because they put that funding right back into their programs that they offer the citizens. Next slide. So these next five slides are aligned with our fund structure, so with all the data including past fiscal years adjusted to reflect all divisions now within general services and includes obviously the general wage and merit approved increases. So this first revenue expense slide is our general fund with approximately 48 employees in this fund. which includes six of our nine divisions. So we have admin, real estate, museums, capital improvement, records management, and procurement services in this bucket. So looking across the years, the expenses in this fund are largely personnel, as well as divisional services, supplies, contracts, and also includes the cost plan, which does fluctuate. The key thing to note on here is that the actuals compared to the budget, or sorry, the adopted and submitted, our revenue is higher than the actuals because we plan for a certain cost recovery, but the actual cost recovery is dependent on the available funding for divisional projects and budgets. So that's a little bit, that view is a little skewed because of that. Next slide. So this is our capital project funds. Revenue and expenses in this fund vary each fiscal year depending on the size and number of active projects and their activity levels. So from left to right, obviously high number of 83. That this year includes the HHS Center. And then what's not shown on this is that the revenue for HHS Center was provided in previous years. So that accounts for some of that skew there. And then other major projects that we've been having are South Placer Jail Vocational Mental Health Facility, the PCDC tier one infrastructure, just to name a few. And then just moving on, we have in 24-25 we acquired West Oaks, 5750 and 5700. So those are obviously big acquisitions, but then we also had the, we initiated the remediation at the Lincoln Shooting Range and began the Auburn library modernization. Then, I feel like this is a lot of projects, right? A lot of big projects. And then in 25, 26, we're moving on the district attorney building B tenant improvements. And then 26, 27, we're adding the juvenile detention solar. So at about almost $3 million. Next slide. This is our building maintenance fund. So again, the building maintenance fund is trending, increasing a little each year, which is primarily due to higher utility rates, rising janitorial prices, and also taking into account the expansion of our portfolio, which is adding a significant amount of square feet to our buildings that we manage. So that's with the purchase of West Oaks and obviously HHS Center. And then just another, just a little blip in this is that our submitted budget reflects expenses exceeding revenue, because we're going to be planning to use a fund balance draw to help keep our ISFs within target range, our contingencies. Next slide. DOCS solution. As Natasha mentioned earlier, Doc Solutions is really making some progress on bringing stuff in-house. So Doc Solutions maintains a consistent level of operations as a result. You can see it's pretty consistent across the board. They also have been able to reduce costs bringing prints print jobs back in-house and consistently guiding customers to more efficient cost solutions which obviously result in savings to the county. A couple things to note in this one is just that in 24-25 the copier program moved to IT so there's a bit of dip in there and then in 25-26 there was a piece of equipment purchase that was actually on the plans to purchase but it was a significant piece so that gives that little bit flip up on that one. And finally, I have fleet. So the fleet vision operations are also pretty consistent year over year. Just some small fluctuations. I'll kind of point out a couple key interesting things that happened there. So 23, 24 to 24, 25, the revenues exceed expenditures due to the fact that vehicles that were ordered were delayed, which was a result of the supply chain disruptions caused from the COVID-19 pandemic. So it's a little bit of an interesting thing that's sort of, I think, leveling out now. And then obviously on a lot of people's minds right now is the fuel prices. So with that, the fleet is actually carefully tracking those fuel prices in response to sort of volatility that's happening right now.

so if there aren't any questions i will pass that back to natasha just briefly here the department was created in august 2025 and with all new divisions combined into dgs the total fte with the new director position is 115 fte the current vacancy rate is eight percent or nine that completes our presentation happy to take any questions you have

Thank you. Questions or comments? Supervisor Gustafson.

Sorry, thank you. And I think this might be a question more for our finance folks and Daniel on depreciation on our buildings. How are we setting aside the funds and what ways are we setting aside the funds so we can take care of things and take that money out of, because there's plenty of need where we can spend it immediately, but if we don't start banking, especially as we acquire these new buildings, we have the opportunity to set the stage to do it. better than maybe our predecessors did.

Absolutely. So this is probably more of a it's complicated kind of answer but the depreciation on county facilities is received in a cost center into the general fund. Immediately using those resources annually we budget a direct contribution back to our now general services department to do ongoing major maintenance. for county facilities. That amount has been about four and a half million dollars plus for the past several fiscal years. The other piece of that is we take a portion of that, it becomes fund balance in the general fund and rolls right back into our capital reserves or other Facility purchases major maintenance projects and replacements. So depending on what year we're in Our investments in county facilities often exceeds the depreciation.

We're collecting Yeah, I Just like I asked for with the fleet. I think we have to be very putting money aside, obviously, more money aside to take care of these facilities. And as we get more facilities, we need to make sure we're doing that. So I mean, that's a broader discussion than this year's budget. It's more a policy level from the board. But I think that could be quite helpful to those who follow us and not to be in the domes.

Absolutely.

Just picking on one particular pet peeve.

Natasha, it's all about the domes. Not the super domes. It's all about. Not the super domes.

The super domes.

Supervisor, something that I would add to Dan's comments are this building that we're in today is the most recently constructed building. I believe in fiscal year 27, 28 will be the first year that depreciation starts to roll through the cost plan on this building. But that's one of our objectives is to look at the long-term needs of this building and the major maintenance there and secure those funds specifically for this building so we don't continue that. that problem. We'll have the same opportunity with the two buildings in Rockland on West Oaks to secure some of that depreciation cost in a way that will improve our delivery of major maintenance projects on those two facilities.

Great. And we have a new fire station coming. We have other, you know, some of the older fire stations that weren't, we weren't treating it like this were let to run down as well. So I just want to make sure we're doing our part for the future, that we're setting those funds aside and being, you know, prioritized for you so that that FCI can come down. And on major, one technical question, what's major maintenance items? Is there a dollar value or a scope?

I'm looking over at Brad Belay's.

Oh, yes.

Major maintenance is the larger building systems, like roofs, generators.

So it's not a cost factor. It could be any dollar?

It could be any dollar, correct.

OK. Thank you.

Speaking of Bruce doesn't the fab is still having leaking problems Are we on that because it seems every time I go to a meeting they were after a rain there's like a new design on the ceiling and

Yeah, I'm aware we had a leak a couple months ago in the front corner of the building. I believe our team addressed that. OK. We are looking at re-roofing part of the fab. OK. The metal portion, the metal roof portion, most likely needs to be taken off because the underlayment has deteriorated under the metal. So we're going to be addressing that shortly.

OK. Thanks for that. Thank you.

I just wanted to say I really appreciate the goals that you have as you're bringing this new team together. You have a great team. I mean, great departments. They've done a wonderful job of responding. You've got goals for the next year or so.

And thank you to all your team members we've worked with for a long time. They're very, very good, as Bonnie said.

I agree, we're really excited. Are you hot? Take your jacket off. I still have my blanket on.

Good morning, Board of Supervisors. Clayton Cook, your Assistant County Counsel and future County Counsel, starting on Monday. I'm here today with Lyndall Rodriguez, who is our Administrative and Fiscal Officer and responsible for the budget work. So before we get started.

All right.

So our office's budget is less involved than many of the other departments. And it consists of one fund, one cost center, and six programs. With respect to accomplishments, many of the items that are on our accomplishments are things that you likely are already aware of, but I want to frame them in a bit of a different perspective, and that is of the legal research and analysis that goes into each one of these items, either before, during the board's consideration, or the implementation part after the board's consideration. So the first one that's on here is really championing well all of these are really championing the overarching success of the county departments in navigating legislative changes different requirements from the state and that often has our office at the forefront or involved in terms of interpretation of those legislative changes advising on the legislative changes and trying to ascertain the THE LEGISLATIVE HISTORY, THE INTENT BEHIND THEM, AND OFTEN SUGGESTING BEST PRACTICES ON ITEMS THAT DON'T HAVE A TON OF CLARITY. AND THAT CUES UP THE FIRST ITEM ON HERE, WHICH IS PARTICULARLY IMPACTFUL THIS YEAR, AND THAT IS THE AFFORDABLE HOUSING BY RIGHT PROCESSING AND FUNDING AGREEMENTS. is something i know the board is extremely familiar with uh but the state legislature has been very very busy on housing bills 45 housing related bills in 2025 and that comes on the tails of 32 housing bills in 2024 you expect in 2026 we're headed for the same path just a lot going on These bills change how housing projects are processed. It's also altered the county's ability to deny or otherwise request modifications to projects and really has modified the way that the county reviews land use projects generally overall. Our office has been advising on both the land use development side and the housing side for each of these projects that comes through. We assist the developers on the change processes, we work through the funding and housing agreements, as well as interpreting the law and the changes that are required to county processes. You saw this on the Hope Way project that turned in part on legislative changes that were implemented in 2025. um and we are largely one of the one of the first counties to encounter these changes and interpret them and navigate them all dealing with the state department of housing and community development over overlooking all of it and all of the concerns that go with that approval of our housing element A couple other notable agreements that we've done on the housing side include Cincinnati Avenue. We've got an affordable housing request for proposals. Placer Vineyards 1A has an affordable housing agreement. Those are some other items that our office has been working on. There's other notable legislative changes that we've been dealing with, and that is the implementation of the Community Assistance Recovery and Empowerment Court, or the CARE Court. That's a court process from December of 2024 for people with mental health and substance abuse disorders. There's been challenges to this in the implementation, including the legal obstacles that come with compelling court participation for people with mental illnesses, also dealing with limited resources and trying to implement the state program. There are at least nine of these agreements that are in place with care participants, though, and we are expecting graduates from the program this summer. So it is something that we are starting to see implementation of. The second item on accomplishments is maximization of lawsuit proceeds, state funding and grants. That's one of the other things our office does is routinely review these grant applications and state funding requests. They're often complex documents with a lot of requirements and sometimes a lot of strings that we have to really consider and evaluate with the departments. Our role is to ensure legal compliance of all of those documents as they're reviewed and they work their way through the system and also to flag the problematic areas for your board and the departments. Couple of the big ones we were involved in, Homekey application, that was last year, but the implementation carried over to this year. Those funds were leveraged to purchase the former Super 8 Hotel in Auburn. And our office was involved in that grant application, then the grant award, then the property transaction, and then the placement of the deed restriction on the property. So really all the way through that process. Another one is the Behavioral Health Continuum Infrastructure Grant, and that was for the treatment facility at the government center. This one, the grant was received in May 2025, and we were involved in evaluation of the requirements of the program, then implementation of the grant, and then the grant proceeds over the course of the past year. I also wanted to touch briefly on lawsuit filings so you get a bit of a perspective on the magnitude of the volume of litigation matters that we handle. It's a bit of a preview of our performance measures slide later, but we average between 50 and 70 lawsuits that come in a year. We get a little under 150 claims a year and for those we're actively defending those claims and lawsuits and working to resolve them either through the court process or settlement. Unfortunately, none of those resolutions show up on the budget sheet, so they're not something that you'll see in the presentation, but I did feel like it was important to note those. There is a smaller grouping of those lawsuits and the lawsuit involvement that do show up on the budget sheet, not for our department, but the greater county budget, and those are the affirmative lawsuits that we file. And there's two highlighted on the bottom of this slide, the first being just under 8 million that we received for the mosquito fire litigation against PG&E for the 2022 mosquito fire, where we had alleged that PG&E's utility infrastructure was the cause of that fire. The other lawsuit noted here is the opioid litigation. We received to that a little under 3 million for this fiscal year. Total received to date on that is a little under 14 million. So those are both beneficial aspects of the litigation process. Some other accomplishments, that third area is sunset area implementation. And I just wanted to note the large amount of efforts that have been going on in the sunset area to mobilize that and get that ready for development. Our office alone has spent thousands of hours of time advising on these projects. That includes implementation of Placer Parkway, which was review of the request for proposal, the bid packages, advising on bidding requirements, eminent domain, land purchase sale agreements. Other infrastructure and pieces include the trunk sewer line that goes down foothills, related sewer funding agreements where we leveraged ARPA funding. We have also, one area I wanted to highlight as well is improved coordination with the United Auburn Indian community. That relationship includes an in lieu tax agreement funding assistance for Placer Parkway and implementation of various pieces of the sewer line. And overall, I would say we've been assisting with that coordination with the property owners and the development in that area on multiple fronts. The last item is department support. There's two big areas I wanted to mention here. First, our office transitioned assignments for the sheriff's office, the district attorney, and the probation departments over the past year with the retirement of Brett Holt and shifting of roles with our office. That gave us the opportunity to evaluate those relationships, improve processes and communication. We've also assisted in the implementation of the Department of General Services, you just heard from, and the related legal requirements for that transition. Another area of department's support that was noteworthy is our Child Protective Services team. And they've really done a lot of work changing the practices around obtaining warrants for child interviews and removals. And those practice changes were in large part to reduce that lawsuit exposure from those situations. And so we've done a lot of work on that front in terms of protecting the county. Also West Oaks acquisition discussions and those communications with the city of Rockland or other areas too that we've assisted on. Emerging issues and priorities. The biggest one here is staffing. Probably can sum up that whole bullet point by just saying we're hiring. We're hiring a lot of people. Karen's retirement is coming up. We're expecting another retirement the next year. Our office is undergoing a change in terms of positions. We have three recruitments open. We'll have another one open in the next few weeks. We've had two more posted probably in the next one to two months. We're looking at hiring five to seven people in the next year. There's a lot of people coming in. We have had recruitments that are out. I would say our results are mixed. We're getting some responses. I personally would like more responses. We're working with PIO and HR on that. But I've got two interviews tomorrow. This is something that is a short-term problem we should have fixed in the next six months. I also wanted to mention we are limited in space. We have funded positions, but we don't have enough offices to fill the funded positions. It's been an ongoing problem. I've been working with CEO's office on it, but we are gonna reach a pinch point on that probably in the next three to four months is bringing these people on board. With respect to workload increases, I WOULD SAY THERE ARE DEMANDS INCREASING VIRTUALLY ACROSS ALL THE DEPARTMENTS. NUMBER OF CONTRACT REVIEWS ARE UP, NUMBER OF COMPLEXITY OF PUBLIC RECORD REQUESTS ARE INCREASING, OVERALL ADVISING OBLIGATIONS ARE UP. A LOT OF THAT IS DUE TO STATE LEGISLATION. IT'S ALSO DUE TO GROWING COMPLEXITY OF CONTRACTUAL REVIEWS. One of the areas of specific increases is the workload to our Child Protective Services Unit. They had 26 appeals in 2025, which is up from the 12 they had in 2020, so roughly doubled over the five-year period. On the state legislation side, I know you heard from Department of General Services, AB 339, Assembly Bill 339, which requires notification to labor unions. That's been a process change that has affected virtually all the departments in the implementation of that. With respect to PRAs, I know you heard from the sheriff's office yesterday on numbers. Procedure requests went up from 24 to 25, from 519 to 804. For clerk of the board, it went up from 92 to 221, from 24 to 25. So we're seeing across the board increase in the numbers. And I would say with those numbers comes complexity, too. We're getting a lot of ones that have confidentiality, privilege, items that get sent to our office to then review and redact. And we're talking about thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of pages. It's just an involved process. There is some legislation that is working its way through that we're hopeful helps. But at least nothing implemented as of now to change the process. It's a time commitment for all the departments and for our office. The last item on here is confidentiality concerns tied to artificial intelligence implementation. And I would say this is something that I expect being one of those issues for the next four or five years as we navigate that implementation of artificial intelligence. And it really has to do with confidentiality because a lot of the artificial intelligence programs require inputs from the county to help determine what those outputs are. And there is sometimes little that is provided by those software providers in terms of confidentiality of the inputs that go in. So it's making it so that a lot of the county departments have to do that screening of confidential information before inputting it into the AI program. And we have a lot of software contracts where even maybe the initial provider can say they can protect the information, but they rely on subsequent software where there is no protection and that subsequent software programs have access to all the data. So it's just it is one of those things where we get mired in these. ROUNDS AND ROUNDS OF DISCUSSIONS WITH CONTRACTORS WHICH DELAYS THESE CONTRACTS, BUT IT'S REALLY TRYING TO ENSURE THAT WE'RE PROTECTING THE MOST POSSIBLE. YEAH, SOMETHING THAT WILL BE AN ISSUE PROBABLY UNTIL ALL OF THIS BECOMES COMMONPLACE. PERFORMANCE MEASURES. I'LL GO THROUGH THESE BRIEFLY, BUT I WOULDN'T BE DOING MY JOB AS AN ATTORNEY IF I DIDN'T INCLUDE A BIT OF A DISCLAIMER HERE. AND THAT IS SOME OF THESE, I WOULD SAY, MORE ACCURATELY REFLECT ITEMS FROM OUR OFFICE THAN OTHERS. YOU SEE NUMBER OF HOURS SPENT ADVISING THE BOARD AND NUMBER OF HOURS LITIGATING CASES ON THE FOURTH ONE. Those are really dependent more on staffing than they are anything else. If we are down an attorney or two attorneys, you see a drop in those numbers. In those instances, we have people that cover, but they won't be filling the same amount of hours as having an attorney there. So you see a drop in it. It just means responses are delayed, items are prioritized. We may be acting more defensively on matters than proactively in litigation. When it comes to contracts reviewed, claims filed, and PRAs, you see number of claims is roughly the same, litigation cases is roughly the same. Both of those all, there's a layer behind that which is each case isn't the same, each PRA isn't the same, there's a difference in complexity between them. But I would say on large part, those numbers are tracking and seem roughly similar across a few years. The most important one here at the bottom, number of hours spent responding to PRAs, way up. I expect that's just going to keep increasing over the next couple years. In looking at the charts on revenues and expenditures, this is roughly the same from last year. Expenditures is $4.7 million. That consists largely of the staffing costs. Services and supplies are roughly 35% of the total expenditures. Those consist of our outside council contracts, overhead, supplies. Intrafund transfers, $4.5 million. That's direct billings from larger departments for attorney time. For revenue, 2.4 million consists of non-operating revenue and charge for services. Non-operating revenue is what comes from the cost plan. That's the contributions from the smaller departments. Charges for services, 141,000. That's money for at-cost development projects and income that we get from various special districts and JPAs that we provide advising services to. With respect to the comparison over the past few years, I would say that there's a $300,000 jump from 25 to 26. And that's an increase in revenues due to direct billing from our Child Protect Services group. uh this this slide does show an increase from that 24 25 year to the 25 26 year that's not an actual change in expenses but is really attributable to a methodology change between those fiscal years where direct billings were moved to intra-fund transfers so nothing in terms of how we process things more of the the financial side funded positions exactly the same over the past uh Four years, I think the most noteworthy piece on this is that last bullet point, we have six FTEs vacant. With Karen's retirement, we will have seven. Those are the ones we are working to fill and will have filled in the next six months. Mayor Mrakas, With that I just wanted to also recognize Sarah powers and Sarah to very loop of our office for their assistance in the numbers. Mayor Mrakas, And the background information for this and also wanted to thank lacey Friedman of CEOs office for her help with the presentation and format with that. Mayor Mrakas, The presentations done, do you have any questions I can answer for you questions.

Supervisor Gosserson. Sure.

Clayton, great job, and thank you for stepping in and starting whenever it is you were supposed to start that you've already started, so thank you. And great job on, I think, being more proactive. I know that's your goal, and we appreciate that to avoid some of the situations we have found ourselves in. With that, I know the legislative changes on PRAs are incredibly important. What, you know, I assume you're working with Joel and our team to make sure we bring some common sense to this. I mean, you know, I just saw another one that came in that was extensive, and I thought, you know, how... this was not the intent. We want to be transparent to the public, but clearing houses and people doing these things are creating enormous amounts of work, and what more can we do to document it or help avoid it?

yeah um i think legislative fix is the is really the biggest answer we are seeing more of the clearinghouse ones where they identify the request of us as to the city of placer or something like that where you know they've this is just cut paste insert um and we've we've also seen a lot of the pras where it's uh somebody who's got an axe to grind against the county and um or not the county the one is somebody else but we got dragged in right Yeah, so I would say on those individual ones, I'm not aware of a way to fix that as long as they're operating within the confines of the law. But I do think legislatively, at some point we get to a burden that is excessive and needs to have some sort of cost sharing provision. or, yeah, some extension of time or some ability for the county to just say, you have to narrow this to something that is manageable for us to deal with.

Yeah, when they're dragging us into litigation that isn't relevant to us through this, and then they, if they were to win, can we get fees back? I mean, you know, that's a really, Enormous burden that I don't think the public understands. I barely understand it. I just see the ones that we have to produce and, you know, affecting IT, affecting the department, affecting your review. It's incredible. So anything we can do there. And then as we look at the hours of advising, as you know, because of the shortage we've had, department's saying well it's at county council's office it's at county council's office and um and so i really appreciate your proactivity i know you've been working many hours to try to catch up on some things so i just wanted to thank you and your other attorneys that are that are working enormous numbers of hours to try to support the department so thank you for that and i would just mention to the extent there are delays and this is for the departments

certainly am not offended by somebody reaching out and saying hey can you get to this I mean I greatly appreciate that that helps me identify the priority on things because we may not always be aware we may have a date for a due date for a contract but may not recognize this is really a an ASAP we need this right now that's the end date type thing and so yeah getting that feedback from the departments is always very helpful thank you Clayton

Supervisor Jones?

Yes, thank you, Clayton. Thanks for everything, stepping up and carrying on. With regard to the PRAs that Supervisor Gustafson was talking about, in the old days, there were provisions for us to charge people requesting those. Of course, we used to give up more physical responses that we could charge for. So any way we can creatively think about ways to charge people that may sort of offset all the man hours that we spend

I do not have any. The legislature is fairly clear that most standard public record act requests we cannot charge for. There are some exceptions to that, but I would say in large part, most all of these, there's no mechanism for it right now.

Well, maybe we should put Joel on it because they are excessive and extreme. I know I have a constituent that's creating a lot of work.

We have PRAs that sideline one of our attorneys for a week or two weeks to review documents, and that's a big impact to our office.

Okay, well, if we can help in any way, let us know. Thank you.

All right, I don't see any other questions, so thank you so much for your presentation. We're excited to have you on board almost officially, and thank you for your work.

Thank you.

We will now move to Ags, Parks, and Natural Resources with Josh Hunsinger and team. Apner, yes. Someone had to tell me what Apner was the other day.

Are we ready to go? Well, good morning. It's an absolute pleasure to be here to talk about the exciting world of our budget. My name is Josh Hunsinger. I'm your director of Agriculture, Parks, and Natural Resources. With me today is my management team, some of whom are out in the audience. I have Daryl Matani, my deputy agricultural commissioner and sealer of weights and measures. Erica Seward, my parks administrator, Carrie Timmer, my regional forest health coordinator, Kyle Smith, principal planner, primarily with parks, but he does a lot of things besides that. And then, of course, For today, most importantly, Dina Lockhart, who is our admin fiscal officer, who really is the mastermind behind our very complex budget. And I just we we couldn't be here without the work that she does. I'm incredibly grateful for for all she does to support the department. So we have, just following up on County Council, we have a lot going on in APNR, or Ag Parks and Natural Resources. We have a very complex, varied, and busy workload. But it's all aligned. We have a fun saying that if it's, you know, if it's a county responsibility and it's outdoors and it's not a road, it's ours. So that's the simple way to think about the scope of our responsibilities. And so we share a common amongst our three divisions, a shared visions, values and goals where one team doing many, many different and varied things. So with that, we have 28 funds, 30 cost centers, and 55 different programs. So we got, like I said, we have a lot going on in a lot of different areas. We have six primary operating cost centers and 24 budgetary CSAs and CFD cost centers as well. So jumping right into some accomplishments, I provide you with that handout because, you know, we are privileged to work and be responsible for the work in all the most beautiful parts of Placer County. And so I figure, you know, with a picture being worth a thousand words, we give you some some pictures to look at along with our accomplishments. And there's a lot of them. So I'll try to. try to be sensitive to our time today but on the agriculture and weights and measures division front really one of the highlights is we did obtain our electric vehicle charging station testing equipment and we've launched that program. We have it up and running. We've, I think, done several hundred inspections to date. We have found some issues with those EV chargers, whether they're with the display and the way that the customer is notified of the amount of electricity they purchased, or in some cases, inaccuracies as well. So that is Really, the cutting edge of weights and measures right now really appreciate the ability we had to purchase test equipment and really get that program off and running. We had great support from our fleet services, who we just heard from a little bit ago, in obtaining an electric vehicle. We have one of the, I think, several Ford Lightnings that the county obtained, and we're using that as part of our testing system as well. Last year, 2025 was really busy on the pest detection front. We actually had three A-rated invasive insects that were detected in our pest detection trap. So we'll give you some numbers in a little bit on our pest detection trapping. But we maintain approximately 1,500 insect detection traps throughout the county that are monitored every two weeks throughout the summer. Normally, we go about two to three years without finding a single pest of concern or the target insect within those traps. Last year, we found three. So just a, you know, seems pretty small, but it's a pretty radical increase in the number. So we found one oriental fruit fly in Lincoln. um, one glassy wing sharpshooter in, um, Granite Bay. I'll pause there and say the good news is we didn't find any more. We did what we call a delimitation in each of those where we really saturate that immediate area with additional traps. And we, in some cases do physical surveys of the properties around there as well. Didn't find any additional insects. So sometimes one's a hitchhiker and a vehicle or who knows what, but, um, The slightly different story is our Japanese beetle infestation down in Roseville, and that's down kind of in the Sun City and Whitney Oaks area, where we found quite a few Japanese beetles. We have a breeding population down there. The State Department of Food and Ag stepped up and, um, is, uh, maintaining an intensive trapping effort coupled with ongoing, uh, insecticide treatments in folks' yards, um, that, um, are hoping to eradicate that infestation because that is a really serious pest that comes, it's established kind of in, on the East coast of the United States. And, uh, occasionally they hop on an airplane and fly over here they're really as as many beetles are they're attracted to light and so when they're loading a cargo plane or something in the evening the beetles will fly into the cargo plane and they don't all die in transit so that's usually how they come or some kind of a plant shipment from back east that slip through the cracks So jumping on some of that stuff. The other thing, and this goes for the entire department, not just ag, but really the transition to building 210. You know, that was a huge thing to bring the whole department together. I think a year ago at this time, we were occupying five separate buildings on the Placer County Government Center campus. We're down to two, or actually three, excuse me. So we've consolidated a couple. We have two of those are shop facilities and then one office building where all the staff who have offices or cubicles are based out of a single building now. So it's been really nice to pull the whole department together, consolidate out of a few, vacate a few of the older buildings that... and one of which being cedra and wrapping some staff in out of the cedar building as well into building 210 so that's been a huge overall benefit for the entire department moving on to ag parks and natural resources we'll first look at some of our capital projects and trails and again i want to be cognizant of time so i'm going to speed things up a little bit we've delivered multiple park upgrades maintenance projects and really Just, you know, the story I think you heard from facilities and a little bit of that discussion about aging infrastructure. Parks, again, has about $80 million plus worth of parks inventory. Once you build it, it starts aging the next day. And so really signage is one of the first places where signs start to fade. They get vandalized. They start to degrade. And so really an... And that's a real key piece that really affects the overall look and feel and how fresh our parks look. And so really doing a comprehensive kiosk and signage updates is one of those things. It's a pretty small, fairly reasonable budget item that can really make a difference. Key improvements to specific parks, such as Applegate Park, Dry Creek Park, Feist Batting Cage upgrades, Green Valley Trail, Granite Bay Trails, and those are just a few of many projects we've taken on. Finished the Martis Valley Phase 3F and completing 10.2 miles of connection between Truckee and North Star. And so we are going to have a ribbon cutting, I believe, on June 3rd. That's scheduled for, so that'll be really exciting. And if you haven't been up there and experience that trail it's just it's just gorgeous it's really really nice and then finally we've launched construction on the 15 mile memorial overland immigrant trail up over Donner Summit you know I think that's in partnership with Truckee Donner Land Trust and Sugar Bowl Resort and others as well as the US Forest Service so that's that's been a long time coming it's exciting to get that really moving um next uh kind of area of parks trails and open spaces are urban forestry fuels management land stewardship program so um i i really think it's one of those kind of things that people don't realize but parks is responsible not just for traditional parks properties or open space but we're responsible for the kind of outdoor and landscape maintenance on all county-owned properties so the county placer owns uh somewhere around 600 individual parcels of land throughout placer county we've evaluated those and determined that over 150 of those properties need active fuels management. As I tell people, we got to put our money where our mouth is. And if we're going to ask our residents to maintain defensible space and good fuels management, we got to do that on our county owned properties too. And your board has been very I think wise in allocating a fuel management budget to parks to accomplish that work and we've been able to take that kind of base funding general fund and really leverage some good grant funding off of that to to really multiply the amount of work we're we're getting done there Part of that is a grazing program. So we've done 368 acres last year in work on actual mechanical and hand thinning, over 1,600 acres of grazing. We've been working with the Resource Conservation District and other partners and also doing a bunch of neat kind of sustainability stuff with raptor perches, pollinator habitat, kind of what I'm calling the wild edge of some of our parks where they're not quite so sterile and where we're getting a little more kind of wildlife pollinator natural habitat even within some of our more traditional city type parks as well. I really think is a neat component of those. So finally, on the park side, sustainability, efficiency, and public safety. So we launched a new equipment management program. We have a ton of equipment, believe it or not, everything from mowers and weed eaters to tractors to trucks, all kinds of tools, you name it. And really having a person whose job it is to maintain all that, make sure we're keeping track of it, keeping it in good condition, paying attention to where it is, all of those things are really important. Another program really proud of and I think you'll see a continuing trend is converting our turf to a new species of hybrid Bermuda grass that use way less water and we're literally conserving millions and millions of gallons of water by switching turf species there. It's more durable. falls apart less under heavy play use and it just uses way less water so we're doing a lot of water conservation and we pay for that water it's not only a good idea to conserve water but also it's it's huge cost savings to parks as well where are you doing some of that josh So, yeah, so a variety of our parks. I think North Park in Loomis is one that comes to mind off top of mind. Dry Creek Park as well. We did a major turf renovation and then it's I know we have others. I can give you one also. Yeah, I think we've done some recently down in Granite Bay as well. So, yeah, as we, you know, turf.

Actually, I stand corrected. It was the tree-like part.

OK, yeah. So turf is just like a building, just like a playground. Turf is something that also wears out over time and has to be renovated on a regular basis. And so that's kind of becoming part of our standard practice is when we do those turf renovations, we're really looking at not just replacing like for like but is there you know almost it's almost technology with some of the the newer turf breeding and stuff to where we can use the latest technology in a sense to get better grass species in there they're more durable more water efficient And then also, you know, just specific to District 5, really working on all the beach issues in Tahoe. And they're so, you know, I call it the issues of, you know, primarily dogs and alcohol use on our beaches up in Tahoe and just working with our sheriff's office as well up there too. It's tough because, you know, the sheriff's office, parks, animal services are all pretty short-staffed on that end of the county. And You get a busy weekend and things can get pretty out of hand at some of our beaches and that really impacts nearby residents and, you know, traffic is impacted by some of those issues as well. So really appreciate the partnerships with our other county departments to help solve some of those issues. Finally, jump into regional forest health accomplishments. We've secured over $800,000 in new grant funding in the last fiscal year, bringing the total grants, and this is a really number I'm really proud of. Since regional forest health was established in May of 2021, we've secured almost $7 million in regional forest health grants and so um i think we have several more uh significant uh grants in the works right now that'll be coming to your board for uh acceptance in the near future as well so been really really successful and i expect that success to continue um really one of the things I'm most excited about, you know, along with our 10 year action plan, as as we communicated your board a couple of years ago with the adoption of that 10 year action plan, we're going to be using that as kind of a global framework, but then looking more specifically at communities and working on the details. And so we've got a I think 130,000 plus acre footprint on the west and north sides of the Forest Hill Divide. Think of it as the portions of the Forest Hill Divide that didn't burn the mosquito fire and really looking at those doing a lot of community outreach, a lot of work with our partners here at Pacific Industries and the Forest Service to really come up with a really solid game plan. We've got some funding for some of the environmental review, engaging with our tribal partners as well there. to come up with a really strong plan. And really that's that really go big at that 100,000 plus acre footprint to protect that community, which is I think one of our largest communities in the foothills there in rural Placer County. And then along with that, like I said, developing some of those tribal relationships. We've really been digging into that because I think that's really important. And our tribes have some real opportunities to do things, especially on federal lands that maybe even the county government does not. And so really utilizing those relationships and those resources that they have as well. Okay, continuing on Forest Health, one more slide there on the accomplishment side. Completing this Calframe Tri-County Memorandum of Association. And I would add also to that just the general MOA related to collaboration with Nevada County and El Dorado County to kind of build a regional approach both to biomass facility development and investment. well as forest health in general and really recognizing that these wildfires obviously are not going to respect County boundaries and really we have a lot of shared infrastructure shared communities and shared interests whether it be the American River watersheds interstate 80 and 50 ski resort issues the Tahoe Basin etc we just have a lot in common with you know our neighboring counties and really I'm excited to collaborate with them and I think I You know, from like a federal advocacy standpoint, that's also really an effective strategy as well in bringing more funding and recognition to the region for that. Specifically within that Cal Frame context, we did also earn that A rating as far as an investment rating. for biomass facility investment. And we hope to leverage that into actual investment in Placer and our two neighboring counties. As far as new biomass facilities, your board's very aware of what it takes to get one of those off the ground and really hope to be successful there. Okay, so switching over to emerging issues and priorities. Ag weights and measures, looking at increased ag urban conflicts. And that's something that we've talked about many times in the past, but we just see as we continue to grow in our residential construction and development out into areas that were previously farmland, kind of that leading edge of that ag urban interface continues to be a conflict. take up a lot of our staff time when it comes to kind of that mediation and trying to mitigate, you know, land use issues where somebody, you know, buys a house and doesn't realize kind of what's on the other side of the fence, so to speak, and is kind of shocked by some of the you know, impacts from farming, whether it be noise, dust, yellow airplanes flying really low next to their houses, all of those good things and odors sometimes as well. And so I'm just working through those and that'll, you know, I think That'll be something that's here to stay along the western edges of Lincoln, Roseville, and some of our unincorporated communities that we're building out there just for the next several decades, probably. New electric vehicle station workload. So that testing workload is new to us. And we're kind of still in the process of learning that program and figuring out what it will actually take to sustain it. So working through that and just general western placer growth General, it's a little counterintuitive, but really urban growth drives ag department workload more than ag growth. It's kind of with all the weights and measures devices that come along with it, all the landscapers and plant shipments and all of that really, and new retail businesses that we regulate. Urban growth actually drives our workload more than farming growth. And then lastly, just I'll highlight, and I know your board's very aware of just some of the recruitment and retention talents. We have seven agriculture and standards inspectors allocations. There's been very, very few moments in the last probably five years where we've had all seven allocations. allocations filled at the same time. For 2025, we've had a grand total of four weeks. I mean, 2026 so far in this calendar year, we have a grand total of four weeks where we are fully staffed in those seven allocations. We hired two people and then within four weeks, someone else announced that they were leaving for a Bay Area county. And so that's just been kind of an ongoing thing. I know H.R. has a human resources, has a salary ongoing salary survey and and work going on that position. But What we're seeing is it takes about four years to fully train an ag inspector and they're leaving on average at about the two and a half year mark. And so it's like we invest a lot in that person just to have them walk out the door for another jurisdiction. So that's been a real challenge for us there in that particular class series.

A question on that. Obviously they're leaving to go somewhere else. How far behind are we on a pay scale that it looks like a big incentive to get trained here, but then leave here, that what do we need to do to keep up with our neighboring counties? Because I'd like to retain as many as we can.

Yeah. So it's there's a lot to that and I don't want to spend too much time on it. But I will say, you know, we do really detailed exit interviews just because this has been such a big issue. And the things we're hearing is really I think the rent in Placer County has really caught up with the rent in the Bay Area counties and the salaries maybe have not increased. kept up quite as quite as well with the Bay Area counties compared to, you know, the rent is pretty equivalent. Our rents have increased to the point where our salaries have not kept pace with. And so my employees, you know, just to heavily paraphrase and summarize, say, you know, that Bay Area salary isn't doesn't come along with a higher cost of living like it used to. And so I'm going to go move down to, you know, I had a employee go down to Sonoma County and take the exact same job in Sonoma County Her rent was just about the same and she got like, you know, it's a $12 an hour raise for an entry level position, you know, just one to the other. And so that is one of our comp counties and, you know, a pretty simple number I know off the top of my head. So as an example, so yeah, so we're working on that. We'll continue to work on that. Jumping over to Parks, Trails and Open Space. Just growth is the name of the game here. Just West Placer growth. We're just, you know, I think we're anticipating bringing on at least 20 new facilities over the next 12 months. And so it's just... um everything that goes into you know a lot of those are developed developer built where you know we have to oversee kind of the design of the park and the components that go into it prior to accepting that and then taking on maintenance and operation uh responsibilities so it's kind of you know from inception all the way through handing that off and us taking on that facility as our own. Just a huge workload there, coupled with a lot of capital replacement and a lot of neat things like our Hidden Falls expansion and new trails up in the eastern part of the county as well. So just rapid growth. from from the west to the east all over specifically preparing for the Hidden Falls expansion. We're targeting fall of 2026 opening for that. I'm really excited about that. We're we're getting really close to that facility being completed and just doing kind of final touches and polishing more than big, big items at this point. So I think we'll, we'll be well positioned to meet that mark and really have a successful and exciting new opening there that you will all be invited to. And then just a lot of staff succession. We're having a lot of retirements in some pretty key positions, especially on our operations and maintenance side and have some vacancies there that we're working through and some opportunities for promotion and just continuing to uh build a good team there on the park side as well a couple more on parks compliance with ab1572 so this is something where this is a replacement of non-functional turf and i know our our clerk recorder is very sensitive to this with his facility that's probably a priority number one is he's got a lot of grass in front of his building that doesn't really do anybody any good. It's not, you know, something you can play on like a ball field. It's just we're watering a lot of grass. And I think that's a great example of the kind of thing that this legislation requires us to address. So we're looking at how to maybe get some staff capacity in to take on, your board has allocated some funding already for this, but really getting that project off the ground and and rolling so we can do some meaningful replacement of with more water efficient landscaping as opposed to just a whole bunch of non-functional grass equipment replacement needs i mean that's a constant thing and and we've been pretty good about getting some money in our budget on keeping up with that one so we're not in a huge deficit there but that continues to be an ongoing need And then just looking at a lot of our aging facilities, you know, not just keeping them fresh, but also the ADA and safety compliance with a lot of our aging facilities as well. And then on the forest health, natural resources side, really staffing, workload, and program trajectory. I think we're still, the program's still new enough, and it's really on a growth trajectory where we're looking at everything from we don't have specific forest or job classifications. And so really, you know, if we're in this for the long term, we need to create some new specific job classifications rather than cobbling together kind of existing job classifications from maybe other departments that work okay for forest health but really building that and then really right sizing it we feel a great sense of urgency to get work done and protect our communities and our infrastructure and just what is the right number of staff to really accomplish that at the pace that your board expects working on funding and just really that's a continuous I think your board is very aware that we just had a really successful time in Washington D.C. last week talking with our federal partners and really you know the Forest Service the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service specifically asked us you know are we giving you funding for all that work you're doing and I said You know, hey, let's talk. So, you know, that that remains a continuous conversation and pursuit as well. And then, as I previously mentioned, cultivating tribal relationships. One that is not on here that I think you're very aware of is our regional forest health coordinator. Carrie Timmer is retiring at the end of May. And so we are very actively recruiting for a new forest health coordinator. I'm very optimistic that we'll get somebody, that person will have huge shoes to fill. And I thank Carrie so much for, you know, really getting this program off the ground and building it into what it is today. But that's, again, an emerging issue in my world for sure is getting a new forest health coordinator on board. All right. Jumping into performance measures here real quick, and I know we just have a few minutes to jump through the rest of these because I've talked too much. So acres of treated at the French Meadows project. I think that's a great one to highlight because I'm very, you know, knock on wood excited that this will be the last year of primary, you know, initial treatments on French Meadows project. before we go into more of a maintenance mode or posture. And so we've got a great group of contractors on board, all ready to go as soon as the ground is dry enough and the snow's gone. They're ready to jump in there and get a lot of work done this summer. So I'm really optimistic about French Meadows. Number of pest detection traps deployed, as I mentioned, we have about 1,500 that we maintain each year. That will expand due to western plaster growth over time. That number does not include several hundred traps that the California Department of Food and Ag is maintaining for that Japanese beetle infestation as well. Acres of parks, as you can see, that number is going to go up quite a bit this year as we're bringing on a lot of new facilities. So that's, I think, going to be the trend and the magnitude of that increase for the next few years as we have a lot of growth in parks. Acres of open space similarly will be absolutely increasing as we experience that growth curve in parks. And then acres of parks and beaches maintained will continue to go up as well. Jumping over here into the numbers, service and supplies is our biggest single category. We are a heavily field-based department. We have a lot of trucks, a lot of fuel we burn, a lot of miles we put on trucks. We have a lot of tools. We have a lot of equipment. Like I said, three buildings, and a lot goes into services and supplies. salaries is number two there as Part of our overall 33 almost 34 million dollar budget. So those are the two dominant Areas where we're spending our budget on the revenue side We have a number of different sources of revenue that's maybe a little more balanced but we We have charges for service, non-operating revenue, lots of other financing sources. I can get into any detail you want, but it's kind of hard to summarize when we have such a massive variety of different programs. So I tend not to get into too much detail in these just because, you know, ag is a completely different story than parks, which is a completely different story from forest health. But this kind of gives you an overall idea of where our revenues are coming from. And then on the revenue and expense comparison side, you'll see the numbers have changed a little bit. If you'll notice, there's kind of a trend with our revenues where they tend to bounce up and down every other year, and that is due to the nature of our A87 revenue, and it kind of has this little cyclical curve or variation in it. So that is the... main thing you see going there with the almost million dollar kind of bump up and down every other year there. But overall, I think we're pretty stable. I think these numbers do not include some pretty significant grant revenues that we are likely to receive, but maybe don't have in hand quite yet in this coming fiscal year as well. And capital projects uh front um we this again um i think there's some pretty significant um additional revenue that i anticipate that is not reflected the revenue looks a little low at the moment but i do anticipate some additional revenue coming to us that i'll be bringing to your board for budget amendments and grant ratifications in the near future But overall, capital expenditures are down slightly. Revenue looks like it's down pretty significantly, but I think that it will will change over the course of the fiscal year. And again, for regional forest health, This is a little deceiving. Again, it looks like we're pretty flush. But again, those revenues will actually spread. Those are revenues that are received that are spread over multiple years of work projects. So we may receive the revenue in a single year, but then that revenue is spent for contracted work over multiple years. And I think we're to the end. So as far as our funded allocations, we did go up by two positions in the last over the last fiscal year. Those are a project manager one, two for our parks fuels team. That was a situation where we had some good funding to get projects going on managing fuels, on counting on properties. But we didn't have the staff capacity to actually get that money working out in the field. And working with our CEO's office, they were super helpful when I came to them and I said, hey, if we took some of that money and put it into a staff person, that would give us the capacity to actually spend this money. It's hard to spend money if you don't have the staff to actually do the work to do that. And so that's reflected in a new project manager that we brought on board for that. And likewise, the second position is a staff services analyst that we're just gearing up to recruit for right now that will help us with all the complexities of that Western Placer County growth and funded through those CSA or CFD funds. that just to help us account for that growth as well. So with that, that concludes my presentation and I just really appreciate your time today.

Thank you. Questions or comments? Supervisor DiMattei.

Thank you, Chair. Thanks, Josh and your team. I just wanted to point out that Josh was a huge asset to our team at Cap2Cap. communicating the knowledge of him and his team to our minority and majority leaders for forestry. And they were really, really shocked and really impressed with what you guys have put together because they have never seen it from any other state or any other county of how diligent we are and how efficient we are to know the cost of preventing the fire and actually putting out the fire. So I just want to say thank you. And to you too. You can't retire because we still need you.

Supervisor Gustafson. Thank you. Agreed. We've done a great job in that arena and that's super. And I, again, as I sit here through all these budget meetings, I'm thinking of what aren't we getting to? And that is kind of, again, that policy discussion on the more urbanized demands that we're seeing for the West County Parks as well as the beaches at Lake Tahoe or trails and that's different than our open space needs and how we address that the expertise we have on staff and and what we plan to do in the future I think that's a bigger discussion for the board as we move forward because those demands and scheduling of assets and fields and all of that are things that become very critical to the communities and making sure we're prepared to meet their demands on those things or find a path forward I think is important. So it's kind of the bigger issue, not specific, but I think it is something we need to be looking at very clearly with the number of new facilities coming online. Thanks.

Supervisor Jones.

I'm excited about the new, the biomass, the biofuels that we're kind of launching into, and I look forward to more success in that area in the future. Thank you for the report, and thank you to your team, everyone. Parks has been especially helpful to me and my district.

Thanks, everyone.

Supervisor DeMattei, did you have something to add?

Sorry.

Okay.

I did have one more thing. I'm sorry. I put my light back on. On the turf, on the unused turf, whatever it is. What's the term? I'm sorry. Turf replacement. Well, the turf replacement on the statute that makes us get rid of non-feasible turf.

Oh, yeah, 1572.

Yeah, whatever that term is.

Yeah, AB 1572. Non-functional turf replacement.

Non-functional. Thank you. Yes. the domes has quite a bit of that and i had proposed this i'm going to say six years ago coming from the water industry i knew we had to deal with that so just saying again a project at the domes yeah all right i don't see any other comments so thank you so much for your presentation you guys have a lot going on in your department thank you so much we will now move to sidra with paul hellman and his team

Good late morning, Chair Landon, board members, Daniel Clayton. I'm Paul Hellman on behalf of your Community Development Resource Agency, better known as CEDRA throughout the county. To my right is Administrative and Fiscal Operations Manager Casey High. In the audience we have our full executive team as well as Randall Beffert who has stepped up to assist with a transition on our executive team. We have another transition on our executive team that I'd like to bring to your attention today. It's the pending retirement of deputy director of engineering and surveying, Michelle Lewis, after tomorrow. So I'd like to take this opportunity to acknowledge her contributions over the nearly nine years of county service that she has provided. during that time the nature and volume of work performed by her division has shifted and increased considerably as you can imagine over the past year and a half i've been very impressed with her willingness and ability to work collaboratively with our developer partners other county departments outside agencies to find workable solutions to the myriad of challenges which inevitably arise during the highly complex and often unpredictable and always time-sensitive development process. Michelle and her team have been instrumental in facilitating the rapid pace of development we've all witnessed in West Placer over the last several years. So congratulations, best wishes, and thank you, Michelle. I didn't warn her that I was gonna do that, but this is her last time appearing before your board, so I wanted you to be aware of that. In addition to the highly visible public-facing functions of CEDRA, we're very fortunate to have an incredibly talented and capable group of administrative fiscal IT and GIS teams supporting our operations behind the scenes, without whom we would not be capable of achieving the high level of customer services that we currently provide. Therefore I'm glad to have this opportunity to recognize their contributions as they're very highly valued members of our team that don't get a lot of recognition publicly. And on behalf of the executive team and Casey I'd like to extend our sincere appreciation and thanks to Amber Easton and the rest of the CEO budget team for their assistance with getting us to this point and for everything that they do throughout the year. as the budget process really is a year-round endeavor. It's not just this time of year. So thanks for all the help that they provide. Moving on to the main presentation. So CDRA is divided into six cost centers, building services, planning services, engineering and surveying, Taha operations, PCCP administration, and administration and fiscal support. Among those cost centers, 43 distinct programs are administered. So it's quite a bit. The next several slides highlight a portion of our accomplishments for the current fiscal year. I'm not obviously going to read all of these data points, but a couple of worth noting. Current fiscal year end projections, so they're not obviously 100% accurate, but the best of our ability, we've estimated where we'll be at the end of this fiscal year. 6,403 building permits issued. 1,010 remote video building inspections conducted, 493 planning applications received, 1,528 residential lots created, 417 code enforcement and 572 short-term rental or STR complaints resolved, 172 accessory dwelling units or ADUs permitted, 140 improvement plans approved, and 11 EIRs currently in process. So quite a bit going on throughout the whole organization. There are some significant year-over-year increases from last year to this year that I think I'd like to point out. Accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, we've had a 72% increase year-over-year. Remote video building inspections, about a 44% increase. That's a program that was just started a few years ago. Residential lots created 26% increase. Final subdivision maps approved 27% increase and improvement plans approved a 25% increase. We had one decrease that was actually a good one, 7% decrease in the total number of STR complaints received, which we believe reflects increasingly effective enforcement and education efforts by the Tahoe STR and code enforcement staff, as well as the success of the STR advisory group in all the efforts that they've been engaged in. Any questions about those? Okay. So getting into some of our accomplishments, let's see, got here, some more accomplishments. System improvements included SolarAPP+, which is an online expedited rooftop solar permitting system, which was funded through a state grant, and DigiPlan, an electronic plan review system, which allows for concurrent review of plans by county departments and divisions. In the old days, Plans had to go from one review group to another, you know, sequentially. Now through this process, they can be reviewed concurrently whenever staff are available to get in and review those plans and applicants can actually log in and look at the comments in real time as they're being made on their plans. To date, PCC permits have covered 27 private development projects and six public infrastructure projects, including, most recently, Placer Parkway Phase 1. 50, 150 acres of ag land, open space, streams and wetlands, and species habitat have been conserved and added to the PCCB reserve system. The 279-acre Vista Ranch was placed into conservation, fulfilling a portion of the Woodland Ordinance Tree Preservation Fund's mitigation obligation.

Paul, can I ask a quick question on that? This may be a question for Greg, but do you know how much is left in that Oak mitigation fund and what the plans are? I do not.

So if Greg does know that.

Good morning, Madam Chair. Yes, Casey's team keeps close track of the Woodland, what we call the Tree Preservation Fund. There is currently about $2.5 million in that fund. That's down from years prior. You may recall direction in addition to, Greg, go get the PCP adopted and permitted or else. was also deploy those funds that came dating back to actually Jerry Cardnan, Robert Wygant, Kirk Euler, and David Bosch, so it's been a while. We've deployed those funds as part of the Big Hill Vista, not Vista, the Big Hill Twilight Ride, Roar Properties, and also vista ranch which was really that first opportunity we had to leverage those funds between the pcp taking all the forward-looking costs for o m and endowment and the oak woodland mitigation funds uh to really leverage those funds into more and more uh property so that's good news so 2.5 million dollars uh the granite bay funds are still earmarked in that fund uh also there's bickford ranch funds in that fund uh and so yeah that's the current state we probably have uh currently three or four opportunities that we're looking at for additional oakwood and conservation purposes that could leverage that fund okay thank you

Okay, moving on your board adopted the vision statement guiding principles for the plaster 50 general plan update. HCD certified the 2025 housing element amendment, which was adopted by your board amendments to the Tahoe based in area plan approved by your board and by TRPA to streamline housing production were completed. Key entitlements were processed, including the Ritz Carlton residences and subdivisions within the plaster vineyards and plaster one specific plans. Short-term rental operator education and community outreach efforts yielded a 10% reduction in nuisance complaints while maintaining a consistent number of permitted rentals. Next, I'll get into some emerging issues and priorities. One of which is demands for coordination with LAFCO and municipalities regarding various annexations and potential North Tahoe incorporation continue to increase. Updated user fee schedules subject to your board approval later this year hopefully will enable greater cost recovery by our department. Keeping up with the demands associated with the fast pace of construction activity within the specific plan areas continues to be a challenge, obviously. We are working on some potential code amendments and process improvements which could yield some potential improvements that would alleviate some of that pressure. Processes have been in place for many years and don't really reflect where we're at currently in the activities that we're involved in compared to years ago. Compliance with ADA digital accessibility requirements, particularly for large complex documents, we have quite a few like environmental impact reports that you're very familiar with, has been a heavy lift fortunately for everybody. Countywide, the temporary relief that was granted by the feds last week, providing a one-year extension of the deadline has really helped to alleviate that immediate pressure, but now we've got a full year to really focus on that and get it done properly by the next deadline of April of next year. Emerging AI technologies in the permit and plan review space offer potential opportunities for increased efficiencies. However, adoption of such technologies in the public sector have been slow thus far. The true benefits they're capable of achieving remain to be proven, and we're going to not dive too quickly, too fast into that until we really can understand the true benefits and obviously there's a lot of different players that are entering into this market and we want to make sure that we end up working with vendors that really have proven their ability to perform. So we have had some initial demos from several companies over the last year or so and we'll continue to do that. and talk to other agencies and find out what their experiences have been before coming to the CEO and your board for any requests to enter into that arena. The acquisition of new equipment for use in the field to enhance worker safety and increase reliability communications is something we're continuing to explore and pursue. We do have some that are very close to being ready to deploy. We're actually in a pilot or a trial period with one vendor for some equipment to see how that works in the field. um those are things we might be able to handle through our existing budget otherwise we may have to come back for budget amendments down the road i'm going to now turn over the next few slides to casey okay and i will uh walk you through cj's fiscal year 27 budget

beginning here with beginning here with um our expenditures the agency's total submitted expenditure budget is 43.17 million dollars the majority of this is about 31.9 salary and employee benefits services and supplies total nine million dollars and it covers essential operating needs technology tools and contract support other charges make up approximately 2.3 million which includes county cost allocation and interdepartment interdepartmental support Turning to revenues, the fiscal year 27 submission includes a 21.15 projected revenue. Our primary revenue sources remain consistent. Charges for permits, bring in approximately 10.9 million and charges for other services approximately 10.2 million. Smaller categories such as fines and use of property revenues represent only a small portion of the overall total so are not seen in this pie chart. It's also important to note that the fiscal year 27 proposed revenue does not take into consideration any potential adjustments that may result from the CDRA user fee study. Those recommendations have not been finalized yet. Turning now to our general fund revenue and expense comparison. This slide summarizes four years of budget context from 2024 actuals to our fiscal year 2027 submission. Expenses increased from 37.3 million in 2024 to what is now 43.2 million in our fiscal year 2027. Revenue show a similar trend, rising from $17.6 million in fiscal year 24 to $21.1 million in fiscal year 27. focusing specifically on the changes from fiscal year 26 to our submitted 2027 budget expenditures increased by 2.4 million driven by reduced salary savings general wage increases and the addition of one new position offsetting that we see a 3.2 million reduction in professional services and a 562 000 decrease in cost allocation expenses On the revenue side, planning and engineering services decreased about two and a half million while other licenses and permits increased by 1.8 and construction permits increased by 728,000. These gains are tempered by 1.3 million decline and other fees and charges. For fiscal year 2027, the agency has 172 funded positions consistent with the fiscal year 2026 second quarter allocation ordinance. As of April 17th, 10 vacancies representing about 6% of our workforce. Over the past two years, the department has worked diligently to reduce our vacancies. At one point, our vacancy rate was nearly 16%. And we've made steady progress bringing that number down to what is currently 6%. And with that, I'll turn it back over to Paul.

Okay, so the last three slides highlight several of our key performance measures and targets, the first being to finalize the comprehensive fee study and to adopt and implement new fee schedules. With the completion of the draft fee study earlier this year, we're on track to present proposed fee schedules to the board for your consideration within the next few months. The target is to implement the new fee schedules no later than this December. And obviously the primary purpose of that is to help increase our revenues to reduce our reliance on the general fund, which has been very significant for many years. Um, another key performance measures to update the county's land development manual, uh, phase one was adopted during fiscal year, 24, 25. Uh, the current target is to complete phase two during the next fiscal year. Uh, the next, uh, measures one year boards are familiar with, and that is the plaster 20, uh, 20 50 comprehensive journal plan update, which commenced during fiscal year, 24, 25. The next target associated with this measure is to commence public outreach to evaluate land use opportunity areas and develop an approach for addressing the county's numerous community plans, most of which have not been updated in decades. The next steps in this process will be workshops with the Planning Commission in May and with your board in June. That's going to be a very key part of that overall update effort. And the last measure that I'll highlight today is the acquisition of conservation and mitigation lands commensurate with actual and projected land conversions in the PCCP plan area. A substantial amount of land has been acquired within the reserve system over the past few years. keeping pace with land conversion authorizations. During the next fiscal year, the target is to record conservation easements and approved management plans for all reserve system lands, which is a pretty big undertaking as you acquire larger and larger swaths of land. That concludes our presentation. We'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have from the whole team here behind me and the two of us up here.

Thank you. Questions? Supervisor Gore.

Paul, thank you for the presentation. I want to say thank you to you and your team. The amount of development that's taking place in our community, we've never seen it before and it is a lot, which means there's a lot of pressure on all of you and everybody seems to be wanting to do it at once. So there's a lot to balance and hard to bring in new people. during this time. So I wanna say thank you to everyone. I really appreciate how folks have responded to my team when we have questions about what development is coming. It is so important for us to communicate with our residents about what is happening as growth is happening on their borders. So I just appreciate the work that y'all are doing. It has been very helpful. Residents really want to know what's happening. They want to be engaged. be aware of what's coming, and so when we ask those questions, y'all have been great at responding. And I think it's just, for us, it's just that reminder of customer service really matters right now. We wouldn't be doing any of these jobs without the development and the changes people upgrading their homes and all the building and hopefully more businesses coming to our community but that customer service just really really matters because we hear people who say well I'm not going to do business in that community but maybe I'll come to Roseville and I want them also to come to Placer County we want to be a place where we planned for the development, we planned for businesses and economic development, now we just have to help it be a little bit more streamlined as much as we can, and I know that you are working on that, and I know you're doing the best you can on that, but it's just that reminder, because we tell people, I went to New York to talk about Placer County is a place to do business, and it is, and we are, but we just wanna make sure we can follow through on those commitments and to all those who are doing business here. So I just want to say thank you. I know it's a lot of hard work and I appreciate the efforts.

Supervisor DeMattei.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you guys for your presentation. Thank you to your team. Chris, obviously lucky to work with you for the last five years, but again, thank you. I've had a lot of questions internally, externally, people calling, how come CEDR is closed on Friday? Can you give me that answer? Because I don't have that answer to give them, and so I can't give them permit numbers or anything, so I'm asking you why we can't be open on Fridays. Absolutely.

That was a question I had when I started. And a few years ago, I don't remember the year, but the board did approve the current office hours that we maintain. We are open to the public in terms of the staff is there, we are taking, they do interact with people by phone, electronically. The main reason is the massive amount of permit activity that we do online. I think we're up to about 80% of our permits come in online. And so that day is essentially a day for the staff to focus on dealing with all of that activity that's occurring online. And yeah, that's really the purpose of that. There may be a time when we get to 90%. We're trying to make it as easy as we can to have people apply online, whether it's in the middle of the night or on a weekend, whatever time is convenient for them. Most people, again, 80% already have adopted that approach. know that process of doing it that way and that really is just a time for for the staff to focus on catching up and getting back to people by email or phone calls or um just processing all the massive amount of permits that are coming in online i mean they do that throughout the week as well but that's just the day when they can really focus on that without having disruptions at the counter or Because when you're open, people come in without appointments. And so you never know what the volume's going to be and who they're going to need to talk to. But having that day when you know no one's going to be walking in unexpectedly, you can plan your day accordingly to focus on that work that has to be done to deal with all the applications that are coming in online. I don't know if Randall might have anything to add to that. A lot of the permit activity is building permits, but all the other types of applications that we have can come in online as well. But that is essentially what the board decided a few years ago was a reasonable response to the amount of online activity that our staff was engaged in.

Is it possible to maybe be open half a day? Because there are people that, contractors that are calling me, they're at the front door and they're like, how come you guys are closed? And it's their time because it slows down on Friday where they can actually physically come in and get stuff done where they, or I've had people call me and say, nobody's picking up the phone.

If you could encourage them to call me directly to talk about it. I've never received that comment yet in the year and a half I've been here. People seem to be used to that. They're aware of the schedule. It's been in place for several years. So I haven't heard of that concern directly yet.

I think the complaints have probably come in for the last three or four months to myself personally.

I would definitely like to talk to them about what it is that's prohibiting them from being able to get their business done on that day. Because again, we are open. We have staff working. Again, calling, you may have to leave a message. You may not get a direct response to a phone call all the time, but staff are still working, whether they're remote at home or in the office, there's still plenty of staff working that day. Obviously, like a lot of departments, we do have a 980 schedule available to all the staff. Well, the inspectors don't really have that option. But for office workers, so there are some staff who also have their one day off every two weeks on a Friday. Sometimes it's on a Monday. But the number of staff in the office is usually a little lighter on Mondays and Fridays because of the 980 schedules a lot of people have.

You said you questioned it when you first came here. Do you think it's an option to at least reopen it every other Friday or half days on Fridays?

I'd want to really talk to my team about the impact of that because they're fully aware of what it was like before and what it's like now. And I can't speak off the top of my head whether that would that would cause major disruptions that might make things even worse for the people that are complaining now. But let me talk to my team, and then if anyone that you're aware of would like to talk to me, that would be helpful to just understand what benefits they would get from that.

Supervisor, could I weigh in? I know that during the transition, we heard a lot of complaints. what I have seen from staff at least at the Tahoe office is if there's an urgent item staff have been willing to accept and open the doors get the documents and respond to the public even on Fridays and it seems like the staff that are working day to day understand when there's a timeline like we have those weird timelines where we can't be in May 1st to October 15th, and people have hard deadlines when they can do certain levels of construction. So we heard a lot about it. It seems like it's going, I haven't heard complaints myself. The people that are working with us all the time realize those dates. or that Fridays are less available, but I've seen your staff be really responsive if there was a deadline and somebody absolutely needed to talk to somebody or drop something off, but I think it's worth discussing again what those impacts are. We should always be thinking about how we can be more effective for our customers, so. And then I had one question, Paul. Where I've really seen it, and this is because of the large number of unincorporated residents I have, code compliance has been, you know, to me, an emerging issue and priority. It seems as people move out to more rural areas, they may still be expecting a city government or municipal type services and that those expectations drive issues for our staff is that fair to say I'm seeing nodding heads behind you and and I really appreciate the changes we've been making and trying to address that but I would see that as a continuing demand we're going to see and how we welcome people to our county, but hopefully get their expectations that this isn't a city government, you're not in a city level, and we have to address, find an effective way to address what they're dealing with out there in the field. Many of these properties are very old, and property lines, survey lines, right Michelle? not maybe what they are in current planning realm and so to me those demands are really an emerging issue that I think you've done a good job on it's going to continue to occur and should be on your emerging issues priority maybe it's already emerged but it it certainly is a demand and and I apologize on behalf of my constituents who seem to forget that they chose to live in a more rural area, but now they want to make sure they have everything they had before. But I really appreciate your staff's responsiveness, because it is, I often say, why is it always D5? It is, because we have so many people living in these sorts of communities with very old infrastructure and planning.

There'll definitely be code enforcement issues in the newer communities as well, it'll just be very different. you know people that there are code enforcement issues in very urbanized residential communities as well but they're very different from what your constituents usually experience out in the more rural areas

all right i don't oh what supervisor jones sorry thank you i think my d4 is the other half of your code complaints anyway um i was looking at your um vacancies at 10 soon to be 11. i was just curious how come so many vacancies i know you've gone from 17 to 6 which is wonderful but

Yeah, I mean, we have 172 allocations. So that's a pretty low number for us, at least since I've been here. And just sometimes it seems like when you fill a lot of positions, all of a sudden people do leave, whether they're transferring to another department or retiring or leaving. So they're always going to have some. So I don't know if we're ever going to get below like 4% or 5%. But right now, being at 6%, we're pretty happy with that. And we have a couple of active recruitments in the works, so we do hope to get a couple of those filled fairly quickly and a few other recruitments that are just starting. Sometimes when we have a vacancy, there's no active list to draw from, so we have to request a new recruitment, which takes about a month or two before we could start to look at applicants.

Right. I just know how busy and how demanding the work is on all of yours.

Yeah, and some positions are much harder to fill and we've been trying to be pretty creative about underfilling and overfilling so that we can get somebody in to help even if it's not maybe at the level that we would like just because we can't find anybody that's qualified or interested to come in at that level. But having more bodies is helpful instead of just keeping positions vacant, waiting for somebody that might not come for quite a while.

Yeah, it seems like a little bit of a theme we keep hearing about the jobs and the pay and what it takes to live in Placer County, etc.

I mean, we're thankfully competitive because a lot of people do like to live here and a lot of people are interested in the work we're doing. There's a lot of other counties where the work is not as interesting. They don't have as much happening. So there are people moving from, let's say, Sac County to here because the opportunities that are available to them, not just right now, but they see going down into the future for their career. So we've been able to pick up some very highly qualified, high-caliber people in the last year or so.

Well, I wish you good luck on the ability to bring on more high-quality people. But in the meantime, everyone in your department is extremely responsive to, well, to me, I will say, I imagine to the other supervisors as well. But you have a great staff. Thank you for everything you all do.

Thank you for your support.

would agree we we have a great we've had great experience with all of your staff anytime we have an issue or a constituent concern super responsive and and just want to thank you and your team for that as well all right thank you very much with that we are going to move to child support with laura and her team

Are you ready for me to go ahead and get started, Chair? I noticed a few supervisors needed to take a quick break, so I just wanted to make sure.

It's fine. Is it OK to go ahead and get started? They sneeze, they lose.

You still have quorum, so you're good to go.

OK, we'll start then. Well, thank you very much, Chair Landon and members of the board, Mr. Chattany and Mr. Cook. I'm Laura Van Buskirk, your Director of Child Support Services. I have my executive team with me here today, and I'd like to just highlight where they are, who they are, and give you their names. So in the cheering section behind me is Assistant Director Tammy Chandler and Program Manager Kristen Mendez. To my left, your right, is our AFO, Taryn Ugin. And you may remember, Taryn gave this presentation for the first time last year. I want to tell you she's been begging me ever since to come back and do it again, but that would be a lie. However, she did such a good job. And one of the things that you'll hear about during her presentation is that we do really value and prize in my department leadership opportunities, growth opportunities, helping people to stretch and maybe do some of those things that they're not so comfortable doing. And so that's why Taryn's here. She did do a really good job. She is absolutely a rising star in this county and in our department. And so it's because of that that I'm gonna hand it over to her and she's actually gonna do the bulk of the presentation today.

Thank you, and I made it back. All good. So good morning, Board Chair, Supervisor Landon, and members of the board. Thank you for the opportunity to present the Child Support Services budget for fiscal year 26-27. My name, as Laura said, is Taryn Ugin. I'm the admin fiscal officer, and I'm honored to walk you through our department's proposed budget. So Child Support Services operates as one fund, one cost center, and within that structure, our team works across five core programmatic activities, establishing parentage, establishing court orders, collecting and distributing child support payments, providing customer care, and collaborative outreach to help families navigate each step along the way. Together, this creates a full end to end process from opening a case to delivering financial support while maintaining strong fiscal oversight and keeping our focus on what matters most. And that's getting timely, reliable support to children and families in our community. So I'm happy to report that for the seventh consecutive year, Placer County Child Support Services has ranked number one in the state in federal performance measures. And that is a reflection of our, thank you. And it's a reflection of our consistency and commitment to families. This success is really driven by our incredible staff whose dedication, compassion, and professionalism continue to set the standard for service delivery in California. And because of our incredible staff, child support services collected 25.5 million for the 24-25 federal fiscal year, which is $193,580 more than from last federal fiscal year. And thanks to the hard work of our child support specialists and our child support attorneys, that's $193,000 more into the hands of families, and hoping that it would provide more stability so that they can meet their day-to-day needs. Just to note, CSS manages roughly 6,000 cases, and for Placers specifically, we're considered on the lower end of the range for a medium-sized county. So as you can tell, we take real pride in our staff. That's how Laura got me here. And their ability to work efficiently and effectively is what makes us not only high performing but also cost effective, making the most of every dollar we serve. So for every $1 spent, CSS collected $3.88 in support of families, really showcasing our ability to maximize the return on public investment, ensuring that a substantial portion of our budget goes directly towards supporting families in need. Additionally, in fiscal year 24-25, CSS finished the year with $7,000 underspent. and while this may seem a bit modest as the fiscal officer who loses a little bit of sleep quarterly with the state's true up process anytime we come in under budget is always a win in my book so All right, so moving into emerging issues and priorities, CSS operates as a 66% federally funded and a 34% state funded program, really highlighting the importance of maximizing federal financial participation, also referred to as FFP. So additional revenue opportunities can be pursued through reallocation requests to optimize available state and federal funds along with strategies to maximize federal drawdown. This may also include leveraging county general fund contribution to bring those matching federal dollars in. And while child support continues to prioritize operations within the department's budgeted annual allocation, general fund contributions are typically reserved to cover unexpected year-end deficiencies and can be decreased with the drawdown of federal funds. So like many public agencies, we are also facing a competitive labor market, particularly when it comes to attracting and retaining our top talent of our case managers, also known as our child support specialists. 75% of our 20 child support specialists right now are relatively new. 12 of the 20 have less than two years experience, and three of our four senior child support specialists have been in that role for less than two years. So our team is pretty green, but CSS continues to invest heavily in training and development to build a strong, adaptable training program and workforce to support the delivery of services long term. So this is usually where we include the part about how we recognize that the child support work is challenging. Our child support specialists often face, often have to navigate complex cases, relationship dynamics, and financial circumstances, and all while balancing like legal requirements and strict timelines. It may not be the right fit for everyone, and that's okay. Our team is committed to supporting employees as they grow, whether within our department or elsewhere in Placer County. If we can help employees build their skills and find roles where they can thrive and continue contributing to the county and the families we serve, everyone wins. another recurring challenge in is that css like other counties also continue to face limitations in collecting support and this is something we've chatted about like in the last few presentations over the last few years the program really operates within a framework of changing legislation and program policy And all those changes really direct outcomes and enforcement tools. But however, the department remains flexible and involved so that we can overcome these limitations and continue to support the families in our community. So the Federal Child Support Program measures, performance measures focus on five key areas that directly impact the financial well-being of children and families. The State of California uses those same five performance measures to evaluate each county's performance. And so they include paternity establishment, cases with support orders established, collections on current support, cases with collections on arrears, and cost effectiveness. While all five measures are important to the program, the three performance indicators highlighted on this slide were selected to best illustrate budget priorities. Collections on current support representing the impact on families. Cases with collections on arrears representing the recovery of unpaid support. And lastly, cost effectiveness represents the efficiency of public spending. So CSS did something a little different this year regarding our targets for the federal fiscal year 26-27, and that's the last column you see there. At a previous all-staff meeting, our program manager, Kristen Mindes, back there, facilitated a discussion among staff, among our child support specialists, our child support attorneys, our analysts, and their supervisors. and she allowed them to set those target goals for the federal fiscal year for our team this was a big deal because it shifted goal setting from something being handed to you to something being co-created in hopes that this would buy in and really strengthen employee engagement and their connection to the work We thought that was pretty great. So our team is committed to not only meeting but surpassing our target goals for federal fiscal year 26-27 along with the fiscal year in all key performance areas. So the total projected expenditure for 26-27 is nearly $6.9 million with a strong focus on people and service delivery. 77% of our budget is allocated to employee salaries and benefits. 18% of the budget is designated for services and supplies, covering technology support, office operations, and staff training. And then 5% is allocated to A87 costs. And overall, 95% of our budget directly supports operations and service delivery, ensuring fiscal responsibility while providing high-quality family-centered child support services. The total projected revenue for 2627 is also nearly 6.9 million with $6.8 million in federal and state funding serving as their primary financial support for our operations. An additional $46,760 is provided by the County General Fund contribution. Thank you. which demonstrates the county's commitment to maintaining a stable child support program. And as a reminder, these funds are earmarked as a contingency and are not transferred directly into the Child Support Services Fund. Moving into the comparison of our expenses and revenue for fiscal year 26-27, as the chart shows, there are really no significant variances between fiscal years. While there are some line item adjustments, the department continues to operate within a stable balance budget. In terms of expenditures, there is a $69,000 increase to services and supplies, primarily due to increased ISF charges. However, our salaries and benefits have decreased by $252,000, reflecting a right sizing of budgeted full-time equivalent positions, while still maintaining an efficient staffing model that aligns with the state's funding methodology. Notably, in fiscal year 2324, there was a one time $274,000 increase in professional services due to the integration of Placer County IT. Those costs, those elevated costs have now stabilized and have become a part of the baseline budget making this the one of the best decisions this department has made. Thank you. And then moving into fiscal year 26-27, the department will maintain its 43 funded positions as seen with last year's total count. Last year's decrease of four funded positions was a strategic realignment based on caseload trends, aligning staff levels with actual workload and the state's performance-based funding methodology. Our vacancy rate as of 4-17 is at 14%. We currently have six vacancies in the child support specialist role, but we intend to fill at least four of those within the next six months. There's a current recruitment going. And then once those vacancies are filled, that will put us just below the 5% rate. So at this time, I would like to thank the board for its ongoing support as we work toward achieving the goals of the child support program in the upcoming fiscal and federal fiscal year. Laura and I are happy to answer any questions the board may have or provide additional information as needed. I feel it is also my duty and responsibility to remind you that the next thing on your agenda is lunch.

you don't have to remind us all right supervisor jones um first of all i'd like to start off by embarrassing one of your staff members miss tammy because she's the one who originally put us in the number one position seven years ago and i think it's worth repeating that she got you there and and then you've accomplished keeping you there that's wonderful being the top

I'm surprised her pom-poms didn't come out yet.

Anyway, thank you for that, Tammy. And then I also wanted to ask you that your caseload trends, you talked about limitations in collecting. Is that due to legal limitations?

as she hands it directly to me. That's a great question, Supervisor Jones. Most of those, well, I will say all, all of those limitations have really come directly from our legislature. So changing laws, changing policy that's handed down to us, by our state administrator, the California Department of Child Support Services. And that's been something that we've talked about in the past several years because really it's been a trend that's been ongoing for several years now. So as an example, there were changes in the laws regarding driver's license suspension a couple years ago. There's actually something pending before the legislature right now that would expand that limitation to other types of licenses and not just driver's license. And I get it. Driver's license suspension is really controversial. People seem to have really strong feelings about that. And with good reason, right? Because if you don't have a driver's license and you're an obligor who owes child support, how do you get to that job to earn income? I will share with you though, in my department, what we found was, let me back up. We don't just suspend someone's driver's license. That was not our practice, right? And it's still not our practice. That person would receive notices of this is our intent. They would have months to respond. and the way it did work in the past when we were allowed to use it we would use it in those cases where someone had truly demonstrated that they were not going to pay support so it wasn't used widely across our entire caseload but in those cases where folks were truly not paying to support their children what we found was that notice of driver's license suspension intent was one of the best ways that we could get someone's attention and get them to take it seriously and to call us And at that point, our trained case managers would have a conversation with them and talk with them about their barriers to payment, find out what's going on in their lives. But in a lot of cases that are non-paying, that was the one trigger that brought someone out from being in hiding, from not talking with us, dodging our phone calls, not opening our mail. and really provided a path to have a conversation to work with that person. And a lot of those cases, our response was not just no, we're taking your license, it was what can you pay? Are you employed? We know nationally and in California, the vast majority of payments in child support come through wage withholding. So we always want to encourage people to work. It's very difficult to pay not just your regular bills, but to support your child without a job. So the intent was never to deprive people of the ability to get to work, right? We used it mainly to drive that conversation so that we could get people to a place of self-sufficiency so they could support their children. That limitation, the change several years ago changed it so that there's an income-based test, and if the obligor's income is at a certain percent near the poverty level for that county where the obligor resides, then we are not allowed by law to use that enforcement remedy. other enforcement remedies have also changed over the years and so our ability to to file a lien to attach a bank account for example those also have changed over the years and it's all been in the direction of removing our ability to collect support for children interesting the state is supporting deadbeat dads over supporting their children

It seems like.

Well, you know, and there's been a lot of conversation, not just in the state, but nationally about the fact and you've all heard me speak to it before, too, before I started having Taryn come here and do these presentations many years ago when this program was founded. So the program was founded in 1975. In the 51 years that the program has existed, we have shifted from one side of the pendulum to the other. We were very heavy-handed in enforcement. There wasn't a lot of acknowledgement many years ago. And I talk about how when I began in the program in the early 2000s, I was a child support attorney. And one of our only options was to put people in jail or to request that the judge place someone in jail for nonpayment of support. It was very ineffective. that was at one end of the spectrum unfortunately i think we have swung in this state in particular but in a number of other states as well to the other end of the spectrum there's absolutely value in building relationship with both sides of the case the child support obligate and the obligor and to try to gain a better understanding of what that obligor's barriers are so that we can help them so that we can refer them out to services in the community

that's wonderful because the goal should always be getting support to that family that needs it right unfortunately we have swung from one side of that pendulum to another well good luck thank you get in touch with joel joel joyce and see if you can get him on your side to to make some changes joel does hear from us i'm sure he does but thank you all for all you what you do and your numbers are amazing

thank you congratulations supervisor gore i have two quick questions first of all how many families do you support typically throughout the year what's the caseload the number of families so that number is always changing as cases open and close but we have about 6 000 cases right now okay that's helpful and then um child support specialists what type of backgrounds or qualifications do you need for those staff i'm going to turn that back to taryn

So that's a great question. So our child support specialist classification is actually considered an entry level position. And right now the qualification, the MQ sit at, I believe it's a high school diploma and no real experience. So it's one of those things we've been looking at too because we're really taking some, we're taking in people who maybe have not had the opportunity to deal with difficult situations like this and trying to train them. It's why the training program is so extensive to kind of like prepare them as best we can. you really can't prepare for those kind of conversations with anybody and so a lot of this is through a learning experience and sometimes people don't find out that they're not necessarily a fit for the job until after they go through that was something for me I started as a clerk with child support services as an admin clerk and was asked if I was interested

case management I like to solve a problem today and it not come back tomorrow but case management is different you're dealing with emotions and people and all the things and yeah I'm thinking about that because I would think you know young people who have a degree in psychology or sociology who want to help people right across the street you've got Jessup University grads and we've got a lot of young people getting psychology degrees, and I just think that that could be a really good nexus.

That's very interesting that you say that. So our supervisors have kind of taken that perspective for a little bit, and that was part of the hiring kind of screening with like, oh, somebody who has been exposed to empathy a little bit more in, say, schooling or education. It actually doesn't, For us at least, our data has not necessarily changed that. Recently, we have kind of said that those that have excelled or succeeded as a child support specialist have had extensive retail background. so in dealing with that customer service aspect um also i think when people who have come from the retail industry into government they kind of they look they're looking at other things as opposed to the work itself they're looking at scheduling steady schedules weekends off right they're coming and they're looking for time back with their family holidays off um it's so it it's really balancing the nature of the work with those who are a little more Thank you. I guess, capable of taking on that emotion. It's not an easy job, that's for sure, yeah.

All right, well, thank you, I appreciate that.

For sure. Supervisor Gustafson. Thank you, and Laura, and to your whole team, what an incredible, you know, being number one in the state. You know, we wish every department, we believe every department is right up there, but you are demonstrating that. I was looking at the numbers, and we see about the caseload. And I'm sorry I forget past presentations, but is that like growing, declining? Do we see increased demands as we've increased our population in the county?

So, yes and no. We're actually holding pretty steady right now into this calendar year. We have seen a decline, and we actually have it, I think, on one of the slides if you want to go back to... That slide that shows a little bit of a decline, that is on par, I will say, with the national trend. No, the one that shows the caseload.

Am I making that up in my head? I'm making that up in my head.

I was going to start with that. So let me just give you some numbers. I did print some numbers off. So October of 2024, we were at 5,717. We did land about 100 cases lower than that by the end of the federal fiscal year, September of 2025. And that's, we actually had our analysts pull the data for all of the counties across the state. And that's pretty well the trend that we see is that downward trend Relatively by about the same percentage and that's not necessarily a bad thing one of the things One of my struggles in this state in particular and working with some of my colleagues is this notion of case closure because cases in the child support program have Criteria that are set out in federal law and then adopted in state law that tell us when we can close a case and And when we perhaps we should close a child support case and it creates a tension, I will say supervisor among the local child support agencies, because in this state, our funding is based upon our caseload. And so there's a disincentive to close cases. more cases you have the more funding you get i can tell you in placer six years i've been here and for as long as i will be here it's very important to me that we follow federal law it's very important to me that we close cases that should not be open simply for the benefit of trying to obtain more funding to which i believe we're not entitled We are very aware in our department that we are public servants, that these are taxpayer dollars. This is not just someone, this is not monopoly money that we're playing with. And so we take it really seriously. And one of the results of that is that we close cases when we're supposed to. So I will tell you if you I'm happy to share the different county data with you and you can see what the numbers are But I would encourage you to keep in mind That there are some counties where there is not such a focus on closing those cases that should be closed And it's widely known Among all of the local child support agencies that the more cases you have the more money you're going to receive from our state allocation So it's unfortunate and it depends on where your focus is. Our focus in this county is going to be serving all of you, serving our customers and doing what's right and doing it the best way that we can. But we're not going to inflate our caseload just to draw in more dollars if the work is not there to be done. And I will say, too, it also has a mental effect or outcome on our case managers. And so Taryn spoke to the work is already really hard as a child support case manager. You're having very detailed conversations with strangers about the most intimate parts of their lives. And that's a huge part of your job on a daily basis is digging into the details of people's relationships, past relationships, their children and their finances. It's really hard to do that. And so we're cognizant of that all the time, too. And what are the things that we're doing and what things can we do at the leadership level to help minimize that. And I will say it's always been my belief. If you have cases in a caseload that are just sitting there that the leadership knows cannot be worked, then you're setting your case managers up for failure. If you're allowing them to have, say, 200 extra cases in their caseload per case manager and you know that case should be closed, but you're not allowing them to close it. Think of the mental impact of what it means to work a job when you know there is nothing that you can do to affect a positive outcome. That's something that we refuse to do in Placer.

Well, I appreciate your dedication and your public service mentality to all of this. I was just running the numbers just on a gross basis, and to think that what you make happen with about $1,200 per case per year, if I take your whole budget, that's remarkable and when I think about the hours that must take and the emotional toll to navigate those those circumstances so thank you on behalf of those families that can't thank you and aren't here but thank you thank you for that and we will be sure to take that back to the team because I'm very well aware as Taryn mentioned a couple times during her presentation it's our entire team that makes that possible we're a very small part of that as the executive team

All right, I agree 100% and really, yes, Supervisor Jones.

I'm sorry, I just have one more. I was curious, if you have the same problem, it takes a good two years to really train somebody up to be good at their job. Do you have a similar problem with other departments that you get them halfway trained and then they go someplace else because of either costs here or there's better jobs, better paid jobs elsewhere?

yes i would say and we talk about this regularly it takes at least two years i think to become a really competent confident semi-confident case manager and we do have people that leave there is this recognition that among some of our staff like taryn said is this really an entry-level job we're paying it like it's an entry-level job but when you think about the level of stress that we're asking our case managers to take on I can understand why someone will leave. Yes, they have their weekends free. Yes, they have a more normal eight to five schedule and they have county benefits and those are great. Thank you. But there is a cost there. And so that's why we're trying to do a lot of work to look at and analyze Who are the people who leave and why? One of Tammy's jobs, you called out Tammy Chandler back there in the cheering section. One of one of Tammy's jobs is that she does exit interviews with every departing employee who wants to do once she extends the invite. And we take those really seriously and really look at those, examine them, talk about them. And so try to identify the trends for who's leaving and why, who's staying and why, who's successful, because we're trying to adapt in our hiring policies to match that or our practices. But the reality is it's a very difficult job. Your district attorney referred to it yesterday. I was listening and he was talking about the victim services unit and the trauma that those folks take on and that that's also an entry-level job. The trauma of this job is not quite the same, right, as working with crime victims. I started my career very early on working with crime victims, so I'm well aware of what that job entails. This is different. It's a different type of stress, but it is incredibly stressful working with people about the most intimate parts of their lives on a regular basis. And a lot of them, quite frankly, see us as the government interfering in their lives. And so that adds another layer of complexity and difficulty. Okay. Thank you for that. Appreciate it.

And yes, I will echo what everyone said and just want to say your approach is as always very much appreciated and congratulations on your number one spot again and really appreciate your focus on balancing compassion with accountability and you mentioned our DA's office and I think that's something that they do really well too but I really want to commend you for you could be a bitter person and the role that you're in, and I'm sure many of your team members could as well. And so the fact that you really focus on the compassion and empathy side of things while still holding people accountable is commendable. So thank you very much.

Thank you.

All right, with that, we are going to take a 35 minute break and come back at 1240 with DPW. Next, with our DPW department and Derek Gady and team.

All right. Good afternoon, Madam Chair, Board of Supervisors Daniel and Clayton. I'm Derek Gady, Pelt Works director. And with me today are Kevin Bell, our assistant director, and Becky Correa, our administrative and fiscal operations manager. With us in the audience is also our DPW executive team. We're happy to share our department budget presentation for fiscal year 26-27. And I'd like to start by thanking you all for your leadership help and support to our department. It's greatly appreciated. And I'd also like to thank all of the county departments for helping us achieve our goals and working collaboratively as one county team. We span 9 funds including the general fund road fun and 11 cost centers with 27 programs for regular operations. Additionally, the department oversees a 166 budgetary costs centers that include benefit assessment districts County service area zones and permanent road divisions and sewer maintenance districts. I'm pleased to lead such an amazing department of professionals who take pride in the work that they do to serve our community. The team continues to work hard and produces amazing programs, projects, and services every day. With so many exciting things going on in the department, it's hard to just reduce it to a few accomplishments, but I'll start today with our capital program. team has done a tremendous job delivering some very excited and needed projects we help deliver over 43 million in projects this year the first one's the forest hill bridge we completed a nine billion dollar project that included ultrasonic testing of 288 weld points and repaired those areas that needed attention our project team and our consultants inspected and repaired the bridge while working with state and federal experts to make sure the bridge is safe for many years to come Next, we completed the North Auburn wastewater phase one project to improve our wastewater system in Auburn and included over 8,400 feet of pipe. This project helped alleviate current capacity constraints in the system to facilitate further economic development in the area. The project cost was 13 million of which 9 million was funded from ARPA dollars. So thank you for that. And we look forward to planning and implementing the phase two project to complete the system upgrades. We completed the $8 million American River Debris Removal Project in five months, and the picture on the left really says it all about the project's complexity, where you see three excavators working in tandem to pull steel from the river. We worked to remove over 450 tons of steel and 600 cubic yards of concrete debris from the stream bed. As shown in the middle photo, we completed the $10 million Fannie Bridge replacement project. We worked with our regional partners, including Tahoe City PUD, TRPA, TTD, Caltrans, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Federal Highway Administration to make this project happen. The unique design of the project with major prefabricated items allowed us to rebuild it in one construction season. Pretty amazing. We look forward to celebrating the results of our efforts at the community block party celebration for the bridge reopening in Tahoe City on May 17th. And finally, we continue to take care of the backbone of our community, our roads. We completed our annual road resurfacing, which included over 22 miles of overlays and seal treatments at a cost of $3.6 million. Our team is always eager to get our projects to construction, and I'm happy to share we have two major projects in construction, which you all already know about, but I wanna share. For the new Yankee Jim's Bridge, as shown in the picture on the left, we're well into our first year of construction of the $60 million project. The contractor is blasting areas around the bridge to get it ready for the new bridge abutments. We're using the blasting spoils to build the adjacent parking area. And the contract will be working on the bridge abutments this summer in preparation for the bridge construction. And we anticipate this project will be completed by early 2028. We're also very excited to get shovels in the ground and start the Placer Parkway phase one project. The middle picture shows a rendering of the anticipated project. The $62 million construction contract will build the 1.5 new roadway from SR 65 at Whitney Ranch to North Foothills Boulevard and install a water line on behalf of PCWA. We anticipate the project to start in the next few months and be completed in 2028. Fortunately, we timed the market really just right and we can deliver this project at a substantial savings. To recognize the team's amazing work on our projects, we received four awards for the delivery of our projects, including the Forest Hill and Fannie Bridges. The most significant award is a National Engineering Excellence Award granted for Forest Hill Bridge from the American Council of Engineering Companies. In addition, we had three staff over the last year who were recognized for major individual awards, including two who received the Regional American Public Works Association Manager of the Year. and one staff who received the Flint Plain Management Association Emerging Professional of the Year. These awards show that we have a first class team implementing our complex and unique projects and programs. We continue to make key improvements that help us better serve our community by being effective in our maintenance and operations, strategically implementing our programs to benefit residents and businesses, and using new technology to reach the public with important information. Our roadside vegetation maintenance program improves roadside visibility, recovery zones, and defensible space within the first 5 to 10 feet from the road, directly contributing to public safety and fire risk reduction. This year's emphasis has been on improving on the over 450 miles of priority areas. We added new equipment to assist our crews that resulted in more consistency and multiple treatment cycles. we mow trim vegetation and spray areas which all reduces regrowth minimizes repeat work and improves long-term effectiveness we're delivering an integrated road vegetation and tree management program focused on efficiency safety and proactive risk reduction across the county's public road system For our North Tahoe parking management project, we successfully completed the first year of the program and achieved the goals that we set. In February, your board approved the proposed objectives to implement the second year of the program, which includes adding a second full-time parking enforcement officer, expanding parking in Kings Beach, updating the parking rates and proposed for more community outreach in Tahoe City to consider further expanding the program. We're making positive impacts by creating improved availability of parking near businesses, and we will continue to use the program's data to measure success and plan for next steps. Recently DPW developed 3 new applications to better communicate improvement important programs with our residents and so the first is the eat well phone app that the county developed after the adoption of the SB 1383 which includes a requirement that restaurants make edible food available to those in need that they track and report on their donations. The well app is designed to connect eligible people with restaurants to allow the excess prepared food to be packaged and provided to them. Second is the My Snowplow app, an online app which is designed to allow the public to see where we have plowed roads over certain durations. And now the public can use an online interactive map that shows where the snowplows are and where they've been. So we're excited about getting that one released. And a new one that we just had a soft launch on is our transit app for PCT and TART. It's real-time bus information, and we hope to start our public outreach soon. THIS ALLOWS THE PUBLIC TO SEE WHERE CURRENTLY THE BUS IS AND ANTICIPATE ARRIVAL TIME FOR THE NEXT STOP. WORKING CLOSELY WITH CEDRA, WE CONTINUE TO COLLABORATE AND PROBLEM SOLVE WITH PRIVATE DEVELOPERS TO HELP DEVELOPMENTS MOVE FORWARD. WE CONTINUE TO USE CREATIVE SOLUTIONS AND COMPROMISES TO THE BEST OF OUR ABILITY TO SUPPORT NEW HOUSING STOCK AND PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IMPROVEMENTS. Along North Foothills, Placer One and Placer Commerce Center collectively completed about 13,000 feet of new sewer improvements. These two projects utilize $28 million of ARPA dollars, again, thank you, to construct the necessary sewer capacity in the region to support new economic development and increase homes in West Placer. The UAIC Casino also completed additional construction east on Athens to get the sewer past the casino's connection point. Staff worked with Placer One to allow new sewer lines to be deeper than most of our existing system. And in return, they agreed to contribute over $500,000 to us to allow us to partially fund and purchase a new, more powerful vector that will allow the maintenance by our teams for the deeper line. all the private development construction activities in the sunset area we have taken a more active role in coordinating work with existing businesses and first responders to help reduce confusion we have worked closely with the construction teams and those most impacted like the casino and watma and the fire station and we've agreed on a minimum circulation plan for access in the area we've regularly communicated planned construction impacts to the group And these regular check-ins really have improved communication and coordination and reduced the concerns coming from them. With our staff being the most important asset and after significant effort, we have improved employee engagement through implementation of multiple initiatives. We've initiated new hire meet and greets where I go out and welcome our new team members, show them who we are and talk about our department, what we do, start to teach them how we value customer service, take pride in the work that we do and the resulting satisfaction of serving our community. We've also initiated an annual staff get-together for Public Works Week called our Rodeo, where we celebrate our successes for our team and let our team connect and get to know each other so that we can work more collaboratively. The feedback from the first year was overwhelmingly positive, where our team feels connected and appreciated. And so this year's Public Works Celebration in Auburn is on May 20th and in Tahoe on May 21st. So by engaging our team positively, we hope to reduce turnover, attract new staff, work better together, and improve our employee satisfaction. For our emerging issues and priorities, I will focus on the condition of our publicly maintained roads, the status of our fleet replacement program, and our focus on technology to help gain efficiency and improve. So the next two slides is taking a deeper dive on our roads and our road condition, kind of a follow-up of what I shared last year. For our publicly maintained road responsibilities, we are primarily funded by state gas taxes, where we get a proportional share of the tax revenue based upon publicly maintained road mileage and population of our county, which equates for us about $29 million each year, which covers not only road maintenance, but roadway operations and lots that we do. With the state gas tax revenues remaining relatively flat and while costs to maintain our roads continue to increase, we struggle with not having enough funding to properly complete road maintenance, replace our road crew equipment timely, and fund new roadway improvements. So we prioritize the funding we have and spend it in areas of the greatest need. since the conditions of our roads are important to the community and essential to businesses we want to make sure we do our best to maintain them and so this year we conducted a pavement condition survey of all 1 000 miles of our publicly maintained roads to determine what our network average rating is kind of similar maybe what you're talking about with facilities earlier And it's called Payment Condition Index. And it's a rating from 0 to 100. You see the chart on the right with being over 70 is good to excellent. And if you're under 25, it's considered failed. So I'm happy to share that the results were very favorable for us. And our PCI, network PCI, is 70. And in comparison, the county average across the state is a PCI of 65. locally we see roseville with 79 and i think that's a lot because they've added a bunch of new roads as part of their development um yeah el dorado county is at 68 nevada county is at 62 and unfortunately sacramento county is at 44. So as we work to maintain our roads through our road crews and major maintenance by contractors, we're constantly challenged with our roads degrading faster than we can maintain them. The industry standard pavement deterioration curve is shown on the bottom left there. And as you can see, our roads degrade on a bell curve. The x-axis relates to the performance of our roadway maintenance or cost to perform roadway maintenance. And the y-axis shares the pavement condition at which to apply the treatments noted. you can afford it but it's much more cost effective to regularly apply routine maintenance and minor rehabilitation treatments versus allowing the roads to grade to level where the cost is higher and the treatment is more significant so we do our best to treat our roads at the right time with the funds that we have and we we do have many roads that are overdue for maintenance For managing our pavements, we use a computer software system called Street Saver, which is a pavement management program that monitors roadway condition and recommends treatments we should complete. It's a robust system that allows us to run different deterioration projections over time and determine funding needs to maintain our roads at desired levels. We have three funding scenarios to share with you as a snapshot in time. The left is our existing program, and it reflects the results if we continue to maintain our existing roads with the $4 million per year in funding, which is our norm. It shows the PCI reduces over time since the network pavements degrade faster than we can maintain them with the $4 million each year. So in about five years, our PCI will go down from a 70 to a 62. The middle scenario looks at a goal to sustain a PCI of 65. The results show that starting in 2029 and moving forward, we would need to spend significantly more than $4 million each year to achieve this goal. The last chart on the right is considering a goal to sustain a PCI of 70, and it requires a huge increase in funding starting in 2027 to sustain the goal. So this update is really meant to share data and provide some perspective on what our future may bring. There are really no decisions to make today as we continue on with our existing program plan, and we will continue to keep you updated on our progress, and we'll do our best with what's available to us.

Question? Sure. EV vehicles, right, which are very heavy and have more wear and tear on our roads and no gas tax. I know that the legislature has talked about it, but is there any movement on doing something other than per mile charges?

Yeah, there's an ongoing study from the state perspective looking at changing how they collect gas tax, and that is one of the mileage usage is one of the suggestions that they have. You know, I continue to get updates along the way, but I don't see any major movement from a legislative perspective to put anything new in place.

And it's just so frustrating because every community's roads are deteriorating, and the gas tax is flat, or... And you look at this, right? $24 million versus $148 million that we could actually invest in our roads to keep them upgraded. What do you do? Yeah.

I'll just add to that that rumors have it that when they do decide to charge vehicles per mile that it's going to apply to all vehicles, not just EVs.

Right.

So we'll be paying double duty, yeah.

Yeah, I think the gas, the plan is the gas tax, as you pay at the pump will be replaced with every vehicle would be paid by the mile. And that's where our advocacy is very important as it's developed.

No, fine.

I'm happy to answer the question. Yeah, next. Yeah, one more. We continue to upgrade our road equipment to bolster our capability for road maintenance and snowplow operations. We have 182 pieces of equipment with 63 pieces in need of replacement. This year, we've replaced eight pieces of equipment, including a snowblower, as you can see on the lower left, a motor grader, and two utility tractors. We have 10 additional pieces of equipment on order, including a snowblower, vector truck, and backhoe for this year. and we will continue to closely monitor our equipment needs and work to bring our equipment current. We're leveraging technology to gain efficiencies and improve control and oversight of our infrastructure. Two examples include upgrading our asset management system and environmental utilities control system called SCADA. For the asset management system, this effort includes replacing an old system with a state-of-the-art system that integrates GIS, work orders, maintenance, and inspection records, and helps us plan and budget for maintenance and replacement of our aging infrastructure. By utilizing an updated asset management system, we will realize significant efficiencies, including being able to be more efficient with staff time by combining maintenance efforts in this specific region at the same time, as we have a system that can help manage all those maintenance needs. IT ALSO ALLOWS US TO GENERATE COMPLETE WORK ORDERS ON REMOTE DEVICES IN THE FIELD WITHOUT NEEDING STAFF TO COME INTO THE OFFICE. IMPROVING OUR LIFE CYCLE PROCESS WILL HELP US BETTER ANTICIPATE WHEN ASSETS WILL REACH THE END OF THEIR USEFUL LIFE AND PLAN FOR RESOURCES TO REPLACE THE ASSETS. The second major upgrade is SCADA system, and it's used by environmental utilities to monitor and respond to issues at our sewer lift stations, wastewater treatment plant, water system, and closed landfill facilities. The system will allow us to see real-time information about the system operations of our facilities remotely 24-7, and allows us to make changes to these operations of these systems. We are currently limited in the amount and type of information that can be transmitted, and this planned upgrade will remove LIMITATIONS. SO I'LL HAND OFF THE PRESENTATION TO KEVIN BILL, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, WHO WILL WALK YOU THROUGH OUR BUDGET PERFORMANCE MEASURES, OUR BUDGET SLIDES, AND ABOUT OUR VACANCIES.

That was loud, sorry about that. Well, thank you, Derek. Good afternoon, Chair Landon, members of your board, Daniel and Clayton. So in Public Works, we have 13 performance measures, but I will highlight three metrics that we have here on this slide today. First is the Lake Tahoe Sediment Load Reduction or Lake Clarity Credits, which are regulated by the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board as part of the county's stormwater permit in the Tahoe Basin. The Lake Tahoe clarity credits are achieved through stormwater best management practices. They're intended to remove fine sediment, phosphorus, and nitrogen to protect and maintain the clarity of the beautiful natural resource that is Lake Tahoe. The various BMPs consist of some more passive options, such as dry basins, infiltration basins, sediment traps, and pervious roadside channels, but can also include various filters and mechanical treatment. We receive different credits for the various BMPs that we implement. And our required target increases over time, with our new target being 898 by the end of this September. And we are currently on track to meet that target. Second is the tons of recyclable waste diverted from landfills. And this is a measure of how much material would go into a landfill if we didn't have our garbage processed at the two material recovery facilities where recyclable material is removed and marketed for reuse. as you can see our target has been 215 000 tons per year and we exceeded that number in 2425 and we'll hope to see that number go up significantly more in the future with changes at watma being implemented as well as changes at erl that will increase our diversion by about double moving forward We will update the target for future years once the improvements are fully implemented and operational. We have historically been among the highest recycled material diversion counties in the state with our One Big Bend collection model and the anticipated increases in diversion will be a big step to staying at the top or near the top. Finally, tons of commercial food waste turned into compost with a goal of collecting 425 tons of source-separated food waste. Several years ago, the state required separate food waste collection from large-scale generators such as restaurants and grocery stores. And in response, the county began source-separated collection routes for these customers, and we have been collecting and transporting this material for composting. And to give you a sense of how much material we're talking about from these last two efforts, the 425 tons of food waste recycled from restaurants would be equal to about four and a half blue whales. And for the 215,000 tons of waste recycled, that would equate to filling about 567 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Or if you took 265 football fields, it would be three feet deep of material that we've recycled each year. That's the amount of material that we pull out of the waste stream.

Great visual.

Thank you.

So our proposed next fiscal year budget expenditures are over $253 million. And our budget fluctuates year by year depending on our capital projects, of which we have many planned for this next year. Most of our expenses are related to the capital projects we are working on. The $120 million of the $186 million in services and supplies is for our capital projects. We have 33 capital projects that are over $100,000 that are in various stages of development, with our largest projects for next year being Placer Parkway and Yankee Jim's bridge replacement. Services and supplies also includes our general overhead costs, including maintenance, insurance, fuel, IT, training, and utilities. The next largest category is our staff salary and benefits. costs at just over $41 million. And then capital is the next largest category, and it represents equipment purchases. The last one that I'll mention on this slide is other charges, which represents A87 charges, lease payments, and payments to other agencies, such as connection fees for the South Placer Wastewater Authority. Next slide shows our revenues, $249 million. with the largest source being charges for services at $96 million, which includes revenues from sewer and water charges, solid waste fees, and transit fares. Next is intergovernmental revenue, which is $90 million and includes federal, state, and local funds. It's primarily made up of gas taxes, which we talked about earlier, as well as construction grants. And then the other financing sources at $51 million is revenue from various sources such as transient occupancy, transient occupancy tax and other transit funding, as well as general funds for road maintenance and our stormwater program. So the general fund provides DPW with a small portion but a valuable part of our overall budget and our general fund cost centers. The majority of the budget expenses and revenues are for DPW admin expenses, which makes up approximately $3.8 million of the $5.4 million shown on the slide. this is fully billed out within our department each year resulting in revenue coming back in to offset that expense from within the department and that is why you see in the prior years the the actuals are much lower than the budgeted because that that offsetting revenue The remaining costs shown here are funding for our stormwater utility, our stormwater quality, and our floodplain management programs. For stormwater, we have over $1.5 million in expenses budgeted, of which the general fund pays for just over 76%, or about $1.1 million for next year. The next slide shows our road fund revenue and expenses, which includes all the road capital projects, including some of the major projects Derek discussed earlier. Actual revenues and expenses fluctuate, as I mentioned, across fiscal years based on the number of active projects and the level of activity on those projects. We have budgeted over $120 million in road-related capital project spending for the next fiscal year, including $49 million for Placer Parkway Phase 1, $28.5 million for Yankee Jim's bridge replacement, $1.2 million in various Tahoe projects, $12.6 million in various bike, pedestrian, parking, and signal projects. And the remaining between the $120 million and the $150 million that's shown there is overhead and staff salary and benefits. In DPW, our staffing has remained fairly stable with the reduction that you see on the slide from fiscal year 2526 to fiscal year 2627 going down due to the transition of the fleet division moving into the Department of General Services with no changes to the other funded position allocations. The number of vacancies has been trending down slightly over the last year to 12%, which is good progress for us as we have been able to fill more bus driver positions as well as engineer positions, partially by underfilling some of those engineer positions as some of the other departments have discussed. And those two categories have been a challenge for us in the past. But we would like to thank your board for your support in implementing changes to the salaries and bonus structure for our bus drivers in TART that has helped us fill and retain more drivers this year, which has been a positive help for us. So we appreciate that. The 32 vacancies that are mentioned on the slide, two of those are actually in fleet, so those would go with the fleet transition. I'm happy to report that we actually filled one of those last week. We have eight more that are currently in the pre-employment process, so that vacancy rate could go down to as low as 21 if those employment processes play out as we'd like them to. And so that completes our presentation, and we're here to answer any questions that your board has.

Thank you. Questions or comments? Supervisor DiMattei.

Thank you, guys. That was great. When we were at the American River clean out, it was brought to our attention that the No Hands Bridge has a lot of erosion around the base of the footings there at the bridge. Has there been any contact with the state to see if we can get money to help fix that before it becomes a bigger problem? there should be money left over from the other one, from the lawsuit, there should be probably two and a half million dollars there hiding.

Yeah, Matt Randall, Deputy Director, I wish. So we have not made contact. So I don't think that bridge, Supervisor DeMattei, is our, like under our maintenance responsibility. But as far as, yeah, reaching out, no contact has been made, but I mean, that's certainly something we could do afterwards. We know the right people to talk to about that.

yeah that'd be great i mean the crews were there and they saw it right so like i thought there was pieces of the bridge shoved up against those pilings okay or the footings but i mean um well we'll follow up all right for sure yeah appreciate it yeah that's all i got thank you guys you guys do a great job

Supervisor Gustafson. Thank you great job appreciate the report and all the challenges and all the Advancements we've made I think the the app for Tartt is going to be quite useful having traveled and other Locales, it's amazing that we haven't had it, I mean outside this country, where you can see when the next bus is coming and you know what your choices are at that point. So I think that'll be very useful to folks. On the Fannie Bridge completion, we still have the why to deal with, and I hear about this almost daily. if not more than once a day, because the entrance to Tahoe City looks the way it does. I know we don't take over the Y. like 2030, is that right? In the meantime, it just sits there with the state. So should I be talking to the state? I know there's been some money allocated through TOT to do some sort of beautification, but 2030 will be here before we know it. What are our plans for the sidewalks, the connections, and the next phase of that project?

Right, maybe I'll start and then I'll let Jared maybe come up and talk to it. But certainly we're monitoring Caltrans. There was a commitment for them to do some signal upgrades as well there. And then we're looking at what is necessary for the improvements that may still need to be done to bring it in a good condition before we accept it. And so we're doing some evaluation of that. Jared, do you have anything else you want to add to that?

Yeah, so Jared Decht, Deputy Director for Placer County Public Works. Just to add on to that too, we've been working with Caltrans as much as we can to kind of get a defined project. They've been very hesitant to provide any information on that, and so we're continuing to keep those communication lines open and hoping that they will help define that, which will help the town city downtown area kind of start being able to work on some of those beautification projects and once we kind of know the general framework of what that project is going to be then they can start moving forward with some of that but for right now unfortunately we're kind of in a whole pattern just because cal transit yeah they haven't prioritized it but um i'm we'll pass that on to the business organizations and i'll probably write a letter suggesting that be a higher priority i mean we've been waiting since 20

16, 17 when we were working on the overall project to see improvements at the Y and have kind of left it in this shape for a very long time. And it, you know, Caltrans can do better than this. It wouldn't take much to make it look a little nicer until then, so. If anybody from Caltrans is listening, you'll be getting a letter from me. We need to do something there. It's a shame, yeah. Well, that's kind of, but because it's Caltrans, you know, it makes it a little more challenging, but we used to do that when I was in a different organization.

Right. We anticipate there may be some money coming back to us from FHWA, from the Fannie Bridge, and so once we determine what that dollar is, there may be some money that we can put towards some of this, too.

Yeah, but I want to see Caltrans live up to their, you know, obligations as well, and the sidewalk connections are really important. They kind of start and stop, and... you know we had a whole vision that we were going to make that area you know it wasn't stopping with just the bridge replacement and so now what's next thank you um and then the only other comment i had is when you do have those bragging points like we're one of the highest in the state on recyclable materials, get me the number and let us brag a bit. I think a lot of our constituents want to understand the work that they're doing and the hassle sometimes it is and that we're getting great results and that means is meaningful. So, thank you.

Supervisor Gore. First of all, thank you for all of your hard work. I really, really appreciate it, especially with all the projects that we have taking place. Placer Parkway, my favorite that's not on the list is Baseline Riego Road. Really appreciate the work on that. I did ask, I'm curious with the app for companies who have extra food, the Eat Well app. How much is that utilized? Is that just our unincorporated area? What's the scope of it?

Yeah, so it's actually able to be used across jurisdictions. And it's a new app, so we're just getting it started. We actually have an outreach plan this summer to get out to restaurants and encourage them to enroll in it and then really start using it. We have worked with HHS to help identify those who are eligible, and they're pre-qualified. So we just need to get the restaurants on board, and then they can make those meals available.

A good way to start would be with our local Chamber of Commerce's who work with the visit the restaurants very well and promote those and I I have the sense that I saw somebody utilize it and maybe I'm wrong but some woman came in at the last minute at four score coffee and showed the guy her app and he handed her a bag of pastries etc that weren't eaten that day I don't know if that's what that is but It could be. It could be something like that. All right.

We do have some that are signed up already and are using it.

Okay. Yeah, I do think working with our local chambers would be very helpful. Appreciate that.

Supervisor Jones.

Yes, I just wanted to commend you on your employee engagement and the things that you've thought of to involve your employees and everyone. And it sounds like fun.

They're having fun.

Good, good. Congratulations. That's really one of the most important things that your employees think you see them, know them, and care about them. But thank you for that.

Speaking of fun, Celeste Lowe and her softball team will come back with another championship. So I just wanted to put that out there for probation.

Thanks. All right. Well, I don't see any other questions. I just want to echo what my colleagues said and say thank you so much for the work that you do. Especially want to give a shout out to the Rhodes crew because they're just incredible and amazing and we appreciate them so much. Of course, we appreciate all you guys, but... but really appreciate the work that they do uh so yeah we're i think we're good thank you thank you so much we will now move to hr with joe and team

Okay.

Feel free to start.

Good afternoon, Chair Landon, members of the Board of Supervisors, Joe Ambrosini, Director of Human Resources, and I have with me Nicole Lopez, Assistant Director of Human Resources, and Chris Barton, our Administrative Fiscal Operations Manager. It's our pleasure to present Human Resources Fiscal Year 26-27 budget. So just to provide a brief overview of the budget structure within Human Resources, our department is composed of five funds, seven cost centers, and 12 programs. Three of those cost centers reside in the general fund, and the remaining four funds are internal service funds, including benefits, dental and vision, unemployment insurance, and workers' compensation. The department's programs residing in the general fund are split between services for talent acquisition and department support, workforce optimization, and administration and labor relations. Our talent acquisition and department support provides dedicated service to county departments, applicants, and employees, In a variety of different areas, including recruitment, marketing and outreach, the selection process, exam development and classification and compensation. Our workforce optimization provides employee assistance, learning and development and engagement programs to promote a positive employee experience. And administration and labor relations provides labor and employee relations support for Placer County and our employees. Our new department mission statement that was adopted just last year is to deliver innovative services as a strategic partner, empowering county departments to deliver exemplary services to residents, visitors, and employees. Just wanna highlight a few key accomplishments for our department. This past fiscal year has been very busy as usual for HR. One of our major accomplishments that we're proud of is the creation of a new three-year HR department strategic plan. This was a huge milestone that reflected months of hard work, collaboration, and dedication from our entire HR team. We view this plan as an actionable roadmap that positions our department to continue transforming human resources into a more strategic, responsive, and people-centered partner across the county. In this plan, we've outlined clear priorities on how to modernize our service delivery and strengthen the employee experience, ensuring that we're meeting the county's evolving needs and long-term success from an HR perspective. We've structured the plan around four key areas, key focus areas. One is strategic human resources partnerships, how we strengthen our collaboration with departments. Another one is enhancing the employee experience, so prioritizing growth, retention, and well-being of our workforce. A third one is optimizing the HR service delivery so that we could make sure we have effective and efficient operations. And lastly, our strategic focus areas on building our core internal HR team to be high functioning and high performing. So we believe that this plan is our roadmap and really sets our clear direction on how we could grow over the next three years. We have approximately 30 strategic plan initiatives baked within the plan. And we've set a lot of priorities and timelines for how we're gonna tackle each of these items. I'll highlight just a couple for the board's reference. ONE IS CENTERED ON PROVIDING FOCUSED SUPPORT TO DEPARTMENT MANAGERS ON DEVELOPING CUSTOMIZED DEPARTMENT SPECIFIC SUCCESSION PLANS. SO THIS REALLY BUILDS UPON OUR EXISTING SUCCESSION PLANNING TOOL KIT PROCESS WE HAVE IMPLEMENTED A FEW YEARS AGO AND REALLY ELEVATES THIS AND TAKES IT TO ANOTHER LEVEL. Another initiative is focused on creating various recruitment and retention incentives so that we could ensure that high performing employees want to come to work at Placer County and stay working at Placer County. Looking at things outside of just traditional salary studies or salary adjustments to reward our employees. And last thing I'll highlight is our planned effort to really take a comprehensive look at HR policies and chapter three of the county code to ensure that the existing rules reflect best HR practices, but also provide maximum flexibility to departments to meet the needs that they have in 2026 and moving forward. So we look really forward to updating your board, the county executive officer and departments as we progress further on our plan. Another major accomplishment this year was with the countywide employee engagement survey. The survey was created and administered internally with subject matter experts within HR and was provided to employees during November and December this past year. We had a great response rate. Over 45% of county employees completed the survey. and we received tons of valuable feedback both through multiple choice and open-ended questions and we're currently in the process of sharing those results with individual departments and working with the county executive officer to develop strategies and initiatives in response to the survey feedback We anticipate reporting out to county employees soon regarding next steps and actionable items. I did just want to give a quick shout out to the HR staff members that have been intimately involved in this process. Doing an engagement survey is something typically public agencies will contract out to a consulting firm. There's usually a large cost associated with that. We were able to avoid all that and do that internally in-house with subject matter expertise, which really delivered a great product. ADDITIONAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS INCLUDE SUCCESS IN THE LABOR RELATIONS AREA. AS YOU KNOW, OUR COUNTY HAS FIVE LABOR ASSOCIATIONS AND WE MEET REGULARLY THROUGHOUT THE YEAR ON A NUMBER OF LABOR RELATED TOPICS AND MEET AND CONFER ITEMS. THIS PAST FISCAL YEAR WE CONDUCTED LABOR NEGOTIATIONS ON A SUCCESSOR MEMBRANUM OF UNDERSTANDING WITH THE PLACER PUBLIC EMPLOYEES ORGANIZATION, THE LARGEST BARGAINING UNIT THAT COVERS ABOUT 1,900 EMPLOYEES. Numerous pay and benefit provisions were enhanced in order to provide greater stability to employees over the next three years. Simultaneously, while we were doing those negotiations, we were also able to look at and make adjustments to the management and confidential employee salaries and benefits to ensure competitiveness in the recruitment and retention space. Many of our comparator jurisdictions unfortunately are facing budget constraints that create difficult conditions for their labor negotiation process. And we're very thankful that here at Placer County we're in a much better place than most of our other comparators. And we were able to make good strides during this process to offer competitive pay and benefits to our employees. I'll make a quick mention of the implementation here of Assembly Bill 339. That became effective January 1st and placed a number of new burdens and requirements on public agencies, including the county. That really requires the county to evaluate the way we do our contracting process. AB 339 became a new and unexpected workload for staff towards the end of last calendar year. And we had to work really quickly to get the new law up and running and implement a process. And so I'm proud of the collaboration within our team and with other county departments to create a process that streamlines this new legislative requirement as quickly as possible. And then lastly, I'll mention here that we've had good success in our benefit, employee benefit space. You know, Placer County spends approximately 50 million annually on various employee benefit programs. Usually when you're at that level of spending, it's common to have a benefit broker to help oversee the plan, look for improvements and provide subject matter guidance. We went through a very thorough process this year and selected a firm to help out in this space. The broker has already identified various enhancements and even cost savings related to what we offer employee benefits. Coming this open enrollment period in September, we're looking forward to offering new and expanded voluntary and other core benefits and providing some savings to the county. The need to procure and implement a new applicant tracking system was a key initiative in our new strategic plan. The current system in place has long been identified as needing improvement and lacks many of the modern features and functionality of newer updated systems. One of the main goals with the new system was to identify a solution that improves communication between the county and job seekers, so those seeking employment receive timely and regular communication regarding the status of their application. We also sought a system that makes the application process, the screening and review process, and ultimately the process to select and hire a candidate much more streamlined. We believe we found these critical items with our new system. This past year we did an RFP process that involves significant involvement and collaboration across departments. A new system was recently selected and will be coming to your board for approval in either May or June. And we're excited to start working on implementing this new system when we believe it will be a success both for job applicants and county staff. And then one final mention in the accomplishment space relates to Placer's deferred compensation plans. You may know that Placer offers two plans, a 401k and a 457 for employees to save towards retirement. Throughout this year, we were able to procure and bring on an investment and fiduciary services consultant and advisor, which helps provide oversight and making sure the plans run smoothly. Not only were they able to do that, they were able to identify some cost savings compared to the prior structure of the plan, and those savings are being passed on to employees who participate in the plan. I'll now highlight a few emerging issues and priorities we have. We have a number of those that we're keeping our eyes on. These have all pretty much been identified in our new strategic plan or informed through the employee engagement survey results. So I'll briefly just touch on a couple of them. Talked a little bit about adequate recruitment and retention incentives. And so we really believe at not just taking a look at what general wage increases provide our employees, which are very important, but also looking at other ways to reward our employees, to keep employees motivated and entice employees to continue working at Placer County. So we're looking at a number of these initiatives. We're in the planning phase right now and look forward to bringing recommendations in the future for consideration. We're looking at expanding our leadership and development programs as a top priority. We already offer several different programs such as the NACO High Performing Leadership Academy, new supervisor courses and others, but we're looking to grow and expand these programs. We're committed to identifying new and innovative ways to equip our leaders to perform at high levels. Enhancing employee engagement and recognition is also a top priority. These are two items that rank very high on our engagement survey. Employees enjoy and appreciate the recognition programs we have in place. And not only do we want to continue those in the upcoming year, but we want to look for ways to enhance and improve them where we can. And so we're going to continue collaborating on this initiative to strengthen these areas. Another critical area for HR is the increase in classification and compensation study requests. These come both from labor organizations or through county departments as requests to HR. These requests are growing each year, which places significant constraints on HR staff and at times can impact work in other areas of the department. Part of the new MOU with PPEO requires the county to complete 27 compensation and or classification and compensation studies during the term of the MOU. Additionally, departments routinely request HR to conduct classification and compensation work for a variety of reasons. Just to paint a picture of where we currently stand, we've completed approximately 98 classification and compensation related requests since the start of the current fiscal year. However, we still have 68 requests outstanding. And then on top of that, we really want to make sure we keep an eye on updating our job descriptions. It's best practice to take a look at those every five years to make sure that those are staying up to date. We have about 86 of those job descriptions that are currently beyond the five-year window and on our log and on our queue to be reviewed. additionally a large-scale countywide study of the accounting series is scheduled to begin later this year which will involve a significant number of staff considering the impacted classifications are in departments countywide just in general by industry standards this represents a significant workload in the classification compensation area one that would be very would be very difficult to keep up with under normal circumstances although the use of consultants does help and they are utilized from time to time they come with additional costs and still require a level of hr oversight and involvement in the process hr's priority is to ensure the agreed upon studies in our mous are met within the required timelines and then we prioritize other requests based on criteria aimed to ensure the most critical requests are covered first We've recently brought in additional staff and are contracting with the vendor that specializes in classification compensation automation to try to find some relief. Although the workload is significant, HR recognizes the importance of these requests to departments and will continue to work through them and identify solutions as quickly as possible. Another emerging issue that I touched on briefly, but I'll just reiterate, is Assembly Bill 339 that again went into effect January this year. This essentially really requires the county to review contracts to determine if contracts are within the scope of existing job duties that are represented by unions. This is a major change in process. Previously, departments would be able to enter into contracts either directly through the board or through their delegated authority. There now is a process where contracts need to go through a review process with HR and possibly procurement, and that really significantly impacts the process where now several hundred contracts now need an extra layer of review that they didn't necessarily need before. Luckily, we do have our process in place. We're going to continue to refine that process and monitor legislation in hopes that we could find some relief in this area. Additionally, we've seen an increase in investigation and labor relations costs. That's not really uncommon for an agency the size of Placer. It's not uncommon to receive, you know, complaints from employees or labor inquiries. And, you know, especially since we have five bargaining groups and that has grown over the years. So there are items in this area that require our attention. Sometimes we need to use external labor attorneys or investigation attorneys in this area to help support. And then lastly, I'll just make a mention of our last issue is marketing and outreach efforts related to recruitment. Your board heard about two weeks ago a presentation I made on AB2561 where we talked a lot about the recruitment steps. I'll just add on here that we truly believe a robust marketing and outreach process is really one of the main reasons why we've been able to have quality candidate pools and seen an increase in job applicants looking for jobs over the years. And so these efforts have been really especially important with hard to fill positions. Unfortunately, marketing and advertising costs only continue to rise. And therefore, we're asking for greater investment in this area. But we believe that this is very important for the county, especially if we're going to market and brand ourselves as an employer choice. And so we're going to continue to monitor new and cutting ways to do marketing and outreach efforts for our recruitments. I'LL GO QUICKLY OVER SOME OF THE PERFORMANCE MEASURES. ASSUMING WE CONTINUE THAT PROCESS LIKE I JUST TALKED ABOUT OF HAVING A NICE THOROUGH AND ROBUST MARKETING AND OUTREACH EFFORT, WE ANTICIPATE ON STILL BEING AND RECEIVING ABOUT 20 PLUS THOUSAND APPLICANTS PER YEAR. THAT'S HOPEFULLY THE WE WILL AT LEAST BE THERE AND ABOVE AS SORT OF A BASELINE MOVING FORWARD. We believe that the current fiscal year target for the number of days to turn around a requisition and completing trainings in Placer Learns will probably really remain about stable. And we anticipate a slight increase in mandatory trainings completed. There was recent legislation that requires mandatory trainings in some spaces. So we don't see that slowing down. We have a goal, like I said, to increase our wellness programs and initiatives in alignment with the feedback we received from the employee engagement survey. And then we expect the remainder of the data points to remain stable in the coming year. I'll now turn it over to Chris Barton, who will run through some of the budget numbers in detail.

Thank you. Chris Barton, Administrative Fiscal Ops Manager. The Human Resources Department has seven cost centers, five funds. The funds consist of the general fund, three self-insurance internal service funds, and one internal service fund for employee benefits administration. Just to give a little bit more clarification on the other charges with our submitted budget that is related to our claims that we receive for our internal service funds, 3.7 million for dental vision, 6.2 million for workers' compensation, and 400,000 for county cost plan charges that we receive. And then with our revenues, Charges for our services make up an overwhelming majority of the revenue we receive that is A little bit repetitive from the last side to what we have twelve point six million workers compensation revenue that we receive four million from dental and vision administration four million from employee benefits administration and just over two hundred fifty thousand for unemployment and Our other financing sources are from operating transfers from departments for sick leave related to retiree health benefits for eligible retirees. And non-operating revenues consist of interest of $300,000 and our county cost plan revenue. Moving forward to the general fund, the variance year over year from 8.3 to 9.4 in expenses is largely due to three new possessions we received, as well as general wage and benefits increases for employees. And as far as revenues, the revenues are tied directly to county cost plan, so that's the Next slide. Next one are employee benefits. have small variances, the little 300,000 there year over year is tied to salaries and benefits increases. We didn't receive any new positions in that cost center, so that is just tied to those. We have increased supplies and services for a new benefits consultant, as well as we also have increased usage with our flexible spending accounts for dependent care and medical reimbursement. and with workers' compensation, The treatments for injuries continue to get more expensive, so that's why our costs continue to go up year over year, and the severity of claims is increasing. However, this year, don't want to just knock on wood a little bit, we haven't received any major claims, major incidents this year. So that is positive note on that. And with that, I will pass it back.

Thank you. I'll just go ahead and wrap this up by just going through our funded positions real quick. So we're thankful that we're now at 59 positions. That's definitely an increase over the last couple fiscal years. We're very grateful and thankful for the growth that HR staff has seen in those years. We're also very appreciative of the two new positions that we received in quarter two of this fiscal year. Those positions helped us to accomplish an organizational restructure that was needed to put us on a better path and better serve our customers. we have a handful of vacancies right now but these are the result of recent retirements and promotions and most of these have either recently finished the recruitment process or or wrapping up at the tail end so we anticipate our vacancy vacancies to go down significantly in the next very short while So while we're grateful our staffing levels have grown modestly over time, so have the demands on HR services. Despite this, the HR team has consistently delivered meaningful results, and we're proud of everything that they've accomplished. That concludes the presentation. We're happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. Questions or comments? I shall.

Thank you, gentlemen. Appreciate the report, the hard work. Two questions. The first one, as far as the average number of calendar days turn around to go from a RECTO, a posting, what triggers the opportunity for somebody to actually go to your department and say, hey, we need someone? Is it the date they resign, retire, leave, Or if the department head knows that that person's going to leave in two months, can they start the process early? I just don't know. And I'm curious. I'm just curious.

Good good afternoon Nicole Lopez, there are several different variations that could come with that process one is if someone were retiring and they were getting notice and we received the notice, then they can begin those processes. But there's a difference between opening like the actually wanting to fill versus opening a recruitment, so in this case, this is specific about. actually someone submitting a requisition that says, I have a vacancy and I'm ready to fill it. And that's from the point where they notify HR and then we begin the process with them to certify eligible lists for them to interview and all those processes begin. As far as recruitments, recruitments can, sometimes we keep lists fresh and open regardless of any upcoming vacancies. So we review eligible lists every three and six months and we determine are they active and eligible do we want to keep them going or are they kind of stale and we need to refresh those those are occurring whether or not there's vacancies it's depending on the interest from the departments but also the use if it's county-wide and the frequency in which that list is utilized so there's two different factors that come along with that time period. The slide and that data point is specifically about a department expressing interest with a vacancy and coming to HR and say, I have a vacancy and I wanna fill it.

So if they have a vacancy and they know the vacancy is gonna be in two months, they could start the process early.

They can. They may not be able to actually fill it.

Well, I understand not filling it, but they could recruit and you could get through the interview process and the whole bit. Of course, you can't have two people in one position at the same time.

Okay. There's some variances with that if you actually have notification that someone is leaving, like written notification versus verbal. So there's some logistics that come along with that.

Yeah, requirements. Thank you. I appreciate that. My other question and just thought in regards to enhanced employee engagement, which I think is important and really wonderful, I've been thinking a lot about volunteerism. And often in the private sector, like we had departments that had to encourage their employees to do a day of volunteerism together. And it didn't have to be during the work hours. It could be after work, serving food at the homeless shelter, or working at the food bank on a Saturday morning. But I do think that might be something to encourage departments to think about. work together as a team to do something of that's meaningful and a value to the community that ultimately when we work together enhances employee engagement so that's a thought for in the future maybe there's a way to encourage volunteerism throughout the organization absolutely and i think that's been done in the past um and we're exploring that in the future going forward too supervisor dima takes

Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Joe. Thank you to your team. You mentioned, you talked about recruitment, I mean retention and working on that. And we've heard from two departments today already that they're losing people because we can't get their pay done. What is the holdup at HR that we are, I have department heads that come in to me that they know what they should be paid, but now we're losing them to Santa Clara County or we're losing them to neighboring counties, for instance, in the Ag Department or you know, in child services today that they're getting paid really low wages to do an extremely hard job. But you talk about recruitment, I mean, retention and getting people to stay and doing all this stuff, but it seems like I'm hearing the opposite from all the other departments. So how can we fast track it in HR? Do we need to go to outside HR to help you guys? What do you guys need from us to help keep our employees here? Because it seems like it's a problem.

Well, I guess I'd say a couple things to that. If you're referring to the class and comp studies, that's kind of one aspect of it, right? We've just recently concluded negotiations. We gave out pretty generous increases that were above and beyond what our comparators were doing. And then we've agreed in the MOUs to look at positions during the term of the MOU, and we're doing that right now. We just presented to the labor group this week four or five positions. And so that data has now been delivered to the labor association and now they're reviewing it. In particular, those ag positions I think may have been ones that you heard. So those are already in progress. We have another tentative scheduled meeting with the labor group to present a next batch in about four to five weeks or so from now. We're doing them. I mean, remember, we've completed almost 100 requests this fiscal year. That's a very large workload of class comp requests. But we still have 68 outstanding. And I'll just kind of go back to a little what I said in the presentation. That is a very heavy lift. Most public agencies do not do this type of, this volume of class and comp work in between negotiations. Typically, it's what is negotiated is kind of mostly it. And you do a little bit of work here and there. But being on track for nearly 200 requests, I think maybe previously I presented that by the time this cycle is done, we'll have looked at over 1,300 employees out of almost 3,000 in the county. That is huge to do that. And so we definitely, I wouldn't say it's an additional help that's needed because that's just a large workload in general. Even if you contracted that out to like consultants, you'd be looking at many thousands of dollars for that. And if you were to hire staff to do that, you would have to look at a lot more staff for that. So we're doing our best to kind of prioritize them. We have a built-in priority list and we're trying to get them as much as we can. We understand all the class comp work is important to the departments for sure. And we want to support that and do that, but we're trying to make sure we hit the MOU ones first. And we're definitely on track for those. So also I will just throw out, you know, compensation studies is looking at doing a study is when, you know, if there is a contention that an employee is not being paid within market, and then we do a study, right? We look at that, we explore that, and we present data that either supports that or doesn't support that. If there are demonstrated recruitment and retention issues, significant ones. Departments are always encouraged to bring those forward. To us, we work through with the CEO. There's nothing that would stop adjustments from being made if there was a case for that. But we generally go through a very deliberate process with studies to make sure that the data supports, you know, action for making that move. So hopefully that helps. Again, we know there's a lot of requests. We are really trying to work through those as efficiently as we can.

Joe, if I could, I'm sorry, Nicole, I just want to jump in real quick, too, and I just want to add that I think there may be a perception that a comp study is very simple, that you just go to your comparator counties, identify the exact same job specification, job title, and just compare the hourly rate to the hourly rate, the maximum of that. There's a lot more work that goes into that. When I've looked at positions within my own department, finding comparable positions in other agencies, they always don't line up with title to title. So you have to really go through the detail of reading the job descriptions, really word for word, to find out what duties are similar to that. then and then there are other portions of that where we have maybe special pays that we add on for certain positions that actually would increase the base number that's not just in the the compensation STRUCTURE OF THE COUNTY. SO THERE'S A LOT OF THINGS THAT GO INTO THAT THAT MAYBE NOT EVERYBODY IS AWARE OF, BUT THAT'S PART OF THAT PROCESS IS REALLY DIGGING INTO THOSE DETAILS.

WE CALL THAT A TOTAL. THE GOLD STANDARD OF LOOKING AT THINGS IS THROUGH TOTAL COMPENSATION, SO IT'S WHAT DANIEL'S REFERRING TO. So we factor in a lot of pays and benefits in addition to that. And that does take an extended period of time to do the study, but it also accurately reflects it. Because at times, placer may not weigh extremely high on just a base salary basis, but when you factor in a lot of the very generous benefits we give, it puts employees over the threshold. So it does make the studies a little bit tougher. And then just kind of last thing I'd say on this point too is the team that does this in HR, it's about eight employees of the 59 employees we have. And they are doing, it's the same teams that do the recruitment and selection. So making sure that we keep our recruitments running. And then they're also the frontline support for departments. with main issues that they have so class and comp studies are no doubt a very significant amount of their time but it's simply not the only time so we we try to balance that out to make sure we don't let recruitments drag down in exchange for something else so it's a combination of factors but yeah absolutely our hope is to get that logged down to a more manageable number and keep it kind of more manageable so that we don't have people waiting for a while

think one more thing to add is that it's also some impact to employees because anytime you're doing classification studies you're having them do desk audits so our team goes and actually sits and goes through their tasks their duties what are they doing examples shadowing it's it's literally a hands-on if you have classifications that have 150 people in them. That means we're touching 150 people to go through their desks and their supervisors are reviewing them. It's very extensive. And then also when we're talking about compensation or those equivalents that we're looking at at the market, we actually contact our colleagues in the other agencies. Sometimes it takes getting into their department structure to understand those equivalencies across their organization and how that relates to ours. It's a very in-depth processes that are very time consuming. But also, I just want to point out that sometimes employees feel like those studies, those surveys are going to result in outcomes that they may desire. And oftentimes, either they're appropriately classified and then they're within market and there's no movement. And so sometimes they get their hopes up and feel like, oh, I need this study. because i'm i'm doing more and i should get paid more and then we find that they're appropriately classified and appropriately paid and sometimes that's very disappointing for folks so just being mindful that while oftentimes folks are seeing that as kind of a way to have some movement sometimes that is not the ultimate answer and if we're looking at kind of a broader interest

if we with so many studies and requests there may be alternatives to address some of the concerns other than class and compensation surveys yeah i think the only thing i would add to that is that you know a lot of these job titles that we've talked about with those different departments they're young kids coming in here right they're coming out of college they're They don't really, not only do they care about their health package, right? We probably have the best health package, but at the end of the day, they want more money in their paycheck, right? They're not gonna go to the doctor. They're not gonna have the same problems that somebody my age would probably have. So really, they're gonna just jump from base to base to go where they're gonna get $12 an hour, $10 an hour more. So I think that we need to really study that and I don't we need to study it I think it's a fact that's out there right now I mean Josh has told me when I was in DC we're losing kids because they don't care about their health care package they care about how much money they're going to take home at the end of the day and so if we're losing and we're not being able to recruit people or not recruit people or retain people then we have a problem and we need to address that because and Laura said the same thing you know she's got young people coming in to do this job who have a lot of stress to do this job but i don't think they really care that they have a great medical package at the end of the day they want 25 30 bucks an hour or whatever that number is so i think that that really needs to be looked at so and then when i hear when cedra is closed one day a week and they have to catch up it seems like they don't have enough people there that can actually do what we need to do and we're a growing county and if that's where we make our widgets right there if we don't get building permits done we don't make money here so I want to be able to see if that can stay open and we can continue to grow. So I'd like to get some info on that. Thank you, guys.

Supervisor Gustafson. Thank you for the presentation, Joe. And I know you've somewhat inherited kind of a legacy of older job descriptions and class and comp. I mean, the reason we're getting so many of these is people feel they're not reflective of their duties. whether that's true or not that's what your process goes through and I appreciate the energy it takes to you know change and and shift and try to address all this I think from a policy level for the board I'm trying to always bring it back to you have to be the technical expert but at the board level when we're discussing negotiations with employees some of these are the topics that that Supervisor DiMattei just brought up. It's inevitable that younger employees don't understand what we do at our uh... more tenured ages on medical the benefits of medical or pensions uh... some of the pension costs and when we see those escalating the way they have uh... it's hard to translate that into what you can spend today on your family and your mortgage and your insurance and all that at your house so uh... i think that's an education process uh... that that we have to think about. And as we're in, you know, when we're brought into the negotiations, often we don't have enough time to really talk about strategies to achieve that. And so I look forward in the future to having more brought to us ahead of time to really talk about those bigger picture issues. I also, you know, the the overwhelming numbers of class and comp requests you're getting, that's a systematic issue that we need to think about what do we have to do because we started granting those, right? We changed our comparable counties which brought a lot of requests for this and then the groups started coming to us and we don't have to do the work we just say oh yeah we'll agree to that and then it falls on you and so i'm i'm really aware that is a huge number if you think that we're going to be reclassifying or you know studying thirteen hundred out of however many groups employees that's a lot so i'm sympathetic to that at the same time i hear from our department heads like all of us do recruitment is a big issue um... one of the things i learned a long time ago and i think is probably still the case is you know the financial matters are one respect for the work you do is a major issue and people feeling respected in the workplace by their managers and so i i look at what are we doing to educate our managers and supervisors to build like we just heard from DPW that that workplace morale as well as respect for the work they're doing because it starts at the top and they're the ones, you can come up with programs and everything on a broad level, but it really comes down to your supervisor. Is your supervisor proud of you and giving you meaningful work? anything you can do to advance that education and incentive there I think will help and encourage that but I do think the board needs to be more aware when we're in those negotiations often we're brought in and it's like boom boom boom we have not very much time to talk about these bigger issues that are facing the county and now we're hearing the repercussions of that I think the department heads need to be kept up to speed on these ideas and where you're headed and how many you have and where they are in the priority list. I think communication is just critical for them to understand. Thankfully, we're making good progress. I hope you hear that from me, that we are making good progress, but we have a lot to make up for.

and i and i understand that i see that and i think we've inflicted some of that on you so i apologize for that but keep it going all right i don't see any additional questions or comments so thank you so much to you and your team appreciate all the work that you're doing we will now move to plaster county fire with chief hudson and mr chatney

Yeah, good afternoon board. I've live from Grand Lubbock and.

good afternoon chair landon members of the board daniel chatt new york county executive officer i'm just going to introduce this one this afternoon our cal fire unit chief plaster county fire chief jim hudson is up in tahoe this week conducting a advanced incident management training that includes firefighters all the way from the fire department of new york So he's going to be joining us for Zoom for the accomplishments emerging issues portion of this. I came over here to sit because I didn't want Karen to sit by herself for this item. So here we are. So I'll introduce the Placer County Fire budget structure. um it is eight funds in total that includes the county's fire fund as well as the zones of benefit that that serves there are eight separate cost centers in there one i believe for one for each fund and then 12 programs overall um chief hudson there he is

It was important that I was here as the cadre lead to make sure things go smoothly, so I appreciate it. I will start with some accomplishments over the last year. The first one is the transition plan to three-person staff that was part of the cooperative fire protection agreement that was approved by your board last July. This will take us over the course of that contract, adding new positions each fiscally to get to the industry standing of three person staffing at all of our fire stations. We've also continued to upgrade our EMS delivery. There was a time where our Sunset Station was the only advanced life support station services provided by our county fire in the county. We've since extended that to the Lincoln Fire Station, to the Dry Creek Fire Station. We are currently in the hiring process for paramedics for North Auburn and Ophir Stations and are beginning to get those online as well. And all of our future plant and stations are planned for three-person advanced life support as well. A very large purchase that was approved by your board earlier this year was the purchase of a new ladder truck for the Sunset Station, replacing a 17-year-old piece of equipment. And I'm happy to say that that piece of equipment will be in service very shortly. And we're happy to be able to find this opportunity. A demo became available that ended up being a significant cost savings for County Fire Department in replacing that piece of equipment. Next slide, please. Just some emerging issues that I'd like to touch on today. I think with the growth in the county, we need to continue to adapt to our increasing call volume while operating within the confines of our current budget. Not only with the growth, but we've also seen the cost of firefighting equipment, supplies, personnel go up as the year. So we're always monitoring the best way to make sure that we are fiscally responsible moving forward and adapting to increased costs as well. A big item that we're hearing from the public, and I know I've chatted with a lot of the members of the board with, is continue to monitor for the triggers for the new development planned on the west end. And it's important that we align our development of fire stations and staffing with the construction demands, monitor those triggers of structures being built and roofs being occupied, as well as monitoring closely what is that doing for our call demand on our existing fire stations as well. And always a topic within the fire services within Placer County is enhancing our capabilities between the five dispatch centers. The departments in the county currently are working on a CAD to CAD project that your board provided funding for. And we're continuing to look for other enhancements as well. And also with the growth as fire chief, one thing that I have to be very cognizant of as our call volume increases, what does our radio infrastructure look like? So we're looking at avenues to provide a secondary command channel for Placer County Fire Department and possible use by our cooperating agencies as well. and to make sure that we have redundant dispatch systems and the ability to operate more than one or two large scale emergencies within the county at one time. And that is even included in Chris Wanner, Applying for some federal earmarks to upgrade our infrastructure system and working with with CEOs office on funding opportunities and making sure that these enhancements and adding this additional frequency meets our lives within the constraints of our budget as well next slide please. And for performance measures, this is the first year that I'm presenting as a department head, as your county fire chief. So we will focus on 26-27. First performance measure, as always, is to make sure that we're meeting the industry standard for responses, and that's both urban, suburban, and rural, for 90 percentiles for our response times. That is an industry standard. I believe that we have been very consistent in meeting that and don't foresee any challenges currently moving into 26 and 27 to meet those. To continue to increase our advanced life support EMS delivery, as I said, we've hired our first paramedics within the North Auburn and Ophir fire stations in that battalion. However, as any fire chief in California will tell you, paramedics are in demand, so we're doing heavy recruitment and outreach to bring those folks on board and get them up to speed as quick as possible to continue to increase our advanced life support delivery. and then always public education needs to be at the forefront of what we do as a fire department our goal is 50 outreaches minimum a year and with the development also that we're seeing on the west end that is a very common question that we're getting when is the fire stations staffing going to look like in the future? Are you going to be able to meet the call demands? And we're hearing that at community meetings and interactions with the public across the county. So we plan to educate that on top of our normal education on fire safety, fuels reduction, home hardening, that we need to make sure that the public is informed on what lies ahead with the growth that we're seeing in our county. And with that, I will pass it to Karen Chia. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Karen Chaya, Administrative and Fiscal Operations Manager. Good afternoon, Karen Chaya, Administrative and Fiscal Operations Manager with County Executive Office. And I'm pleased to be here and give you a brief overview of the financial information for the Placer County Fire Department's submitted budget for fiscal year 26 and 27. The Fire Department's submitted expenditure budget is 22.6 million. The largest expense is 22 million in services and supplies, and that includes 19.9 million CAL FIRE contract. Other financing uses is $450,000, and this is for Bigfoot Fund contribution to fire fund to provide interim service to the Bigfoot Ranch area until the fire station is constructed. And then we have other charges, about $208,000, and that is for financing for the purchase of two fire trucks in 2024. Submitted revenue budget is 21.4 million, and the categories here are, and I'll list them from largest to smallest. The largest revenue category is property taxes at 8.6 million. Next large category are charges for services at 8.4 million. the majority of which is a contribution from the United Auburn Indian Casino to the Sunset Industrial Zone of Benefit for services at the station next to Thunder Valley Resort. The fire fund is supported by general fund and the 3.4 million in other financing sources category includes two and a half million contribution from the general fund. Intra-governmental revenue is 960,000, and that is mainly sales tax apportionment and Western Placer Waste Management Authority agreement to fund fire services. This slide highlights fire protection fund, and in this fund, the net county cost increase from current fiscal year 25-26 to the budget year 26-27 is about 900,000. And this is mostly due to increase in the CAL FIRE contract. And here I wanted to also note that the budget year of 26-27 marks year two of the five-year board approved contract. The revenue is projected to increase by about 200,000, and this is due to ongoing growth of revenue from property taxes. And that concludes the financial portion of the presentation. Please let me know if you have any questions. Great, thank you. Any questions or comments?

No, I guess we're good. Thanks, Chief Hudson. We appreciate you and good luck with your training and hopefully everything goes smoothly. We appreciate everything you and your team do for us.

Thank you.

Thank you. All right. We will now move to our CEO department with Mr. Chatney.

OK, THANK YOU, CHAIR LANDON. AGAIN, DANIEL CHATNEY, COUNTY EXECUTIVE OFFICER. SO IN ADDITION TO MY DUTIES AS THE CEO, I AM ALSO THE CEO DEPARTMENT HEAD. SO PRESENTING THE COUNTY EXECUTIVE OFFICE BUDGET AND OUR STRUCTURE INCLUDES 13 FUNDS, WHICH OBVIOUSLY THE HIGHLIGHT OF THAT IS THE OVERSIGHT OF THE ENTIRE COUNTY GENERAL FUND. We have 13 or 12 other funds that we that we supervise or oversee, plus 20 to 26 cost centers and 64 programs. So as a reminder, some of those cost centers that are included in the county executive office are the public information office, our fiscal and budget teams, the CEO admin team, the Board of Supervisors budget, the clerk of the board's budget, economic development and housing and others. So it's quite a diverse group of components to what we do out of our office Okay, so You know our office works So our office works with all other county departments, and you've already heard from from all of them in the last two days on their accomplishments. So I just want to highlight some of the ones that are more unique to our office and the work that we do. First, we highlighting the the creation of the Department of General Services and the Placer County Fire Department. SO THOSE WERE THE FIRST ONE, THE GENERAL SERVICES ONE WAS AN EFFORT THAT I WAS LOOKING AT FOR SEVERAL YEARS NOW AND IT FINALLY CAME INTO FRUITION THIS LAST YEAR. SO FAR YOU MET, YOU HEARD FROM NATASHA DRAIN OUR FIRST DIRECTOR OF GENERAL SERVICES TODAY AND HER PLANS TO KIND OF REINVENT WHAT GENERAL SERVICES IS AND SO FAR WORKING VERY POSITIVELY AND VERY HAPPY WITH THAT TRANSITION. um and then second one was the creation of the plaster county fire department we took this opportunity as well to really um solidify or or or you know solidify what the plaster county fire department is now we do operate a plaster county fire department through a cooperative agreement with cal fire but as we are continuing to grow in west placer we're constructing fire stations and doing things like that it was important to me to really recognize the value of the plaster county fire department and and our relationship with cal fire In our land use and community services group, we hosted the development speaker series, held an event in May, October, and November. It allows the opportunity to engage a lot of our industry development partners and our county staff with the effort of trying to improve communication and learning to understand the varying perspectives between staff who work in more of a regulatory framework and the developers and what products they're trying to produce. We've received, I think, nothing really but positive feedback on those events. It was a great opportunity for us to work and learn from them, hear things like Supervisor Gore mentioned earlier, which is more of that customer service value that we can provide. And that hit really well when that's a shared effort between the county and the developers are both looking for that same thing. So 44 affordable units at Parkside at Saber City are online. We have, I believe the number is 17 lease agreements already in place and working on the rest of those. So a major accomplishment for us in our partnership with Housing Trust Placer to get those units constructed and occupied. A CHARTER REVIEW. WE HAVEN'T FULLY FINISHED THE CHARTER REVIEW PROCESS, BUT I THOUGHT IT WAS IMPORTANT TO NOTE THE AMOUNT OF WORK THAT OUR OFFICE, BEN MILLS, A PRINCIPAL MANAGEMENT ANALYST, AND CLAYTON COOK, ASSISTANT COUNTY COUNCIL, REALLY PUT INTO THAT CHARTER REVIEW PROCESS AND CONDUCTING ALL THE VARIOUS MEETINGS, DOING A LOT OF RESEARCH, AND WE'LL BE CONCLUDING THAT PROCESS WITH YOUR BOARD IN THE COMING MONTHS. Some more accomplishments on our specific plan administration side, the completion of the judicial validation process for the enhanced infrastructure financing district in partnership with county council's office. So a very big effort to create that EIFD to help support future projects in the Sunset area, including infrastructure, housing, and other programs as well. On the east side of the county, we've completed the renewal of the North Lake Tahoe Tourism Business Improvement District with a 10-year agreement and then a 10-year memorandum of understanding with the North Tahoe Community Alliance for the recommendation of TOT, transit and occupancy tax, in eastern Placer County. So some of our emerging issues and priorities, a countywide strategic plan is one of our top priorities this year. So far we have engaged Raftelis, who is our consultant that will help us through that process. We are presenting kind of the timeline and the objectives of that planning process with the department heads in our June, I believe it's June 4th department head meeting. WE ARE SCHEDULING MEETINGS WITH EACH OF YOUR SUPERVISORS AND WITH OUR DEPARTMENT HEADS INDEPENDENTLY OF OUR MAJOR KICKOFF MEETING. THE GOALS AROUND THAT ARE TO BUILD UPON THE EIGHT CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS THAT THE BOARD HAD ADOPTED PREVIOUSLY AND REALLY WORK TO DEFINE WHAT what success looks like for Placer County in the next three to five years in meeting those critical success factors. My hope and outcome when we get to the slide on performance measures is really to develop more performance measures and how we are doing as a county department in delivering on boards priorities. Another merging issue is the FEMA and federal landscape unpredictability as it relates to disaster support and funding. Obviously with changes at the national level, those programs become a little bit questionable on how much reimbursement there may be or what programs will exist or even what staffing at the federal level will be here to support us if and when we need that. um the local agency formation commission work program specifically the north tahoe incorporation effort so the work plan is from lafco as presented is is pretty robust the county executive office is not the only office that has to participate in those programs so we have staff like jenna martin and shauna purvines in my office that work directly with lafco on some of these efforts but other offices like the auditor controller's office and the property tax apportionments is very active in a lot of these same conversations. So as that work plan starts to roll out in the new fiscal year, we could see some additional impacts to staff capacity and their workloads individually.

I interrupt because I'm just thinking about it, Daniel. Did they hire a new LACO person to run the organization? No. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

Still working on it.

AND THEN MORE EMERGING ISSUES AND PRIORITIES. I'M GOING TO GO WITH THE BOTTOM ONE FIRST. SUPPORTING ECONOMIC INITIATIVES AND PROJECTS WHICH SUPPORT IDENTIFIED NEEDS FOR REVITALIZATION OF TOWN CENTERS. SO THIS IS A MAJOR INITIATIVE WITH STEPHANIE HOLLOWAY AND OUR TAHOE TEAM WHO ARE LOOKING FOR OPPORTUNITIES OF COLLABORATION AND PARTNERSHIP WITH NCTA, THE DOWNTOWN ASSOCIATIONS, AND REALLY LOOKING TO HELP SUPPORT REVITALIZATION UP THERE. FINALLY, LASTLY, CONTINUE STRENGTHENING CAPITAL PLANNING BUDGETING AND LONG-TERM FISCAL STABILITY. THIS ONE IS, YOU KNOW, WE ARE IN WHAT I CONSIDER A VERY FORTUNATE FINANCIAL POSITION AS A COUNTY, DUE IN PART TO THE VERY APPROPRIATE BOARD DIRECTED POLICIES ON BUDGET AND FINANCIAL AREAS. FOLLOWING THOSE, WE HAVE BEEN ABLE TO CONTINUOUSLY SUBMIT BALANCED BUDGETS TO YOUR BOARD FOR CONSIDERATION. WE'VE LIMITED THE USE OF RESERVES FOR ONE TIME AND CAPITAL USES AND MAINTAIN OUR OVERFUNDED STATUS WITH POST-EMPLOYMENT RETIREE HEALTH BENEFITS. SO THOSE ARE SOME VERY POSITIVE THINGS THAT WE HAVE. CONTINUING TO SUPPORT THOSE BOARD POLICIES AND EXERCISING SOME FISCAL CONSTRAINT STRUCTURE doing strategic planning for priority capital infrastructure projects. That helps keep Placer County able and in a good position to respond to any unknown negative economic impacts that may be out there. We talked about HR1 yesterday. That would be one of those scenarios as well. And then any downturn in the economy. Again, I'll just double down on that a little bit. IN THE SACRAMENTO BEE YESTERDAY WITH TWO ARTICLES RELATED TO TWO OF OUR NEIGHBORING JURISDICTIONS, THE CITY OF SACRAMENTO AND YOLO COUNTY WHO ARE FACING STAFFING CUTS, BOTH OF VACANT POSITIONS AND FUNDED POSITIONS DUE TO THEIR BUDGET CONSTRAINTS AS WELL. HAD THE OPPORTUNITY LAST NIGHT TO TALK TO THE CEO FOR YOLO COUNTY AND SACRAMENTO COUNTY AS WELL. SO ALL AROUND US THERE ARE KNOWN IMPACTS THAT ARE VERY HEAVY I just want to just reiterate that your board's policies have put us in a very good position for now. We just need to maintain that fiscal constraint as we go into the future. So this is what I was mentioning about performance measurements. Not the most robust for us, but our social media presence has been increasing year over year. It's a great opportunity that we use, not only out of our public information office, but all the departments as well. AND REALLY PROMOTING THE THINGS THAT WE DO VERY WELL. PROMOTING OUR EVENTS TO GENERATE INTEREST FROM THE COMMUNITY. THE OUTREACH, FOR EXAMPLE, ON THE 175TH EVENT WAS OUTSTANDING. I GOT THE OPPORTUNITY LAST SATURDAY TO GO TO ONE OF THE TOURS. SAW DEXTER THERE. BUT IT WAS PACKED. THERE WERE 20 SOME ODD PEOPLE IN EACH OF THE TWO TOUR GROUPS AT THAT TIME SLOT. IT HAD BEEN FULL PRETTY MUCH ALL DAY AS WELL. HATS OFF TO OUR PUBLIC INFORMATION GROUP FOR PROMOTING THAT AND OF COURSE TO OUR MUSEUM STAFF AND OUR DOCENTS FOR BEING THERE AND CONDUCTING THOSE TOURS. BUT YOU CAN SEE EVEN IN THE OPEN JOB APPLICATIONS OR JOB POSITIONS WE DO A LOT AND WE'RE DOING EVEN MORE ON LINKEDIN FOR EXAMPLE. SO REALLY JUST ENHANCING OUR SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE AND GETTING OUR WORD OUT ABOUT HOW WONDERFUL IT IS TO WORK, LIVE AND PLAY IN PLACER COUNTY. And now I'm going to turn it back over to Karen, who will take you through the finances.

Thank you, Daniel. Which one? All right, now I would like to share with you the overview of the financial details for the CO department's submitted budget for fiscal year 26-27. The first slide is the expenditures. So for the County Executive Office Department, total expenditure is $411 million. The largest expense here is other financing uses at $278 million. And those are the general fund transfers that include all major transfers from the general fund to other operating funds such as public safety, health and human services, and general fund contributions to facilities and infrastructure. The second large category is services and supplies at 80.7 million. And this category includes Placer County Indigent Defense Program contracts. Next category is salaries and employee benefits at 21 million, and we also have other charges at 19 million, and other charges include debt service and cost allocation plan, cost plan allocation. Appropriation for contingencies is 6.9 million, and this is funding for unbudgeted emergency. The next slide is the revenue, and our department's submitted revenue is budgeted at 484 million. The CEO cost centers include most general fund discretionary revenue sources, such as property taxes, sales taxes, and transient occupancy taxes that get recognized in the general fund. Taxes are the largest revenue category here, and the amount is budgeted at $354 million. Our next largest category is non-operating revenues at 39.2 million and that mainly consists of interest earnings and cost allocation. The next category is other financing sources 36.5 million and this category includes operating transfers in and contributions from other funds. And charges for services are $36.3 million, and they are primarily made up of internal service fund proceeds and special revenue funds.

Oh, can I go back?

All right, this slide highlights general fund and total submitted budget is 330 million with 399 million in revenue. Expenses increased by 13.8 million, mainly from larger general fund contributions to public safety. And revenue is increased by 21.5 million, primarily due to increases in property taxes that include the 5% assumed growth in the tax assessment. Now, I would like to note that the surplus in the CEO general fund comes from discretionary county revenue sources, as I mentioned in one of the previous slides, property taxes, sales taxes, transient occupancy taxes, and other various taxes. So while it might seem that the CEO has a large surplus, the surplus is used to cover shortfalls in other county departments. So if you examine other departments, they might show deficit, but overall the county budget is balanced. CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE OPEN SPACE FUND ACCUMULATE UNTIL THE PROPERTY IS PURCHASED AND EXPENSES IN THE OPEN SPACE FUND WILL BE RECOGNIZED AS THEY ARE RECORDED. FOR BUDGET YEAR 26-27 THE GENERAL FUND IS CONTRIBUTING 1.5 MILLION TO THE OPEN SPACE FUND AND THERE IS NO CHANGE FROM PREVIOUS FISCAL YEAR. I would like to note that in fiscal year 25-26 there was a budget amendment and subsequent expenditure of 2.8 million for the Raccoon Creek acquisition to the conservation of approximately 4,200 acres. This is not reflected on this chart as the amounts for 25-26 show the adopted budget and they do not reflect budget amendments made during the year. But we wanted to point out the use of these funds to preserve open space. The Tahoe Fund's primary revenue source is the transient occupancy tax generated in the Tahoe region and budgeted at 17.1 million for fiscal year 26-27 and there is no change from fiscal year 25-26. Those taxes fund services and promote tourism including the contract with North Tahoe Community Alliance and projects in the Tahoe area. Budgeted expenses are $17.5 million, and they are higher than revenue due to the use of fund balances that have been specifically approved by your board for projects in the Tahoe area. Budgeted expenses fell from last year to reflect updated estimates for previously approved internal transfers. Community Revitalization Fund provides financial assistance for home ownership programs, housing, and public service programs benefiting low to moderate income households and communities. Budgeted revenues total 2.9 million and expenses are 4.1 million and they are higher than revenues due to the use of previously received funds, primarily workforce housing preservation program. For the fiscal year 26-27 budget, the County Executive Office Department includes 100 funded allocations, and that includes the Board of Supervisors contract staff. That is a net decrease of 15 positions over the previous fiscal year, and that is because 17 positions moved from CEO to Department of General Services, and two positions were added to ceo and that is one management analyst senior to support the finance and budget team and one management analyst to support the specific plan administration team so this concludes my part of the presentation i'm happy to answer any questions thank you questions or comments supervisor oh no uh supervisor gore

Thank you, appreciate it. I think sometimes we forget just how much the CEO's office has underneath you, Daniel, and really appreciate the hard work you and your team do. I just wanna say how much I appreciate you and our budget team and all the department heads making sure that we have a regular balanced budget and we are not, utilizing revenues we don't carry forward revenues we have any excesses we use for one-time dollars only and we've done a really good job of budgeting it really matters that we have been smart fiscally and as I think about the article I read and I don't know if it was city or county 46 jobs they have to cut And we are not in that place. And I know that everybody wants more and more, and it'd be nice to have more of this and nice to have more of that, but we are not cutting positions. And that has a lot to do with our growth, and that is really important. We have to manage that well. But I'm just, I really want to say thank you for the hard work. because the work you've been doing the last number of years to keep us in the black really, really matters, especially as we watch the economy slow down. And it's not slowing down here, per se, but it is a little bit, and so we really do have to continue to keep our eye on the ball, and I just appreciate the hard work, thank you.

Other questions, comments?

Supervisor Gustafson? I would ditto that. I appreciate very much all the work that goes into bringing this forward to the board and what great financial position we're in. I know it's difficult to have to say no. But this is what we get when we do say no to some of those requests, or at least try to delay until we're certain that we have those revenues. And it takes patience on all our parts. Sometimes we hear that, Daniel, and I know you hear it all the time, that we all want more and can do better if we just had more. but we're in a really good position because we have towed that line and I really appreciate it. Earlier at lunch I had the chance to talk a little bit about our vacancy factor and I think Daniel Vick was expressing to me that actually our vacancies are some of the lowest we've seen in many years And I think we forget that we look at each department and we hear about vacancies, but overall as a county, those vacancies are down. And I think that's really important for us to understand that there are problem areas, but there's also a lot of good news here and we've got to keep working on it. There's no doubt we've got to keep addressing those problem areas, but I really appreciate the work that's gone into this. So thank you.

Supervisor Dimitri.

I just wanted to say thank you to your staff for putting all this together. For the last two days, you've made it really easy to get through it, so thank you.

Supervisor Jones?

I'll add my thanks also. Thanks, Daniel. Run a good shop, and you have good people working for you. Thank you all. And thank you guys back there. I see you. Your silent group back there that works very hard. Everybody.

I agree. You have a great team and really appreciate the work that you do to manage a very large county and a lot of employees. It doesn't go unnoticed. And just in reference to yesterday and today, I really liked the format. I thought that Everyone having the same format was super helpful and I knew what to expect from each department and everyone was generally on time and did a really good job. And so shout out to everyone who was able to keep things on task. So yeah, great work. That looks like that's all we have on our end. So I guess we'll kick it back to you for wrap up.

Oh, I'm sorry. We recommend asking for any public comment.

Yes, I was just going to wait for him to wrap up. Yes, then I will do public comment.

Thank you, Supervisor. You know, I wrote a closing statement last night, but that was before all the nice comments echoed virtually exactly what I was going to say to this. I just, you know, I thought that I would mention that over the past two days, you've heard about many of the significant accomplishments from our departments and some of the upcoming challenges and priorities that they're facing for future budget periods. I just kind of wanted to echo and thought it was worth noting that All of the accomplishments that you've heard over the past two days have been achieved while maintaining those prudent budget policies throughout the county. So I did have a few budget policies that I think are major achievements for your board and worth highlighting to close out today. The first one being We've successfully maintained a general reserve or a rainy day fund in our general fund at 16.6% of general fund expenditures and public safety fund expenditures combined. That reserve today sits roughly at $91 million and it's available in the event of any unexpected economic downturns or unplanned budget shortfalls. Your board has also fully funded our retiree health and dental obligations, also known as OPEB. What that does is it significantly reduces our required contributions moving forward in future budget periods for that plan. So more opportunities to do other things with those resources. We've also reserved additional funds above our annual required contributions to our pension obligations via transfers to our Section 115 trust fund. The balance in that trust fund is likely to exceed $100 million at the end of this fiscal year and will provide stability in our required contributions to pensions in those periods of economic uncertainty. And then finally you know we talked a lot about capital projects and road projects over the past two days. I thought it was worth highlighting that you know your board has historically maintained reserves in the general fund to make direct contributions. to capital facility and infrastructure projects and what that does is it effectively minimizes the county's long-term obligations moving forward as well so in short just having sound fiscal policies combined with conservative long-term projections has given the flexibility in these budget cycles to match identified resources with some of these priorities that you've heard about over the past few days. So kudos to your board as well, I would say. Lastly today, I wanted to just kind of echo and give a huge shout out and thank you to our budget team. This is a very lean team of four analysts, all that have been present here for the past two days. led by Barbara McAllister, who's done a fantastic job putting forward this presentation over the past two days as well. But this team is a very small team that does a roughly $1.7 billion countywide budget annually and works virtually the entire year to construct that budget. So just wanted to make sure they got the recognition from me, because usually I'm just trying to stick to the facts and get under my 30 minutes as quick as possible. So I did want to highlight a couple things that they're working on in the background for your board. The team did redesign our quarterly report this year to read more like a management report. The goal of providing better transparency to your board and public and make it more of a readable management report and not just very fiscal and accounting sounding. In the background, they're also developing the budget transparency web portal that I know is of interest of the board that will ultimately provide the public with easier to access budget information and greater flexibility on how they can access and manipulate the financial data and the budget. And then finally, I wanted to just say once again, this team has been awarded the Distinguished Budget Presentation Award from the Government Finance Officers Association for the fiscal year 25-26 budget. So small team doing great things for the county. But thanks again to your board for hanging in there with us for two full days of budget presentations. And as always, we're happy to take any final thoughts or questions.

Great, thank you. Any other questions or comments? I don't see any from us. So with that, I will open up public comment. Is there anyone here in the chambers who would like to make a public comment?

Gary McDonald, Executive Director of Stand Up Placer. THIS IS REALLY AN AMAZING COUNTY. I'VE LIVED IN A LOT OF DIFFERENT STATES, AND THE PEOPLE THAT ARE IN FRONT OF ME ARE JUST INCREDIBLE PEOPLE, THE BOARD CHAIR, THE BOARD, DANIEL CHATNEY, THE TEAM HERE AND THE TEAM BEHIND ME. Yesterday, I shared with you a very bad Sunday, which involved Placer County residents who were victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and sex trafficking. Sadly, these traumatic events are not uncommon in Placer County. I was made aware of these incidents because we were notified by law enforcement and Stand Up Placer responded by dispatching our emergency response teams. We are the only Placer County-based domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking center with a 40-bed safe house that has a 24-7 crisis line that responds to these acts of violence. Last year we received nearly 11,000 calls on our hotline It is our job and that is what we do. But the need is rising exponentially and we need additional funding. I think with the downturn in the economy, things are going to get worse. There's going to be more tension in the families and more abuse and more domestic violence. Yesterday, I respectfully requested 500,000 annual funding. To be honest, I would be open to any type of funding because if we're not funded, worst case scenario, we run the risk of failure and DHHS may need to take over this responsibility. If not funded minimally, we fail the Placer County residents who suffer from these unspeakable traumas because we're not able to meet the need. If funded, we will better serve the critical needs of victimized residents of Placer County and provide them with safety and an opportunity to restart their lives and thrive. Thank you again for your good service to the county and to its residents and the kind consideration of my request. Thank you.

Thanks, Gary.

Good afternoon, Veronica Blake, CEO of Placer Community Foundation. Like Gary, I want to acknowledge all the incredible work by the divisions. I've sat here for the last two days and it's just impressive to see how your staff is using our tax dollars and how they are making funding available to meet the needs of our residents. Some things I'd love for you to consider in the budget. One is some cleanup money. About a million and a half dollars is needed to clean up property right here in the government center that's in contract with EAH so affordable housing can get built. There's infrastructure and staffing that could be put together to support a revolving loan fund that could support affordable housing financing. we'd love to see a commitment to use funds from the sunset eifd and any other eifd that could be created to support affordable housing and then each year if there are funds that aren't spent in the departments and they're not earmarked for multi-year commitments when they're allowed by a law wouldn't we be able to use that to meet affordability needs meet the gaps and then just my last comment is you know it was about this time last year actually June of last year that you approved an action plan to build 1,300 units in the next five years that were affordable and I based on your staff recommendations and the reports that we've read we see that we need about 10 to 15 million dollars annually to attract the remaining dollars that are needed to finance affordable housing and we'd love to see an allocation in your budget for that thanks so much for letting us comment

thanks veronica hi uh jennifer uh with just placer county um i had the privilege to sit here the last two days to listen to all the departments and a few things just struck me one was the assessor's um talk and how he brought up prop 19 and how we're at a loss for it i think it was 2.4 billion dollars And I think it would be nice if they could come in at some point to our regular scheduled meetings and do a presentation on that and what money's been lost to our county, what that amount money goes to so we can understand why there isn't extra money around possibly also having every department or every county bring this accounting up and then send a bill basically to the state since they are not funding the money that's supposed to be coming to all the counties in California if we could get a bunch of different counties to show what's owed to them as well. That would be great. I just found it interesting. Also, again, the PRAs, I think if you could get a interdepartment person with one of the many positions not filled at this time to go across between the sheriffs and the county council to do a lot of prep work and then have the final people look at the stuff so we're not taking people away from our lawsuits and taking sheriffs away from the the work they need to do to keep our county safe. And then also the talk of the radio infrastructure for across all departments for fire is really crucial because most deaths for a fireman is because the communication was not received properly. And we could keep our firefighters much safer with that. And I hope this radio infrastructure will cross over to the smaller fire departments as well, because CAL FIRE AND OUR SMALLER FIRE DEPARTMENTS DO WORK TOGETHER AND WE MEET AT THE SAME PLACES TO DO THE SAME WORK AND SO TO HAVE THAT CROSS COMMUNICATION TO GO ACROSS FOR EVERYBODY AND REALLY ACROSS THE WHOLE EMS SERVICE THROUGH THE WHOLE AREA OF THE COUNTY I THINK IS REALLY CRITICAL TO HELP EVERYBODY HERE. SO THANK YOU.

Thank you. Is there anyone else here who wants to make a public comment? Looks like maybe there's one online.

There is one online, Chair. Caller, go ahead and unmute your mic and give your comments. Oh, hello. This is Beth Gonzalez from people of faith together. I'm sorry you can't see my face. That's OK. I just want to reiterate what Veronica Blake talked about and that is the need to spend money on affordable housing. I'm not going to even think that I could possibly tell you where you're getting the money you can get the money from. But I know that you all have ideas and I'm hoping that you will work together. I know that you will work together to provide funding for affordable housing which is 14 to 15 million dollars a year. as just part of a contribution to other funding for affordable housing. So thank you for your work and listening to all these reports is simply amazing. Thank you to all the people who work in and with Placer County.

Thanks, Beth. Anyone else? Okay, with that, we will adjourn our meeting to our next special meeting, which will be May 11th, 2026 in Tahoe. Thanks for hanging in there with us.