Executive Committee - Regular Meeting

If the clerk could please call the roll.

Michelle Drobnik. Here. Brian Ernst.

Here.

Paula Hodak. Here. Larry Palachuk. Here. And Jordan Spacek. Here. All are present.

Okay, first agenda item, public comment and communications. We'll start with public comment. We have the sheet up here, Waldemar Madsen. State your name and where you live, please.

It was kind of my attention that we are in a contract with flock safety cameras that 3 people 2 on this 1 on this committee. 1, that's no longer on this on this committee, or in this county board, Larry and Alan brought. To the executive committee on August 15, 2024, the reallocation of of the budget. Um, for Fox safety cameras, however, it's not on the agenda that that's what the reallocation was for. Uh, Robert Hahn also participated in this. Um, as a few days ago now, Monday. Counties across Wisconsin discovered that flocks cameras are selling our information to other companies and I'm not okay with my information being sold to other company in the interest of public safety. That's what governments have said a bunch of times to, in the interest of public safety, let's violate somebody's Second Amendment rights. Let's make brawls. Let's surveil our people. I didn't give you consent, Sheriff Robert Hahn, to surveil me or get my data sent. Well, you do a lot of things all the time, Mr. Palachuk, and nobody calls you out of order. So... Well, it is up to me. We give you consent.

You don't give us consent.

That's in the Constitution. And our rights are being violated with these flaw cameras. And you are using them in the interest of public safety. But when my fiance and her son get kidnapped from here, the sheriff, I have the recording, tells me because I don't like them, I don't get to use them. They didn't use them. You want to use them for public safety? Then use them for everybody, not just the people that like them. Thank you. I'll be back on Tuesday.

Okay. Anybody else? Baltimore was the only one that signed up, but I'll give anybody else an opportunity that would like it. I also failed to mention two minutes for something that is not on the agenda. Three minutes for an agenda item. I will now open it up to anybody online, star six, if you care to make public comment. Okay. Hearing none. Do we have any communications from committee members? Okay, hearing none, next item, number two, meeting minutes, August 13th, 2026. Looking for a motion to approve.

I'll make a motion.

Motion by Grombeck, second by Hodek. Any discussion? Okay, call for a vote. All those in favor of approval, signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Those against, nay. Motion carried. Item three, treasurer's report. Renee.

Good morning. Both of the financial report and the treasurer's report were sent out a little bit later than normal, so I'm not sure if everyone had an opportunity to look at them. A couple things I would point out, which you'll also see on the cash part of Carrie and Nick's presentation, is the fact that we are a little bit higher in our spending, and I just wanted to point out that that actually is the same as last year, but just a couple of months ahead of time. So things that were paid out last year in, say, October timeframe have been paid out in August. Health and Human Services has been a little bit quicker this year, and also American Asphalt's large bill for highway got paid earlier than it did last year. So just kind of wanted to call your attention to that in case you're wondering why it looks lower than at this time last year.

So at this time, there's no cause for concern.

No.

And we've had that conversation, and we can either talk about it now or when we go through the executive summary, but since you brought it up, just one thing. So as Renee stated, we look at our cash in our account every month, all the time. We're watching, obviously, pay bills. So it's the cash flow issue. It's not... Are we overspending, underspending, doing anything like that? It's just when bills are coming due. And like Renee said, our American asphalt bill is $2 million. Well, we're used to paying that in two months, not yesterday or a month ago. So the timing is more of the... We're watching it, right? So we talked about some future strategies if this is going to continue. And a lot of it comes out of the new way of paying bills, right? We were always, write a check. It takes a month. They have to send it to the person. That takes time and mail. Then it goes to their office and they have to take it to the bank and that takes time. So not only did we get bills later, we also had an opportunity process that took a lot of time. Now we're getting email bills. So that immediately happens. And then they have ACH. And so we put it in the system and it goes, here's your money and it takes it out of ours. So now we've taken a two month process down to two weeks or three weeks. So what we're looking at is future strategies of saying, when should our cash be at what levels? And one of the ways we're looking at it right now, When we do all of our construction, so really the big one, American asphalt, anything with construction, we're actually using our own cash. So it's like saying, hey, I want to do a home improvement project and I'm going to earn all my emergency fund. And then at the end of the project, I'm going to go to the bank and say, cool, I used $50,000. I need to put that back in my pocket to be able to have an emergency fund. So. the last three, four years, we've said, okay, we're going to do $3 million in projects. We had $14 million in the bank, Ebb and Flow. And the reason we had a lot of that money sitting there, and it's not extra, the money sitting there is our, we had ARPA funding. We had some project funding that, you know, TJ has a project that takes him a year to do. We had Other PILT payment money that we had sitting there and then we bought another truck. Well, that's a half a million dollars that goes out and no longer is just sitting there to be using as cash. So we need to decide in the future, you know, this year we did it again, right? We spent $3 million of our own cash and then we borrow at the end of the year to replenish it. So at the end of the year, we look normal again. Because we did $3 million of borrowed projects, but we use cash now we're paying ourselves back. In the future, instead of waiting till December to get that $3 million to make our cash whole, we may want to consider getting it in July or August when those big, big bills come due. and then we're just made whole earlier. The only negative with that is, and the reason we've done it the way we did, was we saved the interest payment, right? Because if you take the money in June, July, August, you now have to pay all the interest until we collect taxes in the January, February, where if we wait till December, we can pay it back in February, March, because we've gotten... the money we have the money there we're not going to spend it until a year so it's just a matter of when not anything different we're not short on money we're not it's just we've made a conscious decision to do big projects but we were using our own cash all those cash influxes of the last five years are not we've done all the projects the arpa money we did the soberg we did bathroom, whatever the projects were, the, the PILT money. We had a couple other pools of dollars that we had to, were earmarked, but you can use it as cash. So any questions on the discussions we've been having on cash and how it sits there?

This is probably for discussion later, but have you looked at what the cost of the interest is by spending it early or taking the loan proceeds early versus taking something out of a CD and paying the penalty?

Yeah, we have not. So that's the other part is we have like four some million dollars in CDs. And so we could just say instead of making interest on that, we could go back to doing what we were doing, using cash early, paying ourselves back. So the analysis we still have to do is say we take the $3 million in June. You have six months worth of, say, 5% interest. Really, that's 2.5% on that money. So that's an easy math. You would multiply that $3 million by two and a half. However, your CD might be making 4% for the whole year. So now if you take that early and use that cash and you're not gaining interest, you would lose six months of that interest or about 2%. There's a difference. So you had a 2.5% cost of interest, but you're losing 2%. It's a half a percent gain. So, again, we'll do all that analysis next year when we get closer to, is this something we have to consider? Is the timing of when we pay ourselves back?

We might want to just not do anything. Right. Dwindle our cash down.

And just do what we've been doing.

But if we need it in an emergency, we can always cash some of the CDs.

Yeah, it's a lot of school.

There's a lot to look at. We don't have to get into details.

Yep, we don't need the details today. But I just want you guys to be aware that's stuff we talk about weekly and just we do analysis on it. We're nowhere near like, oh, my gosh, we have to go get our money tomorrow. We know, we sat down and said, okay, next month we're getting our general AIDS payment. We're starting tax collection in two months. We're going to have our loans coming in November, December, like normal. We know what's coming for the big ones. We know health and human services. We look at all that. So just a process. It's just we're now cutting it closer than we used to because we don't have that big number sitting there. Other things that have affected this year are high cost placements have been a little higher than normal at this point of the year. Our forestry stumpage is lower than it was the prior year. It's not out of line. We're okay there. It's just we didn't have an excess of a half a million dollars early. So it's, again, timing on when cash comes. We don't get a consistent paycheck, right? We get Money here, money there, and it jumps. And when the bills come due, the bills come due.

Okay. Anything else for your monthly report, Renee?

Not monthly reports.

Okay. We'll move on to B, delinquent taxes and in REM. I don't know if you submitted a sheet for our packet and I didn't get one.

I did not because the sheet is no longer valid because we went to court on August 18th. gavel dropped we have 15 parcels five that had homes on them and we went and visited them in person evan nick and deputy came with and there are three in the city of phillips one in prentice and one out in brantwood and then the rest is vacant land so we did have one come in and pay off already who As long as they do it before the auction, they are good to go. So we are down to 14. And that was a vacant land parcel. So we are moving forward. They have until September 25th to remove all personal items and the auction will be shortly thereafter in October.

We did go up for CMA, the certified market analysis. So that'll set the first bids on those properties because you have to do it at a market value. After that, if they don't sell, we then come back to the committee to get approval of what the next bids or the starting values would be. So that's the process there with the auction. Do you want to talk of those 15 properties? Some of those weren't necessarily the normal properties.

process? There were some extras?

No.

Yes. So a couple of those were sliver parcels, older parcels that the county had. Five of them were older. Like one, for example, came up, apparently the water level lowered and there's an island, but it's really not an island. It's more like a moving bog. But the assessors put a parcel on it and a value. So that's one of them. There are three properties in the town of Knox that have been there for quite some time. Buildings are falling down. We are looking to hopefully sell those three parcels together soon. as one unit. The bids went out, and Birchland Realty had come in with the lowest bid, so they are doing the CMAs, which are also due on the 25th of September, and we'll go from there.

I didn't know there was talk about evictions, at least on one parcel. Correct. Do you have any update on that?

Well, that's why we went in person. The statute says certified mail is required. However, the last certified mail letting them know that we were going to be taking the properties. Several of them were coming back as unclaimed. So those that had the homes on, we went personally and spoke with the one individual who was home. The others didn't have anyone there. One we couldn't get to, couldn't walk through to. So there was one owner that was home and looked right at me and said, you told me I have three weeks. And I said, you are correct. You have three weeks to remove your personal items.

So far so good then. Apparently that person is aware and is attempting to do what he needs to do.

We are still working with the legal counsel to start the paperwork if they were not to be out by that date so that we're not another month behind. So they'll have everything ready if we get to that date and knock on the door and there's still someone there.

Okay. Does anybody have any questions for Renee regarding NREM and delinquent taxes? Thank you. Okay, thank you, Renee. Number four, Register of Deeds. Sylvia, updates.

Good morning.

Good morning.

So, Register of Deeds is plugging along. We had our last three months have been the busiest months of the year so far. So, long fall days. My deputy is currently out on maternity leave right now through probably the week of Thanksgiving. So the real property lister will be helping out with telephone calls and people at the counter. So please be patient with me if I don't respond to you and as quick as you're used to. I have quite a bit more of a load here, which I'm a little rusty at because I haven't done some things for a while. But August was good for us. We recorded 353 documents. We issued 207 vital records and 59 applications for vital records. Just a quick note, new plat books are available in the Register of Deeds office now. We did receive the 2026 plat books, Price County plat books from Rockford Maps, and those were financed through the Land Information Council, but they are distributed through my office. So $40 for anybody who wants to purchase those. We also have the online link available. So if people want to purchase online, they can do that like they have in the past. And that's about all that I have, unless anybody has any questions.

Just curious about plot books. Do you sell quite a few of them? I mean, with internet and online? Has it decreased or are they still getting hard copies?

Yeah, the quantity has decreased. This time we only ordered 100 of them to see how they'll sell. Some people still like to hold that book in their hand. And then some places in the Chequamegon where it's no cell service, they like to have that book to kind of know where they're at too. Yeah, so we just ordered 100 of them. We'll see how they go. Bader's in the past has been a big seller of our plat books, so we have reached out to the two Chamber of Commerces, and we'll be reaching out to Bader's again to see if they want to sell those. Of course, it is an increased cost of when we produce them in-house, so that may be something that, you know, deters people from buying them as well. But, yeah, we'll see how it goes.

Okay. Anything else for the Register of Deeds? All right, thank you, Sylvia.

Just a note on that. Go ahead. Just a little trivia. The Fair Board used to sell plat books as a fundraiser, and they were huge. I mean, we had lots and lots and lots that they sold, so it's interesting that you only do 100. Of course, digital is now there. So I just thought that was just a little, I'm thinking, oh, boy, that takes me back.

All right. Number five, Office of Administration A, 2026 Monthly Financial Reports. Mr. Administrator.

So you should have your reports. If not, we'll be sharing them here in a second. So just like normal, we'll go through where we're at and how things are going. Over the past – there's a little panel in there. So we're 67% of the way through the year for our financials. Again, same as last month, there's nothing that's really jumping out. We've had no knock-on-wood major changes. major expenses that have been unplanned for or unapproved by the committees to go above their their normal spend. October you'll see probably the biggest jump just because it's a three payroll month and that always jumps everything ahead a little bit and then you fall back behind by the end of the year. Anything on the list that really jumps out, it's usually because there's a project going on. And so you end up being ahead at this time of year. Any questions about the general fund? Next, we have Health and Human Services. This one we've been talking about. So we're at 83% of the year for spend. We're at 85% of the year for collected revenues. So they're offsetting each other as they go. Usually this one's the opposite. Usually we're behind on this one. But again, the state has kind of updated how they're billing, which used to be about two months behind. Now we're about a month behind. A little less in some areas, but then we're also getting our money sooner from those activities. The high cost placements we've talked about several times. It's just been a year where we're having some higher high cost placements. Other funds, animal control, veterans library, airport. Again, nothing's jumping out. The airport, right now it's engineering costs. We're working on the T-hangers. That's one area that you guys approved a project. We're getting ready for that project through the engineering process. Highway projects. are wrapping up for the year, uh, where we seem to, to always have to cross our fingers is when will the snow or rain start that starts to freeze to the roads. Um, cause that's when you start to eat up on your budget at the end of the year or at the beginning of the year. Uh, we had a little bit of a rough start spring cause that was a lot of ice storms and the little, the little snows that you have to still send everybody out on. Price counting cash, we talked about this earlier. So as you can see, we're 25% less than last year at this time. So we're down to $7.4 million. Again, between high cost placements, the lower revenues compared to last year at this time for forestry, and again, they're not out of line. They're just one year we have a whole bunch of cash coming in, one year it's on pace. So Nothing you can do there. Health insurance seems to be doing good. So we're not going under for that. We're finished up a couple of projects, but the biggest ones are when you get those bills from like American Asphalt for the, you guys do or approve $3 million in spending. They, about 2 million of that a year is asphalt. So when that bill comes, it's a one big check we write. Well, now it's not a check. It's a direct deposit. Price County sales tax last month came in a little bit less than prior year. So in 2025, June, it was $136,710. In 2026, it was $127,821. We are still 2.7% ahead of last year, $17,000, with a total of $662,212 collected. This is, again, two months behind. So when we get it this month, you always backdate it for two months. That's when the activity happened. If you know how sales tax collection works in the state, it all depends on when somebody pays it. Some businesses are every month. Some are quarterly. Some are yearly. Some pay when they want to pay. So You never know when that number is going to jump or go back down a little. So we are in our July, August, September are usually some of our better months. But like if you look at last year, September, we had 97,000 where the previous four years were over 160, 159, 161. So it just depends on timing of, like I said, when people put their sales tax into the state and when the state distributes it. Price County stumpage, last year at this point we had 1.1 million. This year we have 672,000 collected or 40% less. So again, $440,000, that's a little bit of that cash flow discussion we had earlier. But the prior year we had 536. So every other year we seem to have high collection, regular collection. High-cost placements were $100,000 ahead of last year, so we had $400,000 in 2025, and if you look at 2024, we were only at $241,000, so we're $250,000 over two years ago, or $496,830 in 2026. That's not slowing down either. We have couple individuals that are monthly costs, high costs. Behavioral health, again, slightly above last year, but way below two years prior. So, we're at $227,697 this year. Last year, we were $20,000 less than that. That one has slowed down a little as in we don't have the high, high costs hitting the behavioral health or AODA. We still have a lot of cases and we're seeing a large caseload, but we've been able to manage some of those costs. Health insurance, we are at, in August, we are at $42,893 to the negative. But for the year, we're positive $250,000. So we started the year at negative $281,000. We're at negative $42,000. So we've had a positive $240,000 year. So that has helped us when we're looking at next year's health insurance. We knew this was going to be a slow process to get above But again, that's part of your cash too, because you're supporting $42,000 worth of the health insurance there. Any questions with the executive summary? No doom and gloom, just here's our average year.

Okay. Hearing no questions, comments, we'll move on to B, updates.

Nothing that I can think of unless you guys have questions in general. Next week, is it next week or two weeks, we'll be at the WCA conference, the yearly annual conference from our office. The other updates is we're working hard on getting the health insurance set up for next year. We have two health insurance products or products years, I guess we could call them. We have a HSA choice plan and then a premium plan. The HSA choice plan, right now it looks like the employee portion is going to go up $12 a paycheck, so $25 total to $175 a month. And then we have the premium plus plan, which is about Well, it's less than half of the deductible that our choice plan, our base plan is, and that one's going up, I believe, $100 a month. Other than that, for the county, we're not raising what we're collecting from each department by that much. I think we adjusted a little bit, but nothing major. So that has helped our budget process, which we'll talk about here shortly. We are also transitioning our voluntary benefits to the C&B product line. So right now we're with Tucker of Allstate. I think he's a Stevens Point area, but he is the one who manages our voluntary benefits. We're moving to C&B for our voluntary benefits. So we're getting rid of our current dental plan. We're going to Delta. And then our long-term short, well, we don't have short-term, long-term hospital and insurance, accident insurance. There's a couple other insurances that we do as voluntary benefits. They'll be changing over also to the CMB line. What that does is it's slightly cheaper on some of the products for employees that are doing the voluntary benefits. But overall, if you had the same package, it would be cheaper by very little, but equal or cheaper. And then the county saves on its costs that we pay C and B. So they give you credit towards their brokerage fees. And then we use a product for signing everybody up for our insurances and managing our insurances. And so we get a digital credit, or I think that's what it was called, some kind of credit on what we pay each year for that. So in the end, the county does save by transitioning over to one product line for our insurances. What else? That's about it. My office is dealing with a couple other, there's currently a couple claims against the county that are out through our insurance, but I'm the contact person for those, so we get updates on where they're at. I know everybody wants those things to go quickly, but the one claim is estimated to take 16 to 18 more months, and we're already eight months into it, and that's just how the court system works. It has nothing to do with how busy they are. It's just everybody has discovery, and everybody has things going. It takes time. So we do have two outstanding claims. That's all I got, unless there's questions.

Any questions for Mr. Trimner? Okay. Hearing none, we move to item six, clerk's office. A, updates. Meredith?

Good morning. So I am happy to say the 2026-27 county directories are in and they're like blue this year. And they're available in the clerk's office for all the towns and anybody who would like to pick one up. We ordered extra this year because we ran out last year and reordered. So that's a good sign. We'll be holding election training on October 23rd in this room for municipal clerks and their poll workers. And UW Extension will be assisting with that. So we're excited for that. We have a lot of people signed up, at least 40 so far. Yeah, people love live training. It's a great opportunity. And let's see, other than that, we are finishing up entering the partisan primary into WISVOTE, and we're working on the general election going forward, planning notices and ballot pickup. That is what I have for the clerk's office.

Any questions or comments from Meredith? Okay, thank you, Meredith. Number seven, 2027 budget. First one is a debt. I'm going to throw this back at you, Mr. Yeah.

So I think the best way to kind of approach this is we put on, on the agenda, the couple of things that we have to make decisions on or discuss, more. But in general, we should just go through the packet and then that'll lead us to those items. So you should have the first draft 2027 budget. It looks like the item that you see up on the screen. Thank Carrie. She puts all this together and does an awesome job, but getting ready for this meeting and, and first draft of our budget. So in this packet, what we do is we put together what I would call is an executive summary of the every line item we have in our budget, which is several hundreds of line items. So the way this first page works in the packet is you start at the very top, and this is our executive summary of the 2025 tax lobby. So it looks weird because it's like, well, why are we looking at 2025? The way that the years line up, it's the year of the tax. It's collected a year later. So we're always... years off on what it looks like. So if you go for the first line here where it says $13,564,311, that is our total tax levy that we collected last year or this year. That's what we put in the budget we've collected over this year. So everybody's paid this on their properties total of $13,564,311. What we have to do is find our base levy, our operational tax levy. That's what the state says you cannot increase. This is what you have to keep it as except for there's some exceptions. So we'll talk about those exceptions. The first thing you remove is your library service, which is what last year was $318,742. Then you'd remove any bridge and culvert aid, which last year we had zero bridge and culvert aid. And that was because we had a credit. So we had over collected two years prior We had a whole bunch of projects last year, but we used the money that was collected the year prior. You'll see we have a whole bunch of projects this year, and we're not having to collect the total amount because we still had available credit. And then in the future, you'll have a negative here. But this year, we don't have to subtract anything because you don't have to change anything. Our debt service was $5,370,078. So if you take all that out, our base operational tax levy is $7,875,491. That's the number we have to work with with our general operating. This is where, again, the state caps it and says, you can't do anything but just raise this number willy-nilly. Um, so the first thing you can do is we get a thing called net new construction number and we have a 0.9% net new construction. And what that number is, is you had new structures built in your community. It would have been two years ago. It's not, it's always behind, but you had new structures that would allow you to tax more, which would make your tax levy actually be zero. Right? So somebody built a new building. If we said no new tax levy, then you'd spread out all the taxes, that $7 million, to all those new buildings, and then everybody's taxes would go down slightly. What the state says is, okay, we'll give you those new buildings at your old rate of what you could do, so we're allowed to raise it by that new building so that everybody's taxes would stay exactly the same if you did nothing. So that's what net new construction allows you. So we now have a maximum operating total levy of $7,947,166. So $7,947,166. That's the number we have to work with to get our operational number. So in our 2027 budget assumptions, we had very few this year because we didn't do anything with the health insurance. We didn't have any major operational changes that you as a committee or as a full board had made any changes.

Paula raised her hand.

Oh, you're like half right. I'm just watching. I'm watching. It can get long and confusing, I guess. Yeah. So the only budget assumption for 2027 was an increase for our wage scale by 2%. That doesn't include steps, things like that. That still gets adjusted throughout the budget, but an additional 2% that we wanted to put in the budget for cost of our wage scale. That costs approximately $268,739. That would change slightly depending on where a person sits on the scale. This is the best. We pick a date. This is what it is, but if you have new employees, it's actually less.

There's a whole process we go through.

Adjustments recommended by our office. So what we do is, well, we know now we're at least going to be probably over budget by $268,739 because our operations most likely haven't changed. We need to come up with funding. However, we also collect from everybody throughout the county and say, hey, what's your budget assumptions? What as a department... are you seeing happen? And when we collect all those, we had $306,840 worth of, these things are just the cost of doing business. So we don't, that doesn't include a department saying, hey, we have a ton of records requests. We need a records request employee. Hey, we need another position to do GIS. Hey, we need a, or a position, it's not another, we don't have one. We need a new whatever it might be. We go through this and we look at it and say, what is necessary for operations? And it's $306,840. We do make a list of this. We did not include it at this time because there may be some other assumptions by the time we get to the board meeting. A lot of this came out of IT this year, and we've talked about that several times. And again, this is not picking on any IT or any department, but things like our radio. We had a 10-year contract was about $36,000 a year for maintenance on that radio. Our 10th year happened. So this next year, it's almost $80,000 a year for maintenance on those radios because that contract is up and you have to sign a new contract. Our Microsoft Office used to be like $1.50 a person per month. We're now paying like $5.50 a person per month for each program. That's not, that's just your email. That's not if you use Outlook. So again, IT is great and they go through and go, do you use that program? Because if you don't, we're not paying for it and we reduce the number of needs and everything. But either way, that gets expensive. So IT is probably your biggest thing this year. Anything that had to do with servers, anything that had to do program, everybody has cybersecurity costs that are going through the roof. So again, $306,840, that's fuel. There's other little things that may... other insurances to cover things. So that gets put in there as an increase. So now we're already at half a million dollars over our potential need for a budget. We have shared revenue, which is what the state gives you. It increases each year by the sales half of the sales tax number for the whole state, blah, blah, blah. So we get $24,000 more from the state. That's what they're saying. So overall, we get a big paycheck from the state of net new construction, which isn't really from the state. That's from our residents and from the state, $24,000. We have $100,000 that we have to work with. Positive is we didn't have a 17% increase in health insurance like most places. If we had a 17%, that's about $600,000. So we're lucky this year. That's not our issue. So the next one, the highlighted number, it's one of our solutions to our problems. So we're going to skip that for a second. And that's what our office has discussed to balance our budget. The next area is under Appendix B. So in your packet, we have appendixes. They're the nonprofit and community partners. It's an area we'll still need to discuss. The one, Northwest Regional Planning, went up by $96. You can discuss it, but it's just one of those that went up $96. The next two are requests by those nonprofit or community partners. So the Price County Fair Association has come forward and requested additional funding. And then the County Tourism, which is the Phillips Park Falls Chamber, worked together to cover woods, waters, and trails for the county. They've come forward. They've given us a plan of how they would how they are spending their money where they could use some additional funding. So we'll come back to that. But right now, those are the numbers that we have to talk about.

So

Even though it says balanced right here, that's because of one of our plans. Right now, we would technically be about $480,000 over budget. So if you watched all the headlines recently, everybody's having their budget meeting. Dunn County, $2.2 million over budget. Eau Claire County, $1.5 million over budget. I can't remember what Taylor County put out, but we're all in the same situation. A lot of it's health insurance, a lot of it's IT. We're about $500,000 over budget based on the minimum budget just getting by our operations. We're not increasing anything. We're not doing anything different. The next section, debt service appendix C. Last year we did $5,370,078 in short-term borrowing. That means we get the money, we spend the money. The only one that's not necessarily, well, there's a couple that are not short-term. They're still considered non-bondable, but they're short-term. We have... The highway has a three-year one, and now IT has the two-year one. So there are a couple that we run out a little longer, but for the most part, it's in and out. The first section, all the red ones, those are all the ones we retired. So they're retirement of debt payments. So we have a highway levy offset. So this one is they use it for maintenance on the roads or general maintenance covering things. That one's one of those where it's like you have to – If you don't renew the three-year one, then the department has to cut $300,000 in their operational costs. So highway would have to cut $300,000 on that. The next one is highway construction projects for one year. It was $2.63 million. Technically, it's the $3 million loan for the projects two years ago. Highway yellow equipment, that one was a half a million dollars here we retired. Highway levy, debt offset for trucks, and then other products we do, that's $757,000 a year we do. Squad cars, there's $191,848, and that's for three cars that we rotate. Children, youth, high-cost placements, that was $400,000. And then the bottom line is just your interest in the change in the amount of principal for interest. The next section is your Appendix D. That's what we're recommending for loans this year. So those have to go through. We have to discuss them, but the highway one is $3.1 million. The offset, that $300,000 that we just talked about, the payment's $101,984. So it's slightly more than the 105 that we retired. And again, that's because interest payments are higher this year. The debt service levy, and this is for the truck and additional construction, that's $799,000. The debt service for squad cars this year, squad cars went up quite a bit. So did salt trucks. I think our trucks went from 350 to 380. They went up 30. Yeah, so they went up $35,000 is my recollection of how much a dump truck went up this year.

Can I also make one comment?

Doubled in eight years.

The highway construction one, the $3 million, that should actually say 3-1, and it was already approved. The resolution was already approved. I just didn't put the resolution number because we approve it a year in advance.

Right, so you've already approved this one. where other ones it takes. So we'll be doing another one to say, next year, do you allow us to do more projects and borrow it for our 2028 levy? The debt service for insurances. So again, we'll come back to that because that's the... our way of balancing our budget. And then the last one is there's additional requests for debt. So we have in this packet, there's a list of projects, items, equipment, things like that that departments have requested to be considered in the next couple years. And when that happens, we look at it as debt. And so we did invite departments here to discuss if you guys have questions on specific needs. And this one kind of comes out of the highway has requested and has been forwarded by the committee for your consideration, a half a million dollars a year for additional equipment, Um, that doesn't mean you will recommend that for the full board to give all half a million dollars or any million, you know, any dollars towards equipment or other things. You can do a hybrid method. You could say, okay, highway needs a front loader. They've requested 300,000. We're willing to raise the levy by a half a million. So we're also going to get a new, uh, aging vehicle. which for the department aging, not an aging vehicle, a vehicle to transport individuals in our senior services area are aging. It may be go towards a body scanner. It may go towards something else. So you have to make that decision on what's priority if you want to raise above anything. The next one is library services. This is one we'll individually talk about once I'm done with this, but each year there needs to be a discussion on should it be, what percentage it should be statutorily. It can be as low as 70%. That's what it was put in this year. Last year we did 80%. The library manual or what do we call it? The library plan has the decision made each year that you guys choose anywhere up to 100%. And we have some numbers if needed on what you guys choose there. The next section is bridge and culvert aid. So the Town of Knox, Town Apprentice, Town Apprentice Wooster, all these are bridges and culverts that you approve throughout the year as a board to help collect and offset half of the cost to these municipalities. As you can see, there's one in red. So when the Town of Wooster did West Solberg Lake Road, we collected half above and beyond the amount that the project actually took because we did it prior to the completion of the project. And so there's actually quite a bit of bridging covered aid, but the cost to the levy or the collection that we need to do is only $10,409 because you can subtract out that $73,000, which was the collection from prior years. So if we were to do some of the things, so one of the things we're talking about is for debt, and we'll get into detail, but just so it sums it up is we're under a state statute 67.045B3. We're allowed to borrow for operational costs that include our insurances. So we're recommending that half a million dollars were over budget. We can borrow $480,000 for our property auto liability insurances. If we were to borrow for that, it would balance our budget. We would then take out debt that would be equal or close to equal as of what's on this page to what we did last year, which would leave you with a total levy of $13,734,138, or an additional $168,629 collected. $71,000 of that is the net new construction. The remainder is your debt, what it changed by slightly. So our operational levy goes up by 0.53%, which is that net new construction. Our library levy increase goes down a negative 0.28%, and that's because it went from 80% to 70%. That could also change. Even if you put it at 80%, it still slightly goes down year over year. Bridge and culvert aid went up by 0.08, which was the $10,000. The debt levy went up by just under 1% for a total increase of the levy of 1.24%, which is much, much lower than we've done in the last several years. I think last year was 6%. The year before was 13%. Our equalized value went up by... $132,333,500 or 5.29%, which then even though you're raising your total tax levy, your mill rate goes down by almost 21 cents. So you go from $5.43 down to $5.22 or negative 3.85%. So that's if we just do what Carrie and I, and actually the board chair sat down with us, and we just said, my role under the state statute is to say, here's a balanced budget. Now you guys get to put your fingerprints all over it. So I would start recommend, or the way it would be easiest to kind of go through it is one by one on these yellow items. And you can skip them, but if you understand them, and then we can come back to them. But in the end, we have to have something that we recommend. And it's not the final budget. We have three months left for that. So this one's just the first kick at the can, and you guys could make no... Recommendations, it goes to board just like this. It'll come back to you. You then have to make a final budget, goes to board. Board has to pick a number. Number goes to public hearing. Public hearing happens in November. So there's lots of steps here. This is not a final budget. Does anybody have questions or concerns about the debt proceeds for insurance, using for insurance to balance the budget? If we don't do this, we have to come up with an area in our operational budget to reduce by a half a million dollars. Cricket. Cricket. No concern. You can move to the next.

I guess I'll comment. I'm okay with it because we have to have that insurance.

We can cut insurance.

And I don't know where we cut.

And that's the cut.

We don't have to take out the loan, but the loan is the only way we could do it because we can't. Because it qualifies, I mean, it's a smoke and mirrors thing. Right. You can explain it better to me.

Yeah, so in the end, the levy, if they said there was no cap to our levy, we would come to you and say, hey, look, IT went up. Hey, look, this went up. We would raise the levy, cover those costs. It would be under your operational levy and in this case the state says you can't touch your operational levy So, but you can do debt. You don't have to tell anybody you just have to have resolutions You have a three-fourths vote and you can raise your levy So in the end, it's just the shell of which type of area you raised my biggest concern by doing this and Again, we had all these conversations with the board chair is what happens today if we say? Okay levy or the operational levy stays exactly like we recommend. Everything fills in, we give the raises, we fix everything on IT, and then we take all of our insurances out, do the loan for it. Every year I have to come to this board and get a three-fourths vote, the full board, a three-fourths vote to take out debt. So if you get a board that all of a sudden says, you know what, you know how I want to lower the levy? I don't like debt. We're not borrowing for anything or we're not borrowing for this. I then would have to take those insurances, because it's an operational cost, put it back in, or the county would. I guess I wouldn't. The county would have to put it back into their budget and come up with a half a million dollars of cuts. When we had these discussions in our office to say, how do we balance it? What does it look like? The areas that you're looking at is reducing things such as the number of deputies, the number of highway workers, the number of I mean, there's not a lot of areas where we have excess things happening. We have very few non-mandated services. You could reduce your airport, but now you have a 20-year payback period on any project you did. Well, in my 15 years, we've done millions of dollars worth of projects. So you would have to pay back the BOA if you said you're not funding your airport anymore. We have 4H. That's the last thing that's non-mandated in the area, and I'm already getting looks, right? That's not where you're going to, as a board, make a hard decision to say, we have to come up with a half a million dollars. So this is our first lifeline, right? We take out insurance as we put it here. between Carrie and I we've discussed we have about three more years of being able to do this between high cost placements, some operational costs at highway before we hit a wall of if the state doesn't change the way we look at our stuff, we have bigger issues than just borrowing for our, our insurances. So that's the insurance. My concern with the insurance is if a future board says no, you have to come up with that money back in your operational. And it might be, and it can't be that construction, right? It can't be, oh, instead of doing $3.1 million in construction, do $2.5 million because that's not operational. That's debt. So you still would have to pass three-fourths vote to get this insurance paid for every year going forward.

And it's the same along the same one is the 300 and the 400 that we're doing on highway because we did this years ago, the same, we needed operational money. So we took it from highway and put it into borrowing.

Mm-hmm.

And we did high-cost play since we did it. And we have some wiggle still on some of it, but there's not, like I said, we have a run. We have time for the state to figure out, because we're not the only county, right? I just said $2 million in Dunn County, 1.5 here. I've heard other counties, bigger numbers than that. And 85% of the problems are health insurance and IT, right? There's other issues, bigger projects for some, but that's what it comes down to. And if the state doesn't give you that availability and schools are seeing it, small municipalities, everybody's seeing it. Health insurance is kicking people's butt. So I heard no major, you know, this is a way to approach it for now. There can always be change. So if we go to nonprofit community partners, if you open up Appendix B on your packet, which is this list right here, That's page five. So Appendix B has the nonprofit and community partners. So just to reiterate, the only way we can give to partners like this is if they provide a contracted service. So you couldn't just say, I want to give a half a, or half a million, I want to give $50,000 to the local food pantry. That is not an acceptable because they don't have a contracted service. But if there was a place here, like a rehab center. We could give to the rehab center if they guarantee us five beds at any time for the service, or they charge us as we go. That's how this works. So it's not just a gift or a charitable donation. It's a service provided. So Friends of Fred Smith, they maintain our park, our statues. That's the role of what this comes from. Historical Society, they maintain historical records for us. They keep anything over 30 years. There's a timeline that we work with the Historical Society to do that. ITBEC is a service provider for tourism. It's now called the Northwest Tourism Board or something. There's 12 counties. 13 counties? Is that what that one is? We're always in 11 or 13 for consortiums. It's quite a few. We have, they meet, they do a ton of, they're the ones that do a lot of the maps and the trail guides or guides distribution for the region. So there are $3,000. Northwest Regional Planning Commission, that's the one that went up $96. They do a lot of things regionally for us. The two that we need to discuss are the Price County Fair Association. We currently allocate $20,000 to the fair itself. And then the County Tourism, which was $30,000. The Fair Association, I don't even remember what the actual number they requested was.

They did not give us the number.

Okay. I mean, they threw out like we would love. I think it was like 60,000, right? But it wasn't the request. It was just, hey, anything you give us, you know, kind of thing. Or maybe that was 60 was Phillips Chamber. I don't remember what the... Okay. I knew there was one of the two was 60. So do you as a committee want to recommend to the full board a different number for either one of these? Like I said, they both made, well, you guys heard the fair presentation. The chamber also did a presentation where they gave a list of here's how we're working on things.

Mr. Palachuk.

I was hoping with the sale of the fairgrounds that we could eventually cut that out entirely, our donation to the fair. And tourism, I would think we could cut some out of that rather than increasing it.

Just my thought.

Any other comments? Well, at this time, we should just leave it alone, maybe.

I would leave it as is for now. I don't think you need to cut away from the fair. There's a lot of programs that actually helps kids that are trying to do something. I would hate to see that taken away, honestly.

Thank you.

What's that? Name three where the funds can go. Name three where the funds can go. What helps them with the 4-H program, it teaches them about animals and whatnot and different things. It gives them responsibilities and outcomes of that. Jobs. I think there's a lot more coming out of there than a lot of other things that get money and funds. You run around the fair or go around the fair with all sorts of kids working at different booths and events. And I think cutting that would be a terrible idea, honestly.

I think one, if I may speak, I think one program that happens at the fair that I think is very beneficial for students is where they meet one-to-one with the judge and they have to describe and talk to the judge about their project, how it came to fruition, what it takes to build it or And the judge is very good. They listen to them, and then they ask them questions. You know, what did you do to do this? How did you do this? How did you fund this? Did you have somebody help you? And it's really... I think it's more beneficial for students that way than just going to the fair and seeing a sticker that says first place on theirs or second, because they have no idea what the judging criteria was. And here, having that one-on-one... I mean, I've been part of that with students. And you could just see they just grow from that. I've had some students who have stood in front of me that just blew me away by how they could assess their own projects. So if you have something to me, that's huge. We're helping these students become citizens, becoming community people, and growing with that as well.

And I would agree with that. I think it gives, especially the kids, good hands-on experience. Gets them out of the iPads and that kind of stuff. And we're losing that, I think, as a society. So I definitely would not recommend cutting it. Increase. Everybody always wants more. At this time, I'd say we leave it alone.

And I don't think cutting tourism is a good thing either. Tourism is unfortunately what's driving our area with a lot of people coming and going from here. It's a tough one to swallow, but it still is. Without tourism in the area, we have not a lot left, unfortunately.

It brings a lot of money, no doubt about it.

Yeah, it does. Yes, it does.

Okay. Do you want to move on to the next highlighted item?

The next area. So that was the Price County Fair. That was the County Tourism. We'll leave it as is. Again, we still have days of talking about this. The next one, I'm actually going to skip the debt one. For now, we'll move to the library. We'll bump back up. So library services this year, it's in there at 70%. You can see it's $280,866. The prior year, it was $318,742. So that's where the collection of the total levy would go down. We did put together the numbers if you left it at 80, but it's one thing you guys have to discuss. Do we have that chart?

It's at 70. Oh, Appendix E, perfect.

I was trying to open it somewhere else.

Appendix E right here.

So you can see which libraries collect what. If it goes to 80%, what it would look like. Got that. It would be 30% or $37,000 more. Is there a percentage you'd like to see? change to for a future budget? Do you want it left at 70? We do have the library here, or two of the libraries that represent the county. The ones up at the top here, the out-of-county ones, that is 70%. That says that in our library service. The libraries at the bottom, I did hear from all the libraries, they are requesting that it stays at 80 for their funding, but that again is up to you. as a committee or as a full board, but what would you like the board to see?

So it currently is 80.

This year we collected 80% at 300.

But on the budget you have it at 70. Correct. Okay.

And that one is a levy that's outside. So we don't have to cut somewhere else in the county. That one's just a separate collection. If you live in the city of Phillips Park Falls or the Ogema municipality, you do not pay this tax because you already are paying for a library in your community. So this is what... I guess this is new to Michelle. So how the library... collection works is, it's like the bridge in Culverday, but the library is above and beyond our levy. We have no, it doesn't affect our budget, it's just how much are you as a community, as the county representatives want to participate in the local libraries. So, for example, the city of Phillips has a budget that they put together for their portion, they pay, and then if users outside the city limits use it, they keep a circulation number, so how many books are checked out. That number then gets told to us and we can collect money based on the usage outside of those municipalities or outside the municipality. Because the local Phillips is already paying a portion of it, the outside, the circulation is what the outside municipalities pay towards it. So like I live in the town of Elk. If we come in and use it, they track that we use collection or we use the books. And my tax bill shows that I'm paying towards a library because that's this extra library fund or collection expenses. So I pay 80% of what it costs for me to use the library.

And it's not separated on your tax bill? No. It's within the county number. Okay.

I was trying to see if I pressed the mic. You're looking as though.

I pressed my mic last time, too, and you ignored me, but it's okay. No, I didn't hear you. So do we, do they keep track of what's the actual users?

Yes.

No, but what I'm saying, so out of the city of Phillips, how many active users are there versus non-active users?

Library members, that would be a question to ask. Do you want to come up and tell us?

You're saying how many people have a library card and how many actually use a library card? Circulation.

How many active people are using the library? I'm sorry, not just one-time works.

And just to clarify, is that only to come to check out a book or using the facility itself?

How many people are using the services?

Okay.

That's a totally, that's two different questions.

Come up to the mic so people online can hear.

Are you looking for what were, how they determined this?

No, okay, so this year at the fair, we tracked a number of people that actually came through the gate and wanted non-rides, and then we kept track of people who actually wanted the rides to see if the rides actually paid for themselves or not. So I want to know how many people within, like Phillips has X amount of people, how many people actually go use the library?

Well, I can tell you for Park Falls, we track the number of people in the building on a daily basis. We've had 15,695 people use the library this year so far, which averages to 94 people using the library. That doesn't mean checking out materials. So the fact that our funding is based just on circulation is hard to value the usage of the library because people are in there for using our public computers, using the Wi-Fi. We have many people that work from home that come and utilize the building all day long to work. We have lots of programs. We have technology help. So it's more than just our circulation numbers.

But the assessment that we're paying for is based on circulation, correct?

Yes, absolutely. So we have, Park Falls has, we have over 2,200, I had it written on here somewhere. We have over 2,200 registered patrons and we have 1,400 active users as of last year. I don't know what you have there.

yeah and phillips we have 20 we have about 2200 active users actually as well um or people with library cards i guess i don't have the active users um and of those numbers about a third of them is the city and about two-thirds of them is county So yes, and the glitch with the circulation, and this is kind of what's killed us since COVID is that we don't get reimbursed for e-circ. So anybody that's using an e-audiobook and streaming it or checking out an e-book from the library and streaming it, we don't get reimbursement from those e-circulations. So between Park Falls and Phillips, you have about 2000 circulations a month between that and like, it varies between 2000 and like 2200. a month that we aren't getting reimbursed for um and it's because the state hasn't figured out how to bill for those circulations so we track them but we don't get reimbursed for them um and that number for phillips has just about doubled since covid so i've lost that many sorry jody you said 94 a day roughly yeah and

Becky, do you have an idea?

We don't have a door counter. It's on my annual report, and I tried to pull up those numbers, and I couldn't do it on my phone, so I apologize. But we're significantly busier. My registered news is going up. We partnered with the school this summer. Our summer library program had a... 30% increase this year over last year. I'm running programs that, you know, we have a sign-up sheet. It's signed up within a week. We have a waiting list. We've had to rerun programs this year. Libraries do really well when people don't have money for things because we're free. So right now across the system, we're seeing more circulation. Across the county, we're seeing more circulation.

What does your cost per e-book amount to?

Yeah, I don't know that either.

That you're not getting reimbursed for.

We can find that out.

We can find that out, yes. I think at a system level, we pay, do you even remember the budget number? It's something outrageous. It's like $60,000 to $80,000 a year for, and then we share them within the consortium. So, yeah.

going back to your numbers out so we I have a total circulation so up on the chart here so if you look at 2027 Phillips and Park Falls you had total circulation and we'll pick Phillips of 30 35,505 and the outside of the city of Phillips people was 21,600 that so that equals that two-thirds it's how the membership lines up. So, same with the prior year, it was $40,000 in total circulation, or $40,000, not dollars, 40,000 circulation. It was actually more circulation outside the county, this percentage-wise, in 27 than it was 26. Park Falls is kind of the opposite. A lot of their local, yeah, you have about 50,000 local circulation.

About 25% of our circulation also comes from Ashland County because we're right there.

I forget about that. And that gets reimbursed differently. So you still report that. So on this library outside municipality circulation, this might be another 20,000 for Park Falls because that goes to Ashland County and Ashland County collects money and pays the library. So that's where if you go back to our list you Everybody up here. So like if Nick goes over to Minocqua and uses their library, they track that and then they call us up or they send us a report and say, hey, by the way, you owe our county money for your citizen coming over here and using the library. So that Ashland's number for Park Falls is quite large because they're right on the border and the closest is, does Mellon have a Glidden?

It actually has a library.

So that would be the closest one for Butternut?

Did your question get answered? Sort of? Or not?

No? Is Ogima planning to come?

I don't believe she'll be here, no. I mean, we can invite her.

OK, so I guess.

has a brand new director, so she's still learning.

So are you two working together like the chambers do? No.

Well, all the libraries work together. Of course we work together, but we're completely separate.

They're here because it's going to affect both of their budgets.

No, I understand that part, but she said it's like as a whole. Becky did in the one part.

Well, the 80% one would affect all three.

It'll affect us differently because Phillips gets close to 50% of their funding from Price County. Park Falls Library, we get, I can tell you exactly, 26.4% of our funding comes from Price County, whereas I also get 29.3% from Ashland County.

So you get about 50% of your budget is outside municipalities?

Yeah, so 50% for us is divided between the two counties because we have so many users that live in Ashland County because we're right there, Price County. We're at the top of Price County.

So what we're looking at, I don't know if deciding is the right word, but at least talk about today is the effect. Right now it's put in at 70% for this budget. If it raises the presented budget amount to 80%, We got to find a way to make up the basically $35,000 somewhere else in the budget.

No, it's above and beyond our budget. So all it would do is change this number right here.

Which I can tell you what that is.

At the very bottom, instead of us being 1.1 point. So instead of the levy going up 1.24%, it would go up 1.51. So we'd go up an extra 0.5%. to 5%.

Right, so your mill rate at the bottom. But it does not affect, we don't have to look at the sheriff's department.

Not going to affect the budget at all otherwise. No, and if you went up to 100%, it would go up to 2%.

If it goes to 70% as you presented, then we've got $35,000.

No, we can't do anything with that. All that is, is we're telling taxpayers we're not going to collect $35,000.

That's what I guess what I'm trying to get at.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that's a good point. So. What this really affects is it's more of the, and I hate bringing this word, the politics of a budget, right? So as a taxpayer, they're telling you as a board, don't raise taxes, don't raise taxes. This is an outside tax that you could actually lower, right? You go from 80 to 70 or same with debt. You could lower your debt and then your levy total collected would be less and you could tell taxpayers we lowered the total amount collected. That doesn't mean their house is going to be collecting less taxes because that has to do with assessment and your municipality and your school. So the goal is to try to keep this number reasonable, right? So is raising the total collected amount 1.2% or 1.5% if we change it to 80% what you're looking at?

Yeah.

But that's the only change that changes that number.

Or we still have to talk about debt for the additional equipment and things like that.

Oh, yeah. So that'll change it as well.

Yeah, but it would go up to 1.5. Like if we would have left it in at 80, this number would be 1.51. Sure. And this number would still be negative. So your mill rate's still going down. We would have to do a lot to make the mill rate not go down. Okay.

So the question is, do we want to recommend leaving the 70% in there, or do we want to leave it at 80%?

Well, it is at 80% right now.

But it's only at 70 on the 27th budget.

But we haven't really given them a chance to work with the 80%, correct, that we gave them last year? They would have gotten it.

Two years. Two years, yeah. Either way, it's not going to affect operational budget.

It doesn't affect what you want to collect. This is the decision you want to collect from the users outside of their municipality who owns the library.

And it goes across the board.

Yes.

Whether you use it or not.

No. Well, like a city of Phillips person would not pay this. They're paying through their municipality. Their municipal taxes. Ogama would not pay and Park Falls would not pay.

Right. So this number that 289 whatever is going to all of the municipalities is going to be as our taxes and stuff, is all going to go to all the municipalities except for, all the taxpayers, except for Ogima taxpayers and Park Falls and Phillips taxpayers will not get this portion on their taxes.

The municipality taxpayers already, in Park Falls, they're already paying, I get 64%, almost 65% of my budget from the city of Park Falls. So they're already paying for it.

So if it were 80, who's going to get hit with that 80?

All the rest of them, not those. Town of Elk. Town of Elk. All the other ones besides these.

So regardless if they use it or not.

Correct. Same with this number.

Regardless if they use it or not.

It's always that way.

Yeah. It's been 80. It was 80% last year they paid, yes.

Right. So can we get a breakdown of who actually uses it outside, like county-wise? 50% of people.

Take a look at the last page. Where does your money go? The library's in there as well.

Are you trying to say what municipality? Oh, you're saying, yeah, you're saying outside. We can't pick on, I can't go.

Is there no way to break that down? No.

I don't mean they can probably do based on address, but the problem with that is you can't, I can't reorganize the tax.

No, you can't say elk has to pay more because more of elk people went to the library than hill. You can't do that.

No, that's, no.

And that's not why I'm asking it. I want to know how much outreach it has if those people are actually utilizing it to where it's warranted to raise all of their stuff comparatively.

Yeah, it's 30 or 60% of their circulation is outside the city limits. That's what that thing I showed you was. So the people of Elk and Flambeau and all that are using it because that's right here, this number.

So two out of the three people that go there don't reside in the city of Phillips.

Yeah, so the reach is outside of Phillips or outside of Burke Falls. Ashland's a hard one because it's not on here. So like for Phillips example, in the city, the total circulation is 35,000. The people outside of the city limits, so Flambeau, Elk, Worcester, Spirit, wherever it might live, 21,000 of those circulation are those people.

So 21,000 of the 35.

Yeah, so more people outside of the city limits use checking stuff out. Now, I know like after school, people are dropped off because they may live in town and use it.

You're doing math? You want to think about it?

All I know is if you've ever been to a library, I mean, libraries are just a buzz. They're always busy. There's always something going on in one of the rooms. It's not just about books. It's about, again, just like I said about the fair, it's community. It's community working together. I sit on this board, on the Phillips one.

I represent the county on there.

So there are a lot of things that is just new to me.

If we go back to 80%. It's going to affect the property taxpayers, $0.20 per thousand, basically.

No, $0.01 per thousand. $0.01.

Oh, okay. I got that backwards.

Yep, yep. So the percentage of increase for the levy, and that's not because of the library, because the library technically is going down. That's because of your net new construction, your debt is going up by 1.8%. 2.4. 2.4. If you change this library, because right now it's going down negative 0.28, it would actually go to 5.1 because this would go to almost zero, this number, because you're keeping it close to last. The 80% is close, but the total number is less because there was less circulation or there was less expense total divided by a circuit. There's a whole formula. Okay. The mill rate, which is the per thousand, is this number. So we charge right now in 2026 for every $1,000 your house was worth, it was $5.43 you paid in taxes. This year, if we do what we're proposing, it would go to $5.22 per thousand or down 3.85%. However, if we change it back to 80%, this number would go up by one penny.

Yeah, it's 0.195.

So this goes negative 0.195. So it changes by one penny. So it's one penny per thousand that this changes.

That's what I said.

Yeah, that's what the chair said. So is there a recommendation to leave it at 80?

The effect to the taxpayer is it's going to cost them 20 cents more per thousand.

Penny.

A penny per thousand.

It's actually less.

Well, I... Year over year, but between the 70 and 80.

It's going down by 20 cents year over year. Right now we're saving.

If you go to 80%, how can you go down?

Because it was 80%. I'm just looking at it.

He's saying if you're going at 70, it's going to go down.

Yes.

Correct. If we stay at right now, it is going down. If we go back to the 80, then it's only changed by a penny. It's 5.23 instead of 5.22.

If you're looking for a recommendation, I would just say we keep it at 80.

Any other comments? Are we fully confused? Are your numbers mathing yet, Michelle?

I would recommend we leave it at 80 also.

Okay. What number are we still looking for? The breakdown of the municipalities paying for it? Is that still? It's the.

Yeah. That's not number of people.

No. That's number of books. So like when my family goes, we check out 10 books at a time per kid. So we might check out 20 books.

We do, but we don't have to worry about it. Unless you really like some.

Unless you really like it.

We also make sure that the little one doesn't tear the pages. So yeah, it's circulation is different than number of people visiting.

That's what I want to know, the number of people.

But that's what, right.

It's on my annual report. So the county actually has that number. I don't know where it's at. Yeah, but I mean, I can email it to Nick. He can give it to you.

Whatever numbers you need, we can get you guys.

So if that's what you're looking for, I can get you visits over the course of a year.

Okay.

Paul made a motion. No, I don't think it was. We don't need a motion. Recommendation to leave it at 80.

So we'll present it on Tuesday at 80. Sure.

That's what I'm hearing. Okay.

If we could have your numbers then. Okay. Yes.

Well, we beat that book to a... We figured that would be the one. We took that hard copy and made it a soft copy. Leather bound votes.

All right.

So the last major thing we need to discuss is, okay, so if we, right now, as presented, we'd be going up 1.5% for the levy collected, the number. What taxpayers would see would be a lower number for mill rate. So, again, that gets distributed. Town Elk might pay more than, well, they'll pay less this year because the equalized value was less than others. But we saw this with Worcester a couple years ago. Their re-evaluate happened and they also got a bigger number from the state. So, they pay a bigger piece of the pie. The following year, their pie went down and the Town O'Lakes pie went up. So, then they paid more even if we did nothing. So, taxes would have went up in Lake and Worcester would have went down. We saw it in Olgama. It happens across the board. It's what the state says the piece of pie should be for that municipality. The last thing we need to discuss is, do you as a committee want to recommend increasing your debt levy to cover equipment requested by departments or projects so we had highway recommended a half a million dollars of equipment that they want next year which is in the packet for a request um it's appendix c c And then we also have a list of all kinds of stuff that other departments would like to work on. So it's the equipment and projects list. So as you can see, like forestry on here has several items. When we talked to Joe, a lot of these items are just, Hey, we need to make sure we have a five, 10 year plan. things come up, you know, we don't want to surprise you as a board, a committee. I mean, everybody on the list, that's kind of their mentality is, hey, we have a list. We know there's stuff coming. What do you want to do? Or how do you want to fit these things in the budget? So on this list, you can see there's all kinds of fun stuff. And then you have the equipment one also from the Highway is the next page, so they have like a yellow iron, a loader is $300,000, a patch trailer for $55,000, a mower for $18,000, portable traffic lights for $60,000, a 75-horsepower tractor for $67,000. for a total of $500,000. That's what they're requesting that you just give them a half a million dollars. We go do this and we keep doing it every year because you can see in 28, 29, 30, they have a plan for a half a million dollars here. We do not have that in the budget. That would be up to you as a committee to recommend to the board to increase our budget by a half a million dollars. We also have all these projects that we talked about, the forestry, land conservation, the health and human services, buildings, grounds, corrections, and the sheriff's department that would be debt too. So we can look at it a couple ways. One, you do nothing. You leave the levy as presented. Taxpayers see a 1.5% levy increase with a mill rate going down. You pick a number to increase debt by. You can do highway gets all half a million dollars and do their yellow iron. You could do $600,000 increase and do highway gets a half a million and somebody else gets one or two things on the list. You could do a hybrid where say, you know, Carrie and I kind of talked through around the number about that half a million spot and give highway their yellow iron, you know, their loader to keep equipment going. But then you pick $200,000 worth of other items. Health and Human Services vehicles, as you can see, are getting in the 200,000 mile range. So do you know that's $40,000 on their building ground there. They need some snow removal for their sidewalks. We use our lawnmowers now to do that. It's not necessarily the best. We break down real quick on those and we're beating the heck out of lawnmowers. Do you look at, you know, or maybe only $100,000 worth of projects on here and only raise it by $400,000. So you do the $300,000 loader and you do $100,000 worth of projects. We do have department heads here available to talk about any of the items on the list if you have questions. Some of them, they have some mileage left in them, but we have to make sure they're on the list so we don't forget about them. You know, like the Ford Escape, you know, it's got 97,000 miles, still got some life in it, but we don't want to forget about it when it gets to 200.

Nick, I have something here from Sarah.

Oh, yeah, and I know that's one of the ones we really do have to look at.

This is her copy. In my packet. Yeah, it's in there. Page eight.

It's page D1, appendix D1. It starts at C because that's our loans, yeah. So they have a van with 128. Yeah, it's on there. New Traverse. They do have another Traverse in their fleet, and it's got 56,000 miles, and it's a 2024. So they put a lot of miles on their vehicles. And that's why those ones I would say, between Carrie and I, on the list of items, everything's a priority, so no one take this wrong. But those were kind of the top priority looking at would be replacing that the traverse and potentially the how do you recommend we proceed go through this list individually well there's a couple ways we could do it we used to play a game where you guys put chips in a bucket we tried that it worked well but it just gives us an idea we can go through and star things and say hey these are really important to you as a committee that should go to board you could just give us a number and say we feel comfortable raising the debt levy by a half a million dollars which is that would do carrie can give you what that looks like as a levy

So going back to his original sheet, that would increase your levy if you added $500,000 and the 80% for the library. So it'll raise that to $704,282. So where that $168,629 number is in the middle, yep, that'll go to $704,282. Your percent, the next blue, would go to 5.19%. And then at the very bottom, your mill rate would go to 5.42.

5.42, which is still less than last year's mill rate.

Yep, by one penny.

By one penny. So half a million dollars keeps you a break-even mill rate, and it raises the total levy by 5%. So again, you have to decide what's your priority. If you did $300,000, it would raise it by about what we would consider.

What we have presented here, Highway Alone wants that half a million.

Correct. Well, Highway, we just put it in the list. I'm just making an observation. I mean, everybody wants the money, so if you guys want to raise it.

Yeah, but if we say we're going to raise it $500,000, then we've got to figure out how to divide it up.

Yeah, correct.

We do or they do?

You do.

I'd say we do. This is the joy we have. We decide between the departments how much they get.

Correct.

They decide what they spend it on. With our approval, I guess.

Well, when we take the loan, we have to put what we're buying. So really we got to narrow it down to say, you know, if it's that $300,000 loader, which we almost bought last year, we had some last minute costs to our project. So we did not buy that one. So that's been on the radar for a while. So if you did 300, again, I'm making this.

We just got a patch trailer and there's three other ones on the list. So might have to skip a year.

And this could be a long-term thing. So if you start half a million dollars for equipment like this, next year you pick a couple more things off the highway. Maybe it's the patch trailer, it's the tractor, and you do a truck for forestry. So you're really establishing, do you want X dollars to go towards equipment and projects? Because right now we have zero dollars going toward because it ate it all up for a couple of years and high cost placements. And so we've gotten away from projects and put it more into operation to keep our levy the same.

So today, do you want to just say, look at the half a million dollars and how it gets divided? Do that with the full board?

What I would say today would be give us a number that you feel comfortable increasing the levy debt by, which will increase the total levy. We'll work on kind of narrowing down the list. But, I mean, unless you guys have priorities on there. It sounds like you don't want to give it all to one department.

Well, that would be my...

Right. I mean, I've heard that from...

I know Larry would like to give it all the highway.

You want to put that on the record and talk into the mic? So, and maybe it's $400,000, maybe it's $300,000. If it's $300,000, you're probably looking at a piece of it, or you're pushing that piece of equipment down the road. I mean, that's up to the board.

Can we just do department-specific numbers?

You would pick products.

Or do we have to actually pick numbers?

I would pick products. I would not divide it by department by going, oh, we'll give a little bit here. Because the problem with that is you're not actually looking at what's priority as a county as a whole. You're just saying, I don't want to hurt feelings and I'm trying to be nice.

You could be picking a project that they're not ready for. Let's say it's Smith Lake Toilet. maybe he's not ready for it and you're picking it for next year. And I'm not saying he is or isn't, but if you pick it for him and he's like, I still have to finish all these other projects. I'm not ready for this one yet.

Or if you just say they get a hundred thousand.

Well, that, yeah, that's why I'm asking if we can just do a set dollar amount, if that's easier.

I think it's easier to pick actual issues because then you're showing, you're telling us what's priority in your book and what you've heard from us or them saying. And like, again, I talked to each of these departments, I would say on the list, if you based on. What's going to happen in the future? The vehicles at Health and Human Services are probably your first thing that's going to break or cost you a ton of money. Some of the other stuff, again, it's priority. It's just maybe not till 2028 or 2029, but it needs to be on the list because otherwise we get to a situation where it's like, whoa, you didn't tell us about this for the last 10 years and you knew it was coming due.

So I guess the first thing to do is decide how much, if at all, we want to...

Raise the levy.

Raise the levy. And then after that, figure out what we're going to spend that amount on. Do we do all that today? Or do we just want to come up with an amount today?

I would come up with an amount today and then we can kind of work with a couple people to narrow down. We'll be in the hot seat for you.

Let's do $600,000. I was going to say 5 because it's... 6 is a round number. 600 would go up. No increase in level.

6 would make your mill rate go up. So that's what you'd have to tell citizens.

Our mill rate went from 5.22 this year to 5. I know, but I'm mathing all the numbers like Michelle was mathing.

600 would go up to 5.46.

So how many cents per thousand is that? 2?

0.033 it went up.

$500.

Anybody got $400? $400? $300?

$400?

Any other committee members have a recommendation? I want that on record. I'm trying to lower the level.

I understand that. And we looked at the...

Oh, I understand. I'm not looking at it.

We're looking at borrowing more money, but still not increasing the level. Vehicles?

We beat them up too much.

Well, we're increasing the levy. It's just we're not increasing the mill rate.

Okay, yeah, I misspoke it. The mill rate is what I run.

Yeah, we have high mileage leased vehicles at work.

Which we don't use it, but in California they do. So are we better off to buy a high mileage lease and lease these so they're guaranteed every year?

We don't have enough vehicles. We tried the leasing thing where we rotated it. It was a pain in the butt. And some vehicles put on miles, some didn't. And we're better off managing it each year.

Today, I think we should just focus on what that amount is. Okay.

And going back to Larry's comment, I agree. We're handcuffed by the state saying, yeah, everything's going to go up, but you can't make your budget go up. And we've been like that for my 15 years here. So every year we're cutting and figuring out until the state gives you a little bit of a leash of cash. We don't have to vote on this, but we'll bring it to the board with a half a million. We will not pick the actual stuff because the board may say, I don't want to raise the levy and why go through the process of picking. Be prepared at your next meeting to reduce it to the 500,000 of projects.

Put them all in a can and draw out. Oh, boy.

Seems like a poor priority way to do it. Hey, blind roulette. But then what if you don't borrow half a million next year? Then we're back in the same worst spot.

So you got to do it by priority.

We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. You got to give us a number. We got a number. We'll figure it out. We'll work with departments. We'll work with everybody. Our department heads are great. They work well on these things. They understand there's limits. They know how far they can push their equipment or their vehicles or their projects. And you're right. Sometimes waiting on a project is going to cost you a little bit, but you don't have the money today. So half a million going once, twice.

I don't like quiet, Michelle. Start with a half a million.

80% of half a million, which then your mill rate will be zero, your total increase will be about five, which is still less than we've done in the last three years, if that helps anybody. Anything, let's see what else we have in this packet, just so you guys, so this is just

uh department by department what goes up what goes down general fund goes down by 82 000 this year bring something up that half a million it's going to be it is probably going to break even because of i only put 500 000 i didn't figure the interest so we're going to break even at 500 okay um

Some of the other things, and this is kind of what you were alluding at, Michelle, with breakdown of, it's not necessarily users, but how people get charged. The first one is net new construction. So this tells you who got us to that 0.91. Biggest winners this year was whoever, Town of Spirit, 2% increase. Town of Hackett, 2%. I don't know what was built out in those areas, but... Somebody built something big. A million dollars worth of increase. But that's how we come up with this .901. It's right here. State of Wisconsin, the average is 1.639, so we're always behind. A really good report came out from Forward Analytics about how this number is supposed to keep our levy up to... what they call inflation. So if we followed the state rate alone, if you took $100, I think it was what they do 10 years ago, and said how much the net new construction would make that $100 go up to, it was 125, where inflation actually took that same number from 100 to 150. So if you were the average county, you're behind on your operational costs by 25%. We're not average, we're below average. So we're actually behind by about 35 to 40%. of inflation so that's where we've been cutting or we put it on debt right so that's how we've offset it way to make it even more depressing But that's the state limitations. It has nothing to do with us. I mean, I believe our board would have kept up in a different way, but that the state says borrow. I mean, we kept up. We just borrowed instead of putting it on your operations. The nonprofits we talked about. Appendix C, this is just how our loans run out. And so you can see if you follow the chart, it's where the loans are, what year they are, what you have available, did they go up, go down, what you added. Appendix D, this is our capital purchases and projects by fund. So we have a capital improvement fund that we put some of these things in. So right now we don't have a lot of wiggle room in there because we have a couple things coming up, which is the Cranberry Creek Dam, the courthouse electrical panel, and the airport hangers. So we did not recommend any additional projects or anything going on in there. We do have $100,000 in our operational budget that we do general capital improvements. So we do building the ground does, when we say ceilings and lights, that's really just updating offices and making sure we're fixing things up and keeping them up to date. Flooring, same thing. Carpetware is out. This gets you about one office now instead of three like it used to. So we try to keep up with offices after they get about 20 years, 10 years of wear and tear. Furniture, same thing. As we update offices, we get away from those old big metal desks. We also use that for flooring. So really all three of these top ones work together to maintain our buildings. Okay. MDCs, those are the computers that go in the sheriff's vehicles. Those are not cheap because they're unbreakable or what are they, indestructive. So you can ferry them, beat them, not shoot them, but they're pretty much waterproof. They're everything. They're meant to be a safety device and contact dispatch. Computers through IT. We talk to IT each year and say how much, how many, what's the rotation look like? We used to buy computers for about $500 to $800. The cost now is about $2,200. So our computers go for just a laptop to do our job. Yeah. So we get less and less each year, so that we're going to have to be monitoring. Again, we can borrow for it, but it doesn't offset your operation very well.

That's what the budget item was this year, right? And we're already $42,000 plus over that amount.

Some of it's grants and reimbursable stuff. We don't have to buy every computer outright, but there's some offices. Land Info can buy computers for certain offices. When you buy a computer downstairs for child support, we get 66% reimbursed from the state. Health and Human Services has grants that they can get. It's not every computer that we pay 100% levy, but we do have to have You know, Carrie's computer does not get paid for by any grants or offsets. Mine. We did have some money available, so we took the, there was a request for a fingerprint scanner out of the sheriff's office to put it down in the, not the, the entrance area to the, from the, where the, what do you guys call that? Yeah, but I didn't want to use that name. What was it?

The jail entrance?

The jail entrance. We're outside the Sallyport. So the car pulls in, there's a secure area. So we want to put a fingerprinting down in that area instead of taking everybody up to the jail to do their fingerprinting. But that was one of those that was on the, hey, we want to borrow for this. It's those projects. We had some room in the budget, so we moved it over to here to get that project done. Capital borrowing, just the highway trucks. So as you can see, 390,000. Squad vehicles, 200,000. The list you guys already saw. That's just a list of the capital improvement library services you saw apportionment. So this one's just interesting because this is how it gets distributed year over year. The only problem is you can't see what last year's was, but as a municipality, this is what you will get divided. So say at a million dollar levy, you kind of, let's see here, elk would get 11.5% of that. Who else? Phi Field pays 11.5% of that million dollars. So each year this number changes from the state to say how much of that piece of pie. So if you never changed tax levy and you said it was always a million dollars, the taxpayers in ELK might pay more this year compared to the prior year, depending on what the state says you need to allocate that piece of pie.

Did you break it down?

It's really, really small, but it's in your packet of percent year over year what changes. So 2026. So if you look at Town of Lake, in 2026, they're 11.01%. In 2025, they were 11.05%. So if we did a million dollars, they would have paid probably exactly the same if there was zero assessments, zero new net construction, everything was the same, or the schools. I mean, everybody has to be the same. That's in your packet. Equalized value, mill rate, that's just another thing we give you guys. where the money goes. So we are how we collect revenue. So 2027 revenues, property taxes was 13 million. Sales was 1.8 million intergovernmental revenues of 7 million. So we end up collecting $34 million throughout the year, they're almost 35. Our expenditures are the same 34 million Health and Human Services is $9 million. The highway is $8.4 million. Public Works, so that's like your forestry. Public Safety would be your jail and your sheriff. Is that where you're under? Oh, right here, 1.7 for forestry. It's not just forestry. There's several things in there. Zoning. So here's the pie, what it looks like. Then we do a chart that says, where does your money go? So if your house is worth $100,000, you pay $43.5 per month or $522 in county taxes. This does not include the school taxes, which is, so we're about one-third of the tax bill. depending if you're a municipality or a city. So out of that $43.50, you pay $14 a month for public safety, pay $18.58 for transportation, culture and recreation, $0.34. The court system costs you $2 out of that $43. Libraries cost you $0.89 a month. Health and Human Services is $8.00. We do negative here. There's all kinds of stuff, yeah.

That's for shared revenues and all that stuff.

The state. We're part of the state. Gives you money back. Any questions on the 20? Our first kick at the budget. Hey, Michelle, you get to listen to all this again next Tuesday.

And then you're going to notice because you guys made some changes. So Tuesday, all this is going to look different.

It'll be the same long speech, though.

Okay, any more discussion regarding the, I guess, preliminary budget?

You guys gave us some direction. We'll work on that direction.

Do you guys have any other questions for us? Nick or Kerry? No. No? Okay. We'll move on to the next item on the agenda. Does anybody want to take a break?

Five minutes? No.

You want to go back to work?

Okay, we'll keep moving on then.

You can always step out if you need a break.

Okay, we're going to move on. Item eight. Resolution, Price County Capital Projects and Capital Purchases to be financed with short-term debt, 2027 executive. Whereas the following capital projects have been identified by the Price County Executive Committee, Highway Department, 2027 road maintenance projects, $700,000. Whereas the following capital purchases have been identified by the Price County Executive Committee, Sheriff's Office, three squad cars, $200,000. Highway Department, second plow truck, $390,000, whereas the following costs of insurance premiums for Wisconsin Statute 67.045B3 have been identified by the Price County Executive Committee, insurance premiums $480,000. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Price County Board of Supervisors authorize the Executive Committee to proceed with With the implementation of 2027 capital projects and highway department road construction in an amount not to exceed $1.77 million, million to be financed with short-term debt and to include such debt payment to begin with the 2027 Price County Budget. Fiscal impact, $1,598,165 for 2027, $107,990,000 for 2028, $104,006 for 2029. Looking for a motion to... Motion by Palachuk. I'll second. Second by Hordak. Any discussion?

So this one's a little, it's not unique. This is our normal one. So you guys all heard the whole budget presentation. The only thing that's not on here, which I still recommend we move forward, we'll do it separately. That way we can list everything separately and then we can decide what projects are. So this one is all the debt that was already in there to make the budget what it is presented today because we need to keep moving on at least the base amount of debt we're going to be taking. So you'll see this resolution and then an additional resolution in the future if you decide to do the half a million with certain projects. So we're clearing up all the ones that were our normal debt that we've been doing with this resolution. It does not include the half a million and it does not include that'll be separate.

Any discussion, questions? Hearing none, all those in favor of moving it on to the board, signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Motion carried. Number nine, resolution, approved transfer to offset budget over just 2026. Whereas for county board of supervisors policy and procedure manual, if a department exceeds its approved net budget, revenues less expenditures by 10% or greater, or for all general fund accounts, account code 100, any such spending that exceeds the approved net budget by $25,000 or 10% or greater, whichever is less, shall be referred to the board for funding determination upon recommendation of the executive committee. And whereas the unexpected and unbudgeted expenditures of the following departments have occurred resulting in an overage of the 2025 allowable expendable budget as stipulated above. Coroner, $17,486. Information technology, $44,231. Tax solicitor, $42,511. Buildings and grounds, $40,829. Sheriff's office, $159,882. Corrections and communications, $350,612. Traffic safety, $575. Now, therefore, be it resolved by the Price County Board of Supervisors that the transfer is made from the general fund to cover the 2025 budget expenditure overage. Fiscal impact, $656,126, not budgeted. Looking for a motion to approve.

I'll make a motion to approve.

Motion by Spacek. Second by Drobnik. Discussions?

So I have a basic breakdown. So the hard part about this one is it looks like, oh my gosh, we overspent by 600, but other areas of our budget were positive in revenue. So our overall budget for the year is not necessarily negative 600,000. What this happens is throughout the year there's, you know, discussions. So, for example, the tax lister area, there's contracted services, my tech. So, we did $31,400 in services that weren't budgeted for. That came out of the transitioning over our GIS services to my tech. We also had them do additional projects throughout the year, which you guys were, we discussed. And this is also hard because this is from a year and a half ago when we discuss it or further. So it's one of those like, oh, yeah, I remember, but it's re-coming up. So, for example, coroner's office, it was pathology for the most part was 11,372. We probably had incidents where we need extra autopsies or the death rate Autopsy rate was high that year. Not a lot you can do. And the revenues were down $7,700 compared to the prior year. Software, so information technology, it was computer hardware and software maintenance, went up $32,698. A lot of those contracts change mid-year or towards the end of the year, so you have additional costs there. And then in their office, somebody changed health insurances because it went up $12,400. So either one went... On at the end of the year. Oh, and June would have went on because his spouse no longer had insurance. Tax lister. We talked about that. My tech buildings and grounds. We had employees that didn't take health insurance and then we had employees that went on our health insurance. So that went up 58,740 just in health insurance. So that's two family plans. Sheriff's department. Ages is their area. Corrections, wages, that's $180,000. Health insurance was $72,000 in the jail. So again, you hire somebody that takes a family or switches to a family throughout the year. And then we had quite a few prisoners boarded, so $33,340 over budget last year. That's the basic breakdown on those.

Questions, comments? Discussion? My only comment is this money's already been spent. So we're just approving this.

You're just saying it comes out of general fund.

The formality to balance the books.

So this is the transparency, right? We had to bring it forward. We showed you. You now are aware that these areas went over. If you look at it as a percent, we spend $34 million a year and we were over by $600,000 in our general fund. So...

Not even.

Yeah. So that would be, you know, if you made $34,000 and were over budget in your household by $60 or $600, it's not a lot.

And it's not. $60. Any particular department's spending frivolously. No, it's health insurance. It's just the way things are.

it's sheriff's wages and and health insurance is probably the biggest one uh sheriff's department corrections department that's 400 000 of it health insurance is another hundred and some thousand throughout the departments we pick a date in the year and say this right no that's yeah One health insurance for families, $35,000. So if you go no insurance to a health insurance, it eats your budget pretty quick.

Any further discussion? All those in favor of approving this resolution, signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Okay. Next up, number 10, Resolution Transfer to Capital Improvement Fund 2020-25. Whereas the Price County Board of Supervisors approved Resolution 33-07 Capital Improvement Fund at a regular meeting held August 21, 2007. And whereas, I'm going to skip a few lines here. Whereas they audited general fund revenues adjusted for the restricted funds for 2025, where $12,070,220 in general fund expenses adjusted for the restricted funds for 2025 were $12,553,287, resulting in a loss of $483,067, leaving a net loss of $483,000. $483,066, which would provide zero transfer as per above provision, and whereas the net income from the 2025 in rem for the personal property was $1,225, which will transfer to the capital improvement fund. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the greater amount of $268,000 $1,797 plus $1,225 profit from personal property sale for a total of $270,022 be transferred from the general fund to the capital improvement fund for the year 2025. Motion to approve. Motion by Dronick.

Second.

Second by Spacek.

Only question I have is why is 166 and 167?

Why is there a dollar difference?

Yeah. Is it? Yeah. 483067 and 483066. Yeah, yeah, because I will correct that. Okay.

I noticed that too, but I didn't.

I don't know if it needs to be or not, but. It says leaving in zero transfer.

Hit the wrong key.

Exactly. I shouldn't even have said it twice. So I will make that quick correction. And yeah, I'll do the math to see which one it is. But it shouldn't be listed in there twice.

Okay, so we're going to amend this. Do we have to have a motion to amend?

Just strike it.

Well, for the record, we're just cleaning this up where it says resulting in a loss of $483,067, leaving a net loss of $483,066. Are we going to strike leaving the net loss of $483,066 completely out? Or are we going to just change the number from six to a seven? Okay, I'm going to let you read it when you get done. Okay, for the record, on this resolution that was presented to us here today, we're going to strike out leaving a net loss of $482,066. Any objections to that? Hearing none, any further discussion? Nick, you want to add anything? No? Okay, call for a vote. All those in favor of approving this resolution, signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Motion carried. Item number 11, Resolution Price County Highway Department Road Construction Projects to be financed with short-term debt 2027. Whereas the Executive Committee has identified the need for financing a portion of the 2027 Highway Department Road Construction Projects to the potential extent of $3.1 million. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Price County Board of Supervisors authorize the Executive Committee to proceed with the implementation of financing 2027 Highway Department road construction projects in an amount not to exceed $3.1 million to be financed through the issuance of short-term debt and to include such debt payment in the 2028 Price County budget. Fiscal impact, $3.1 million. $3,134,875. That'll be in the 2028 budget. Motion to approve. Motion by Palachuk.

I'll second.

Second by Spacek. I don't know if routine is the right word, but this is just an annual thing we are doing.

Yep, so you have the list of projects. They do the projects. We then put it in the future budget, and it's up to that number. So if they did all 3.1 million in projects plus there's some interest. In the past, we've had less than that. Last year it was 2.66. Yeah, it was 2.6-something. This year it's more than that. So this is saying, okay, we have the list. You can go do the projects, and you'll guarantee to borrow it so we don't just use all our cash and... have a bigger problem.

Any further discussion? Ms. Hordak?

I have a question. No, we're going to vote yet, right?

Yep.

Okay, go ahead and vote. Then I have a question.

If there's no further discussion, we'll go ahead and vote. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carried. Okay, Ms. Horton.

Okay, my question is just to these resolutions. I don't recall from previous years that we've had a line item that was approved as to form with Bryce Shaneborn, our core counsel. Doesn't that cost us a lot of money to have that done? And is there a reason he has to read them?

We don't have a corporate counsel, no.

Right, and that was new under Megan. I don't know why we added that.

Okay, so when we get another core council.

Or you can go back to not having it.

That's what I would say. Let's strike it. I mean, that's another cost.

Is that something we have to do as a committee?

No, it was added when Megan was here. I don't know who added it or why it was added, but that was just new.

I would nix it. I mean, we've survived without it before, correct?

Okay, just nix it. Do we have to bring it up on the next agenda, or can we just tell you, don't worry about it? No. It was never an agenda item to begin with to put it on.

There was never approval for it.

Okay, I think that's a good catch. Save us a couple dollars.

Yeah.

Next up, item 12, update law enforcement radio equipment technology project. I'll have Mr. Tribner and I was going to have the chief deputy, but he stepped out. So I don't know if the sheriff wants to add anything, but go ahead.

I was going to say buckle in. We got a whole bunch here. No, I'm kidding, Michelle. No, just a quick update. We did sign on with TUSA. They will be on site. They're traveling the 28th to get here, so they'll be here in the afternoon. Through that week, I've talked to the chair of law enforcement, Larry, and we are going to have a meeting on the 29th for law enforcement at 9 a.m. to meet TUSA and kind of set up expectations of the board's expectation, committee's expectation for this project, followed by a meeting at 1030 for the key stakeholders, which include the schools, law enforcement, fire departments, EMS, hospital, whoever, a whole bunch of people to start the project. Then they'll go out on the field. They'll look, you know, see what we have. They'll be looking at our equipment, blah, blah, blah. So that will start the week of the 28th. Any questions about the... Project, I'm guessing anybody's, well, I'm not guessing, anybody's allowed to come to that meeting on the 29th at 9 a.m. if you have a special interest in the radio project and want to hear what the committee has to say.

Mr. Sheriff, would you like to add anything? I'm good to go.

The stakeholder meeting, on the other hand, that is not open to the public. That's just the EMS groups and the stakeholders. That's not a public meeting. at 10.30.

All right. Unless there's more discussion, we'll move on. Next up, bug tussle update.

Yeah, slow and steady. Same as what we talked about at the board meeting. We have requested out. I've made it clear to them that you as a board have said no payments, no signing anything. I know there's some other stuff going on with other counties. They're receiving some communication. Because we haven't done anything as a project or any... nothing has happened. We're not getting the same communications because we're just not in the same boat. Hopefully they can figure out with their bond agency and with their legal how to just call our project over. The next step for us may be just having a resolution or a letter stating we as Price County consider our project concluded and then they can put that towards the note saying project's concluded. So

Okay. Please use your mic.

When are they done paying us? Because, right, we're getting a certain percentage every... Yeah, we have 40 basis points.

We're supposed to be getting it.

Yeah, we can.

Right. Not funny. So we've gotten $92,000 so far. They have a payment coming up in November, I think, is their next one. Yeah, so that's when the next payment would be.

Are they current?

Well, so one of the things we're looking at is they did not send us a a payment in May, March. I don't remember what that was. We're using that as our chip of saying, hey, our project's concluded. Let's get out of this. But by the way, you technically owe us, I think it's $32,000 at this time. We will get that money, whether it's just, can we use that as a bargaining chip?

be smarter to wait till after we get that last payment for the year? I mean, what's it hurting us at this point?

I mean, we're using, so again, I'm trying, we should be in closed session talking about this stuff. One thing we can look at is if you don't make a payment, that's a default on a contract. So these are options we have.

We'll halt discussion.

Yeah.

Anything else? bug tussle besides what we've already talked about?

No. So right now we're continuing to move forward with no project payback. They pay back the money that's sitting there and we're out of the loop of all the other counties dealing with them.

Okay. Item 14, monthly vouchers.

I make a motion to approve the vouchers as presented. Second.

Motion by Hodak, second by Drobnik. Any discussions? Got a couple questions myself. Regarding revenues and expenditures, was it the public defender when it says court approved counsel indigent? Is it like a public defender? Does anybody know? Because it was like $13,500 some dollars.

Yeah, so if individuals don't have a timely public defender, the court can say we want to get this one done and moved on and they hire a lawyer in town to do it, and we just have to pay for it. So it's a judge call. We've been lucky. A lot of counties are really struggling with that because judges want to get stuff done, and they just say, fine, don't worry about it. Your public defender is paid for this way instead of that way.

Okay, moving on. Coroner pathology, we're over $11,000.00. plus. Is that just happenstance, or is it because we have a different corner?

I don't think it is. That's, well, Sheriff walked out, but a lot of times it just depends on the severity. So we kind of have a flow chart. It's not like all of a sudden the corner can decide, I'm going to do every one and just find what it is. It's this was a suspicious and I use suspicious as not as like a criminal system, but Hey, that's weird that this rolled over that they were in a ATV accident and there was nothing around. We want to make sure there wasn't anything medical or, Oh, there was a, you know, individual passed away at a farming accident. We look into making sure it was a suspect.

Well, there's a couple of voting things.

Yeah, drownings. Hopefully there's nothing in their system that would make foul play. I think that adds up. It adds up quick. They're like $4,000 apiece.

Any other questions regarding the vouchers? All those in favor of approving the vouchers, signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any vouchers approved? Item 15, date of next meeting is October 8th, 2026. And item 16, unless there's something any committee members wants to bring up right now, we will adjourn. Okay, meeting adjourned.