Board of County Commissioners - Regular Meeting

We're going to start staff meeting here for August 25th. Got a couple different items. Tom, where do you want to start this morning?

We have two items, Chairman. Good morning, Commission. The first item, our appraiser is here this morning, and she wants to talk about two issues and probably a little bit of a third, too. First, she's going to talk about she wants to collect some different data to broaden the use of sales data. She wants to talk that through with you, make all commissioners aware of that. She wants to go back and talk about legislative post-audit again and kind of give an update on where we stand there. So that's issue number two. And then there was an issue circulating on social media this past weekend regarding a payment issue that she's also going to talk about. So she's going to talk about two main things and then touch on a third. So that's issue number one. And then the second issue is this. We are now at the last second for budget, so we want to give commissioners one more shot today to review maybe what their intention is for tomorrow as far as motions or resolutions and or add any so that staff can work those up today. So a little budget discussion is the second item, and I think that's all we would have for today. So we'll start off with Deanna. Okay.

Morning, Deanna.

Morning. How are you doing? I'm Deanna Asford on the Cedric County appraiser, and there were some handouts, so hopefully everybody got a handout if they didn't let us know and we will get you a handout. As Tom had stated, we will start with the information in reference to sales. So one, I want to let you know, I want to remind you, seven months ago, you hired me and I committed to a modernization plan that I had given you at the time to be transparent, accurate, and provide accurate communication to the Board of County Commissioners. And so that on significant operational changes and technology changes. So that's what I'm doing today. And Today's meeting is in... Let me get a drink of water. I tell you, every time... I don't know if it's a microphone or what, but... So today's meeting is intended to provide an update of several of those efforts from my original plan. And following one year of the anniversary of the modernization plan, I plan to present a formal process review outlining the status of accomplishments and the next steps of each one of those initiatives that I have set forth in the plan that you received seven months ago. Let's just start talking about sales first, but before we get to that, PVD, the Property Valuation Department, every year does what they call a final... Ratio study, so I recently received the final ratio study for 2025 and I'm just going to talk about residential right now. If you have commercial commercial questions, feel free to ask, but my primary focus on this. 1st. item is going to be on residential. So for residential, our final ratio study for 2025, and that's comparing 2025 values to 2025 sales prices. And so our median ratio was 89.87. Now, the state requires us to be between 90 and 110. And that's an industry standard set forth by IWO. But they also give us an opportunity to get into compliance By using a confidence interval, I'm not going to go real deep into that. It's a statistical term, but what it means is that the median would fall within 95% of 2 different numbers. And so our true median fell within 95% of 89.52. And ninety point two one, so therefore we hit our ninety mark. So we are in compliance in residential for our sales ratio. There is also a on the report is the, which is the coefficient of dispersion and our rating was ten point three seven. The state requires us to be below twenty this rating. Um, gives us a view of uniformity and consistency. So that means we are valuing consistent properties within the same class. And then there is a PRD, which stands for price related differential and the PRD has to be between 98.98 and 1.03. And for residential, we're at 1.00. And that is what we would strive to be for is 1.00, because that says that we are uniform across our property price tiers. So if we were below 0.98, that equates to higher value properties being valued higher relative to lower price properties. And if it above 1.03 equates to lower value properties being valued higher than higher price properties. And when it's lower, it actually affects the lower price home. So if it was below, if it was at 1.03, 0, 3, then it would show or higher. It would show that we'd be placing an unfair burden on the lower price properties. And what it's showing on our report card from property evaluation department is we're at 1.0. So we didn't we didn't overvalue or undervalue higher price properties or overvalue or undervalue lower price properties. So that is the basic report card for from pbd on um on residential our statistics that we have to do in order to make compliance so um if not then we lose points so we didn't lose any points from residential we got 100 on our compliance points for our uh finals ratio study

Deanna, are you taking questions right now?

I will take questions.

On this one in particular?

Okay. I think for the public, you just threw a lot of information out there. I want to ask a question on this final ratio study. So you need to be within a PVD, the state says, be within a compliance range of 90 to 110 of what? Can you help the public understand 90 to 110 percent of what?

So what they're doing is they're comparing the sales price to the appraised value. Okay. And so that's why we have to fall within 90 to 110. It's 90% to 110.

And what is that number? Is that a median in the market? Is that a...

It is a meeting in the market because, of course, we know that using the other form, which is mean is another form to look at this keeps in all the outliers. And so when we're valuing and industry standards lends itself to the medium, because.

the outliers they may have a reason why they're an outlier and they may not have a reason at all and in order to it to us to look at everything uniformly we we look at the median well i'm going to state the obvious here okay um 90 to 110 90 means that you are less than the cells the median is less than the sales you came in at 89.87 you creeped into the bottom tier which suggest, and this is where the public is going to have a hard time digesting this, is that we are still, according to state PVD and sales data, that you are still undervaluing property related to sales prices in Sedgwick County. Is that what this number represents?

For 2025, that's what it represents. And so when we were looking at 2026 values, that's why we raise values because we knew we were very close to being out of compliance and out of what industry standards expects us to be within.

And it is going to be hard. I mean, you heard and how many appeals that we had and all of these. This is what we heard. But this is data, correct? This is based on sales data, verifiable sales data. So I know that this is going to be a conversation ongoing. And this isn't speculation. This is based off of your valuations versus the sales data in the market. People are going to have a hard time digesting that based on all the information I got. But this is the data. Yeah.

And we didn't calculate, of course we do calculate it, but this is from the oversight agency. It's not within our office. So we didn't have any influence on what they came up with.

So this is PVD's number. Okay.

May I add to that, whatever you're... Yeah, go ahead.

Well, it's part of the same discussion. So if that's acceptable, Chairman?

Yeah.

So your data, Deanna, is 2025. It's a full calendar year, and it's a subset of sales. It's not every home sale. I don't know how they pick it, but it's around 300 properties or so that are randomly sampled from the home sales. It's not every single home sale that produces your data, correct?

Or am I wrong? They actually use all of the cells for residential. The sampling part comes in to when they're When they're looking at the – you're correct. The sampling comes in when you're looking at residential. They're not going to use all the sales like they do in commercials. So, yeah.

My understanding is that they usually use several hundred home sales, and the way that they pick them I think is kind of a random process to pick those home sales. But they don't look at every single property. And because of that, for a number of years now, I have done similar – data analysis, trying to do this on my own, trying to use all of the data as much as I possibly can. And so I just handed out a minute ago, and you're welcome to, anybody who wants to see this is welcome to have an access to it. I apologize for that. I selected a couple points on the chart there, and I apologize. I think my selections moved for some reason. I just printed this out in color so you can see this a little bit easier, and my selected points moved. But let me just make a point here. This is 2026 home sales starting January 1 through July 31. And there were 7,490 homes were sold in that timeframe. So basically seven months, we had almost 7,500 homes were sold. Of those, 4,997 sold above the appraised value. And I'm talking 2026 appraised value. So January 1, 2026. just under 5,000 of these 7,500 homes sold above their latest appraised value by the county. And the other third, 2487, sold below their appraised value. So it's about two to one. About two out of every three homes are selling above the 2026 appraised value. I think that data is necessary because there's a narrative out there that's not data-driven, that everything is overvalued. And I guess my point would be is that the data should dictate the narrative. And I'm not trying to raise property taxes on anybody. I just want the data to speak for itself. what I'm after, I think a lot of us are after, is the consistency in how we evaluate property. Because consistency drives fairness. And all this does is helps us know how to split the tax levy between property owners. Assessed value creates, if you will, an apportionment of the tax burden to every property owner. That's all it does. And so consistency and applying the law the same to every single property creates a fair way to distribute the tax burden amongst the different property owners. And based on this, I would say that at least two out of every three times, the value is based on actual sales of 7,500 homes. the actual sales price was higher than the price value of the county. And by the way, I think if we go back in time, I think every year I've been here, the sales ratio study has come in below 100%. It's never been – I don't think it's ever been above 95% since I've been here. It's always been at 90% or roughly sometimes quite a bit even below that. So targeting 90%, you were right on the cusp of 90%, which again, if I would – Pick a number to target that would be 90%, not 110%. Right. You were right there with the state's analysis. And I would argue this red line here represents, in case you don't want to look at the data here, the red line represents the average of the home sales, which is above the green line. The green line is your perfect appraisal. It means the property sold for exactly what it was appraised for. Only six properties fit that narrative, six out of the 75,000. And so two-thirds of the properties sold for more than the 2026 appraised value so far in 2026. I hope that narrative helps. If you have any questions on that, let me know.

And that's correct. We had looked at that also commissioner how typically we, I know, commissioner typically asked for this at the end of the year, which we will provide you again. But, yes, we sold that to you when we were looking at our analysis.

so commissioner how i just want to ask you so it looks to me like around 66 percent are selling above so 33 percent of folks are selling their house for less than what so that that's that's what i want to gain is a third of the folks out there are selling their houses for less than what the appraised value is and that's where i kind of want to get into our subset of data and I sent you an email and was asking you about that, Deanne. I was trying to understand the discussions we had at the Commission is we wanted to look at the total market. We want to look at everything. You know, in the past, they'd said, well, auction properties, we weren't going to look at those, but everybody knows that is a lot of true market. A lot of those are auction properties. Actually, more often than not, they're not a forced sale. And we look at pre-foreclosures. We look at judicial orders. A lot of these make up that smaller... lower property in, $150,000. And that's what I'm concerned is a lot of those folks that have been in their houses for 30 or 40 years, they're in older neighborhoods, they've got deferred maintenance, and that's the ones that I'm concerned they're definitely fitting into this 33% that they're paying more in taxes than what they've had. So we've had a discussion. We wanted to put it on our legislative agenda to have PVD look at everything. And I understand, Justin, you guys came back and you said, We have that right to do that internally. We don't have to have any legislative movements. Am I stating that correct, Justin, or do you want to restate that?

Yeah, and Chairman, and I think Deanna may get to this in more detail, but I think the analysis Scott Anderson and our office researched at some was that there is a statute that allows some of those sales to be considered, whereas I think before the Sedgwick County appraiser, I don't think, had been considering those. And in certain circumstances, they can be. I think there was some... mixed guidance from the state on that. Again, Deanna or Scott Anderson can talk to that in more detail, but Deanna's going to talk about it more, but the view is that KDOR slash PVD, Property Evaluation Division, are okay with some of those sales being used in certain circumstances, and I'll defer to Deanna to explain that in more detail.

Okay, but the major question I've been trying to ask, and I sent it to you again last night, I'm trying to understand like 742 7,490 home sales. Is that everything that's sold or is that only what we say is valid? I'm trying to, I'm trying to identify if there's 10,000 sales, do we say only 7,000 of them are valid or how many sales are we invalidating? Is that trying to understand?

Give me a minute here. Okay. I do have a couple of things right before that, but I think I'll answer your question. If I don't, then we'll circle back.

I thought we were going to bring it up, but yeah, but I'm, Before we go out and start cheering that we're within 90% and we're doing everything right, let's look at a third of the time we're overcharging for taxes or for valuation and try to find out exactly what the total market is.

So, first of all, I'm going to let you know that I did discuss this briefly earlier with the board earlier. about taking a broader view and looking at a broader set of residential sales. So this is kind of a follow-up with that. But I want to remind everyone that statutorily we're required to be uniform and equitable at a fair market value. And so that requires us to make sure that all of our real property and tangible property are appraised uniformly and equally within the class at a fair market value. Also, when you look at fair market value, that is also in state statute, and it defines fair market value as an amount that a well-informed buyer would pay from a well-informed seller That would accept an open competitive market without and do compulsion or assuming this and we must assume the sale is of January 1. that's our lean day. So that's our evaluation date. That's when we have to make do our evaluations on also, it does require. That all real property to be appraised at fair market value. And it's actually determined by actual review and inspection of sales. So we kind of touch base with that. You kind of alluded to that historical treatment of sales data. We have used three years' worth of data for our sales data. So for this year, for tax year 2027 valuation, we would use sales all the way back to January 1 of 2024. But historically, we used three years' worth of sales to make sure that we were – Reviewing the market appropriately and, um, as you alluded to chairman, um. Previously, when we Pre validated some cells, there were some sales that were judicial orders, immediate family sales, absolute auctions, foreclosures and some other potential for cell situations that we wouldn't even look at. Uh, that we didn't look at determining. We also determined that. Using our available resources to determine whether or not they fall into these categories. We use the sales validation questionnaire. And we looked at indications of distress with the cells, how much the bank was involved with the cell. And if the, if the property that was sold had adequate market exposure. So, um. With that said that, um, I decided. And I alluded to this, uh, the 1st part of July. that I was going to use additional sales. So with my prior background in real estate and with looking at fee appraisers procedures and actually even PVD, they actually have considered a broader set of sales and that you can verify them as arm's length transactions and they are exposed to the market and we should be using those. That was my feeling about it when I spoke about this earlier. And this is our plan going forward. We actually went back and I'll give you some numbers here in a little bit, Chairman, but We went back and pulled ourselves for the back three years to look at those validities that we had previously not put in our analysis because I felt like it was a broader view and it lined up more with what fee appraisers were doing and it lined up more which property owners understand better. And it also lined up with some more that the sales ratio was actually using that the PVDU is using. So I went back and I looked at the same things that probably Scott Anderson did, but I went back and looked at the PVD guidelines. I looked at IAAO industry standards for different types of validities. And I also called PVD and consulted with them in reference to the additional validities that I was going to review and putting them into our analysis and i realized that there were some other counties that were actually already using them um if they could verify that they were a valid cell now i wanted i want to bring this back because i want everyone to realize that previous county appraisers They weren't wrong by not using those extra cells. They weren't. They were still treating everyone fair and equal and uniform. And so I just want to let you know that I don't feel like they were wrong. It was a an appraiser discretion to be able to use them or not use them and I've discerned to use them, but I don't want anybody to think that we, for years and years and not done the right thing because we have we've and the reason for that is because such a county typically has enough sales to support the market, the value that we set forth. And so I definitely want to bring that point up today, because I think that might be something that someone would look at and say, well, we've been doing this wrong all along. Well, no, we have it. We have not. And so, um. With the with that said, um. The cells are not going to be included simply because they occurred, though. We're not going to use every cell that's out there because we need to be able to verify that the cell has... Adequate exposure to the market arm's length transaction. There's no undue compulsion or stress for that sale. So. It not every sale that we have received in our office with an are we going to be using and honestly, these cells take more time and more effort and research to make sure that they can be used in. our evaluation. And we're going to use the resources that we have, which is the sales validation questionnaires, online listings. and visiting with the seller and the buyer, that's the information that we're going to have to be able to determine whether or not they fall into a category of being valid. So the purpose is to strengthen our market analysis and support a stronger valuation. I will let you know that, and you were asking about numbers. Just a minute, let me get to that. So again, we go back three years, right? And so the three years going back on the sales, if we included every sale that we received that was a residential sale, there would be 24,671 sales. And out of that 24,671 cells, we've already reviewed 17,741 of those cells and we deemed them to be valid, which is approximately 72% of our overall total. We've also reviewed 4,646 cells that is approximately 19% that we have deemed to be invalid. So meaning they didn't have the proper exposure, there wasn't an arm wrestling transaction. We do have 2,284 cells, which is 9% to review to determine whether or not we can use them in our analysis.

Okay, so just trying to understand historically, and I understand you're saying no one's done anything wrong, but I'm just trying to understand the interpretations because it looks like right now 28% of sales wouldn't even have been included because they were part of that group. I know whenever I did my own personal appeals, half of my were thrown out and they were on the open market. They were all MLS comps that were out there. They weren't for sale necessarily. They were out there on the open market. And I'm just trying to understand. I mean, that's. a pretty large number to me and a pretty big percentage. And I know a lot whenever you came on and you shared publicly that your theory was that the values in the past were suppressed and you were doing this, you know, one-time catch-up. And I know, you know, a lot of constituents had increases up to 60 percent. But you did all that without this potentially 20% to 28% of sales included in that. So now I'm just trying to figure out where we're at. And more importantly, not just to us here in Sedgwick County, I'm concerned that there's 105 different ways of doing this. I mean, you said some counties were accepting this. I don't know how we proved to the public that we have a consistent taxing policy here.

Well, one, you need to realize that the market in Sedgwick County is not going to be the market in Garden City. So we will not value the same way exactly as someone in Garden City would do because our market's not going to be the same. Probably the closest market to ours would be Johnson County. They have comparable parcel counts that we do, and it is a little newer. We're a little older than they are. In reference to construction, so we, we have to know what are and I know that you brought this up before chairman. That that local people know the market better than does. And so that's what I'm saying that we're looking at the local market and we're looking at all of these and I think maybe you. Misunderstood something I said, yeah, I guess I don't understand. I'm going to roll back to the numbers to start with. You said 28%. We weren't using before. Well, out of that 28% that you said 19%, we won't use now either. We only have 9% to review to determine whether or not we're going to use them or not. And I will tell you the preliminary that we're looking at, we're picking up about 40% of what we've been looking at so far. We have just started doing the review on them. So only 40% of the 9% we'll actually end up using because they'll be valid for us to use.

Yeah, I get the 28% from the 19% that you had and the 9% you were still looking at. Right. And I just, you know, I don't know if we'll probably have to have another meeting or something else where I'd like to dig in deeper and better understand that. As far as real estate, yes, it's local. Western Kansas, Johnson County is different. That's the major thing with real estate. It's all local. But policies and procedures should be consistent. Wouldn't you agree?

They are consistent. That's why we have to uniform.

How are they consistent whenever you're telling me that other counties accept these?

Because that's what the market is. The market here... isn't going to be the market in Garden City. So what we use for the sales may be different here than what Garden City uses. Or let's just say Ellis, Kansas. I mean, Ellis County, for instance, up by Hays, So they may not have as many cells, so they're going to need to get as many cells in as possible. They may even use more cells than what we will use because they don't have any cells. And you have to have some kind of cells to back up what your values are. And so across the board, I can't say that Cedric County and Ellis County or Feeney County can be all the same because they can't be. Our markets are not the same.

I guess another concern I have, too, is we have all this data, but so many of these are put together with cost replacement. So how does that play into this as well? Because we're deviating from all the data we have to use cost replacement. But then we're invalidating sales, too.

So, you're right, that's going to be a whole nother meeting for me to explain to you how the cost works, but I will let you know that every valuation method uses sales. To determine what the value is, so that's why every evaluation would be. Considered fair market value, because every evaluation, whether it be income, whether it be our model based, whether it be our cost approach, or whether it be ourselves market approach. It all of them have a sales factor in it. So but yes, if if you want to talk about just cost, then we will definitely have to have another meeting in reference to that. I'm not prepared to go into that in depth. I'm not. And I need to know probably how you want to go on it because cost is is is a formula. And it expands out and I don't have a problem coming in visiting with you about that at a later time.

Okay. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry.

No, go on.

Well, I was going to ask question how talked about 2026. Sales percentage do we have a final 2025 number for I remember 2023 it was 94% of. residential sales were above the county evaluations. And then in 2024, I think it was like 85% or something. Well, I'm just kind of curious. I know what the ratio study, I know that percentage, but do we have a percentage yet on 2025 sales?

No, I do not have that with me, but I will send that to you. Does anybody else want that?

That'd be great. Thanks. i do have some comments on i know you have another topic you're going to discuss but so let just let me know when are you still going to talk a little bit more about the valuations or you know i'll just say what i'm going to say and we'll go from there people are very frustrated at valuations because they traditionally have led to property tax increases so i've been saying this publicly for three years now the onus on property taxes is the electeds that are setting the budgets. So, here we are again. We're going to have 8, 10 percent assessed value growth in jurisdictions all across the county. And this week and next week, you're going to have local governments adopting budgets. And wouldn't you know, damn it, about a good percentage of them, probably the majority, are going to take every penny of that assessed value growth and then point a finger at you and say, but the valuation, but the valuations are high. Instead of doing what we're going to do here and be a good steward over the tax dollar and the taxpayer and say, we don't need 7.5 percent assessed value growth to run our government. We're going to redo. We don't need that much. This conversation continues to go because local governments continue to grow their government at a pace that's faster than citizens can afford. And they're using assessed value growth and all the assessed value growth to justify it instead of just being diligent in their budget processes and saying this is a hard decision. Yeah, that's probably a need, but our taxpayers can't afford it, so we're going to have to forego it at this point in time. I think you're going to see that displayed for the entire world tomorrow when we adopt our budget, that we don't need 7.5%, 8%. of assessed value growth. So number one, for the public's, for the umpteenth time, the budget is different than the valuation. The onus on property tax increases should be held at your local electeds that are setting budgets. But the second thing is, and I've told you this a few times, and I've even pleaded for you to forgive me when I say it, and it's not a personal issue. Anytime someone cannot understand a variable that's related to taxation, it creates frustration. And if the state had any gumption about reform, they would say, you know what? The average citizen cannot understand mass appraisal. You just spent 30 minutes talking about this in my notes here, and I've been doing this for three and a half years trying to understand it. And you just acknowledge you're going to have to come back and do a whole other meeting just on cost replacement. The average citizen cannot understand this. We just can't. We can't.

How long have you been doing this? Over 28 years.

Over 28 years, and you have to be certified with years of experience before you'll even unleash an appraiser. I just think what is so challenging is people can't understand the science behind mass appraisal, and then it's tied to a variable where we use to set budgets and levy property taxes. I'd have the same charge against the federal income tax code that I have to have a CPA and two lawyers help me interpret in these workarounds. It's the same charge. Anytime you have a variable that is hard to understand, that is tied to people's well-being and their pocketbooks, it creates frustration and confusion and it demoralizes people. I have no doubt that your data is accurate and the state just validated your data. There's mechanisms we can talk about and how do we use more sales, things like that. But the challenge is we can't understand mass appraisal. The general layperson can't understand mass appraisal science, and that's what creates frustration. That's why we had how many appeals did we have this last year?

93, something around that.

Yeah, roughly 9,000 appeals as people are looking and saying, no way, how could this possibly be? And we have that. And then we also have the state saying, oh, but actually you were only at 89% compliance. You crept into the bottom of compliance, Sedgwick County. You're undervaluing property here. You see the tension in the rub. And that's the calls that we get as trying to help people understand this science of mass appraisal that frankly is very difficult for people to understand. So- I would just say to the public, totally get it. I totally get it. And I think the state should look at it. Mass appraisers are doing their job. But there's got to be an easier way to determine what a valuation is to base to levy taxes. There's just got to be a better and easier way for people to understand. So I don't think the state's going to go there because I think that's too sweeping a reform for some of those folks. But my God, we need it because I don't think we're ever going to get away from this if it's still this complicated.

So, yes, if you're not an economist or a statistician, even when I come back to talk to you guys again, it may not mean anything because it does take years of classes to understand that, that it's all based on, and because the mass appraisal is mass, right? To be honest with you, we did all of the 239,000, some properties in Cedric county as a fee appraiser would do that. You and I would both have to move. We would all have to move because the affordability of being able to. Have a fear appraisal done on every property. Would be astronomical, so that's why they went towards the mass appraisal process. So we can do it in mass. And the statistics that I talked about at the very beginning are measures to see whether or not we're doing a good job, but those are statistical too. And if you don't understand that, yeah, it would be in it. And I can see where that would be coming from where the property owners thinking that we're trying to to not be transparent with them. But it's hard to be transparent when you can't explain it at a level that can be understood.

And mass appraisal is its own science. And we can measure the validity of mass appraisal within the realm of mass appraisal. But the bottom line is the market price is what people sell it for. And there's a lot of different things that indicate and influence that. And what my neighbor is doing with their property. It's a comp shouldn't really impact what I can sell my property for in many different ways because people buy properties for a lot of different reasons. And I think that's the frustration people have is trying to determine market value. I'll stop. But I want people to understand that when they're frustrated about their property taxes, they need to call the 170 taxing jurisdictions in Sedgwick County and talk to those elections that are setting these budgets because they're the ones that are screwing you by growing their government the way they are.

And I will let you know that my plan is to go back in the three years, review those extra sales, determine if they can be used in our analysis and put them in our analysis. And I will report back on the impact of those additional sales after our analysis gets done. But that will be probably around February when I do my annual report.

I'm just going to state that, you know, I'm not an expert at mass appraisals, but I do understand. real estate sales, and I do understand how to analyze data, and I do understand that throwing out large sets of data can skew all the results. I do have concerns with this. I'm not going to be satisfied today, but I want to continue this conversation because I understand we are 20-25% of that tax bill, but we have the responsibility to ensure there's an accurate valuation for the schools, for the cities, for everyone else that's maybe not choosing or can't do a mill levy cut. So, I want to continue this conversation because I want to be able to look my constituents in the face and say, yes, we have a process that doesn't require a catch up from one appraiser's idea from another, that we have process of procedures That are consistent and that we're looking at the total market and that's where I want to get.

We actually are already during that chairman. Um, we are, we have procedures and, and we are consistent with our property evaluations. That's what some of those statistics did show. I will let you know that it is the Cedric county appraiser's responsibility to set values. Um. No one else in Cedric County has that authority to do so. And I am taking a fresh new look at it. We are changing some processes to make things better. And with that said, just letting you know that we're being transparent with you, letting you know when we're making these changes and so that you're aware of that. But the way that the properties are valued in Cedric County are still the responsibility of the Cedric County appraiser. So I'm going to move on to the next one.

I have a couple of comments at least. I also want to say I completely agree with Commissioner Beatty's comments earlier, except for the D word he used. But other than that, a couple of points here. Statistically, when you put these errors together, Statistically, the average of the errors is impressive. Let me just say that. What I'm not happy with is the width of the errors. And I think that's, you're doing the best you can with the data that you have. And I think that one of the points I would make is, if the state really wants to fix this problem, they need to invest in making the appraisals as accurate as possible by providing the very best data. as possible to your system, if you will. That's beyond our ability. I don't think as commissioners we have a lot of ability to change how you access data. Your system that you access and how it's done is a state function, as far as I can tell. So the errors, and I'll just say this, the system is not perfect. There are lots of examples below this line here that shows this is, in my opinion, a bad appraisal. Not because you guys did something wrong. You did the best you could. But for whatever reason, it led you to make the appraisal, in my opinion, is just ridiculous, overvalued because it sold so far below. On the converse of that, there's also homes that are undervalued, grossly undervalued. It sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars more than what they were appraised at. So the error is in both directions. It's not just one side or the other. The average of all those is impressive. But the air ban should be duly noted. And I'll just say once again, you know, property tax is a national issue. It's not just here in Sedgwick County. It's not just Sedgwick County government. It's everywhere across the nation and certainly across the state of Kansas. And, again, as much as I – I would like to see the state invest in improving the quality of the data, not because it's statistically wrong, but the error band is too wide, if that makes any sense. Whatever we can do to narrow that error band. No matter what, this line between what I call perfect appraisal is infinitely small. It's the smallest line. Unless you have a perfect appraisal, it means it sold for exactly what it was appraised for, and only six properties were that number. If you're going to err one way or the other, I would like to err on the side that says it sold for slightly more than what it appraised for, ideally, if you're going to err one way or the other. And again, we're in the correct direction. It's just there's, as Chairman Blubaugh said, there's a third of the properties that sold for less than what they're appraised for, and that is a concern. I agree with him on that. And then I just say this, I'll say once again, all the ideas we come up with on how to address property taxes. And again, I think you personally and your staff, I'm glad you're a central county team and everything. And I think you all do the best you can. I still think that the Fraser function should be a state function primarily because they're a disinterested party. What I mean by that is there's an underlying accusation that we're trying to get more tax dollars because we're pressuring you or manipulating your staff or the process behind the scenes to inflate values unfairly so we can get more tax dollars. There is an accusation that that happens. A little way to get rid of that accusation, I think, is to transfer this entire function to the state because they are, to quote them, they're out of the property tax business and they're a disinterested party at this point. So I'd like to see the state take over the function of appraisers across the state of Kansas. And I think what you also see is some consistency that, again, I don't think it's intentional, but let's say Butler County might do something slightly different than what we do them here. And I have examples of what I mean by that. There are some differences from county to county, and I don't think it's intentional. But those differences, in my opinion, it violates the constitutional principles of uniform and equal. So I think the state should take this function over entirely. And, again, it could still be a county-based office, but I wish that the state would simply own the entire function of the appraiser's office. And so with that, I'll just wrap this up and say I agree with what Commissioner Beatty said. What I would like to see is the most accurate appraisals possible. If every appraisal was perfect – We wouldn't be talking about fairness any longer. We'd just be talking about magnitude. It's all about equity and the magnitude of our tax burden. The equity is your job to find how do we divide the tax burden as a function of the appraiser and state law. The magnitude of our tax burden is what we do as commissioners, as we do as elected officials passing that budget. And I want to focus on making sure we have the most conservative budget possible and But then how that's divided amongst the property owners is really a function of state law and the appraiser's office. And we have almost zero control over that. So it has to be noted once again. Thanks again. Appreciate it.

And again, one last thing, and I know I've said this before, but whenever you look at majority of of those sales that have went through a broker and everything they've spent a lot of money to get that house market ready and put it out there it's that that's that's why i'm so um i'm going to continue to push that we look at all comparables because if it's a judicial order if it's something that it's an auction property, it's an as is that's a snapshot of what the condition of that property really is deferred maintenance and everything. We know every house that's out there in Sedgwick County is not market ready. So I'm deeply concerned that a third of our sales were above, you know, we're, we're, we're, They sold for less than what the tax value is. So I'm going to continue to push for more and more accuracy.

And we haven't done the full extent of looking at 2026 sales. So you might want to wait until we get through the year to see all the sales, to see how it all pans out. That would be a suggestion that I also have. Another suggestion I have is, Yes, the property owner can come in for an appeal and they can explain what any kind of deferred maintenance that they have. They don't have to wait for that appeal. I urge anyone that has deferred excessive deferred maintenance. To call our office and we'll do a field check on it. We'll make an assessment. We'll make an adjustment and and then you're right. Those ones that we're lacking the deferred maintenance on. We need that information and again, we don't go on the interior unless they request that we do. So, but they do need to reach out to our office so that we can get the information correct.

And, you know, when we were preparing for this yesterday, you mentioned that you do, you'll do your normal February report to the commission and you'll have the additional details on. kind of that subset of data and everything that the chairman has asked for. So you'll be able to report out thoroughly based on a whole year of data at that time, right?

Right. And the impact that using these cells.

I'm not going to settle my hands till February because it's all the things that we want to ask for legislatively. I want to understand that. We're going to have a new administration, a new governor. So I want to make sure that we're as educated as we are here at Sedgwick County and we know what we're asking the state for.

And I think chairman to your point, I think we're going to have a legislative round table before long. And I know that was 1 of the things that the commission wanted to talk about is valuation process and all of that. So, I think this was just talking about that specific subset. But yes, I mean, I'm not trying to encourage you to wait till then.

Commissioner Wise and I will be up in the northeast, I think Wyandotte, wherever we're going, Friday to meet with the big five. I hope that I can introduce that into some of our conversation and see how the five largest counties in Sedgwick County are looking or in the state of Kansas are looking. Anything else on the next topic then?

Do we have time to go through the next one? Okay. All right. Reported in July of. In July of twenty six, this is a follow up on and and just want to remind you that in July of twenty, twenty five, the appraiser's office completed a review. Of the and properties and during, and we reported the results to the, and what we recognized during that review was there was approximately 112 and that had not went through the full exempt and approval process with. Receiving a boda order, the previous county appraiser who retired in June of 2025 had been solely responsible for the last approximately 30 years for this process. I can't speak to why they did what they did. I can just tell you what we're doing moving forward. So following the July 2025 review, our office has implemented additional procedures to review controls to help prevent similar evaluation issues from recurring. So some of the procedures that we created were that we added a new full-time position that was created just for specifics of handling the IRBs and EDXs. We met with PVD, BOTA, the BOCC, other Cedric County departments, bond council, and various cities regarding past and future issues. A checklist was created for these applications to make sure that we completed them Fully and for an easy review for the county appraiser and counselor to look at additional fields were also added to our database to help us with tracking. All current active and have an exemption record and Orion at this time, I will tell you, we did not have that when we looked at that in July of 2025. I will also in monitoring tool has been created to track this process. um and to make sure that we have accurate values on it in 2026 final review was completed using the commercial standards evaluation processes using the new tools that were created to verify fair and equitable valuations and all entries were done and were by entry staff and were qc'd The committee consisted the committee that consists of this new position, which we call it a special projects and exempt praiser. We also have legal counsel with us. So the. The exemption appraiser legal counsel and myself review all applications prior to making the county appraiser recommendation and sending it to Boda. This is a new process. We also have processed 18 IRBs and EDXs. So we are waiting for two appraiser recommendations on two 2026 applications that hopefully this afternoon, legal counsel and I will be able to review those and get those sent up to BOTA. We're waiting for one 2026 and one 2025 from BOTA to return for approval. And these are our current IRBs and EDXs, not the 112 that I talked about originally. And from BODA, we have 13 2026 and one 2025 IRB that's been returned from BODA with their approval and their order and their docket number. In March of 2026, the county appraiser's office was asked to participate in the legislative post-audit process. They selected us because they were selecting larger jurisdictions that had IRBs. During the process, we met with them And when we met with them, we chose to self-report that we had not processed approximately 112 IRBs properly and received proper BOTA approval with the docket number. Um, I will tell you that the procedures that I spoke about. In the previous point was taken into account. They're fully into action and that's to help us from having these issues of not having all of them properly approved by. Um, and I will tell you that when I reached out to the auditor prior to them. Releasing the audit that the audit there told me that we didn't get any recommendations in county because they had already understood that we had corrected the process and we were in the middle of correcting the issues and making sure that we get all 100. of the IRBs formally approved from BODA. The legislative post-audit report was issued in July of 2026, which we did notify PVD and the BOCC about their findings. I will tell you that since then, we received a Kansas Open Records Act request on a specific IRB EDX property. Yeah. Um, and, um, when we provided the information they requested, unfortunately, the information and commissioner radius, you have stressed already that. Our information is complicated and the, the requester, um. Was open to having a meeting with subject county staff to explain the information for which we provide it. And so we met with that individual and we sat down with them and explained the information that was provided. And actually during the CORA request, it was identified that there was a clerical error on that property. So this is a separate situation from the legislative post audit. It's a clerical error that was made. it was found it was addressed it was corrected and a tax bill has been sent out for the remaining taxes for that property um i do think uh It that that error would have been. More or less caught if we would have used our typical commercial review process and entry process, because we have to see that review that to make sure our entries look correct. So, in the future. I'm not saying that human error won't occur and X and mistakes will not occur. What I'm telling what I am saying is. We do have a process in place that wasn't followed previously in order to catch such errors. So we feel like that error would have been caught. We also feel like. During our clean up process, because it will take some time to do a clean up process. I know you read in the post audit. Legislated post audit report that we had reported to them that it could take 2 to 3 years because of the complexity of these applications. There are over 98 pages worth of data that we have to sort through and sometimes there's even multiple communications that we have to do with the entities to make sure that we're actually exempting what. What they were approved to exempt when they requested their. So, um, sometimes it's not as clear as it should be. Um, and I don't know, mainly because these are on industrial type properties that there, some of them are large. They have a lot of different ages on buildings, different buildings uses. But the person we've hired in the position that oversees this, very detailed and very good at what she does. And she would have found that clerical error once she started looking at the information. It did come to us a little quicker because of the core request when we looked at it more in depth. And then... I did go ahead and request that our office do an audit on all 24 to 25 and 25 to 26 IRBs and EDXs to make sure that we didn't have any more of these. The clerical error actually was that there was two classifications. There was an exempt class and a commercial class. And when the appraiser entered in the information, even though on their final review documentation they had it correct when they entered it in they flip-flopped and they had the exemption value on the commercial portion class and they had the commercial value on the exemption portion class so um with that said um we do um we have started working on our 112 outstanding ones to make sure all the documentations are in order. We will go through the proper review process with legal counsel and we will send an appraiser a recommendation to the BODA with the proper documentation and check and get those orders back in process. So I have asked finance to participate in this information set. So I'm going to have Brent come up here and give us some additional information in reference to what finance's role is in this. So thank you, Brent.

Good morning, Brent.

Good morning. Just for the record, Brent Shelton, your deputy CFO, and appreciate all the work that Deanna has done to and her staff has done to clean up the process that, frankly, process is only good if it's being followed and it's being followed and improved as we speak. I know there's been a lot of social media discussion around a specific industrial revenue bond and talking about taxes that were lost and taxes that were foregone. First of all, let's just... Let's just talk about that specific property and kind of IRBs holistically. So the property in question has about five or six parcels that over the course of time have moved from bare agricultural land and the taxes that were generated before any commercial activity took place. One of them was $6.58, and that was the large one. The other one was $5.56. Per year, total taxes, all jurisdictions. Since those initial IRBs, Since those initial IRBs were issued, and sometimes they carried a partial tax exemption, so taxes were paid ongoing, one of those parcels has generated over $2 million in property tax revenue across all jurisdictions. So, Well, yes, there was a clerical error that has been corrected. I think the bigger picture is that that's an IRB that has worked pretty well. That's just one of those parcels. And I think some of the confusion is because of the way the land is laid out in Sedgwick County and the way we track it, we track and bill at the parcel level. There can be multiple projects on one parcel. So an IRB can go... for 10 years and another one for another five plus five year for a different project on the same parcel. In this case, as Deanna mentioned, there was commercial taxable value on that industrial revenue bond. It just got flipped. It's been corrected. The bill will be paid. So I think holistically, that's the other side of the story. with an IRB and a tax exemption, we're not giving up anything we didn't already have. We're foregoing some or all of the taxes to create economic development, tax-based growth, and potentially new jobs. So I think that just, I wanted to kind of frame that so that the rest of the story is out.

Yeah, Brent, thanks for the explanation. That's really, thank you. So this clerical error, so this RRB had been going on for a number of years. Does this clerical error go back one year?

It goes one year.

So the previous X number of years on all those parcels were fine.

And I think part of the complexity is that the amount of of the exemption, the percentage of exemption can change from one year to the next. So they need to be reviewed on an annual basis, which is why the team approach and the collaborative approach of looking at those assures that we have a much better product.

Yeah, thank you, Brent. Thank you for that. There's two conversations happening on this topic, IRBs and And they're both important topics. I don't want to conflate them. One is the value of IRBs and any sort of municipal tax incentive. That's a separate conversation in many ways. It's a conversation I actually think that we need to have as a community. I would love to see, you know, better explanations of how these things are used, what tools are available. I'd love to see a dashboard so the public can follow it. You know, that's a conversation. You just gave an example of how this IRB was – the capital investment has – been a significant return for the taxpayer. So that's a separate conversation that I do think we need to have the conversation on the tracking of these things and to make sure that there are systems in place. Deanna, thank you. I asked you in the room and I want the individual, the citizen that has been so involved in this. I appreciate that people care about these processes and they care deeply about understanding these and they all have opinions and their opinions are all valid. So thank you personally. I want to thank you for taking time to meet with people from the public to walk them through that. I think that's really important. And to hear their feedback. I think that's really, really helpful. I would say that I asked you a question in the room that day and I said, can we be assured that this won't happen again? Number one is, do we have systems in place now to where this little clerical error isn't going to happen? And you detailed just now all the controls that are now in place that you believe that we have enough oversight, that this isn't an issue that they could be easily repeatable. And if it is repeated, it will be caught quickly. Is there anything else? Our job is to give you the resources you need to do your job. Is there anything else this commission can do to help modernize I'd love to talk about valuations, those things, but I'm talking specifically about this area here, leaning into more technology, which is why, frankly, we hired you. This conversation in your interviews about how can you give us suggestions of how we can modernize this office and use technology, and you gave us a book that thick of everything that was in your brain and what we could do. Is there anything right now outside of the controls you put in that we can do to support you better in this?

So one of the things that you may be looking at tomorrow is that we've requested a commercial market application. Because of a multi-parcel issue that we have in Cedric County, but also because of the complexity of commercial markets. Properties and to be able to bring in sales information so that we can look at sales information that before we had been putting sales information on a spreadsheet and it was not very easy to use. So we're looking at bringing in an application to where we can. Bring those cells in and look at those cells at a whole and then also be able to bring those of those property values in the debt and look at those at a whole and then reallocate the value back out to put it back into our system for proper taxation for each property. So the commercial market application that is on that's on an agenda for you to look at is something that would definitely help. That will help. Because right now we're using a couple of different databases that it had created over 15 years ago and actually their program that program or that wrote them are long gone. So there isn't anybody really to fix them. They're kind of being held together and they're not as stable as we'd like to see. So.

Good to know remind me tomorrow this is this will actually be a part of the recommended budget tomorrow decision package. I've committed to help modernize your office. How much is this software package cost? Remember?

Can you remind us? Yeah, it's 450,000 dollars for an upstart cost estimated and then about a 100,000 dollars.

Just to be clear, it may not come up tomorrow. This will help your office modernize and hold these systems more accountable. It will make it easier and more efficient. We'll have a better understanding. You need this tool, correct, in order to do your job. Then I will happily support this because one of the main goals I think that I have in this seat is to modernize your offices and support you in all the modernization efforts. So you'll get my vote for tomorrow.

Thank you. And on both topics that we talked about today, the extra staffing that I've asked for sales staffing would be very much of a benefit to help us proceed to make both issues a better, more efficiently handled and better for our office or overall procedure. Any other questions?

Thank you, Chairman. Just real quick, you may have already stated this, but if you did, I missed it. How far back are we going to, I guess, review these? How many years back do we have to go?

We'll have to go. Well, right now, some of them are active for 10 years. So our goal would be able to go back on all 10 years. But we're going to be looking at we're going to look at ones that have a lot of incomplete data to start with on the application and the ones that are a little messier. But we'll start the most current and go back.

And if we find if we clean this up and fix it, whatever taxes were due, will be, I assume will be paid by the property. We'll have to make it right. We will make an effort to collect that

I'm going to say this, and then I'm going to ask Justin probably to confirm. But there is a state statute 79, 1701A, I believe, to where the commissioners have a right to approve a clerical error for the current and two years back. So if it's a clerical error, we would be able to do that two years back. Is there something you can add on that, Justin?

And I think that's the limit of the discretion that the board would have in those matters. I mean, I would concur with what Deanna indicated on that. Commissioner, how did you have more to that question?

I guess I'd just like to know if someone, let's say, has an eight-year-old IRB that was not filed correctly and there maybe was abated taxes and we We try to resolve all of this. I'm not sure where we are with that property specifically. If the abatement's approved, I guess then there's nothing to be done other than file it correctly and correct the paperwork. I mean, I assume that that doesn't change the taxes so much, but there may be one that's not approved. And for that one, I guess that's the one I'm concerned about, that if that happens, then there's taxes. Correct me if I'm wrong. I don't understand exactly. Like $110,000. that was found on this specific one. I think the presumption is there was an abatement provided that wasn't correct. They actually would have owed the tax dollars. That's the error that's in their favor that should not have been set that way. They should have paid the taxes, if I'm saying that correct.

Yes, and so we submitted a tax bill for the additional amount of taxes that they owed that they did not pay for 2025.

Okay, so going back 10 years... Some of these expire at the 10-year mark. Are we going to prioritize the older ones to make sure we don't potentially lose any revenue that might come to the county?

Maybe I didn't explain that well enough, or maybe Scott wants to come up here.

I guess I should ask, how long will this process take to go through all these?

Two to three years.

So my concern is, let's say you get to the third year and one of these expires during that time. I don't want the one that's nine years old to not get attention it needs because we're taking three years to get to it. I'm sorry, go ahead.

Good morning, Commissioner Scott Anderson, Assistant County Counselor. First time here, so I guess I'll say good morning and hi. So yeah, I've been working with Deanna on looking at the IRB process. I think the first thing, we're kind of looking at conflating two issues here. I think when we started looking at these past 112 IRBs, we didn't see any that would not have been approved or should not have been approved. So we're not anticipating an issue where we're going to have something that back taxes would be due. In the event that back taxes are due, like, if we find 1 that maybe it should not have been approved. I think that's highly unlikely based on what we've already started looking at. It looks as if these are that have been properly passed by a city or a county, those kinds of things. So, in the event, we find 1 that isn't, we are limited on how far back we can go, but I don't anticipate. Like I said that we're going to find those issues. With the recent issue that we found, that wasn't really related to the IRB, more clerical error, I guess.

It's more of a misclassification?

Yes. I think fat fingering numbers basically is the better way to put it.

I guess what I'm saying is I just want to make sure we don't miss an opportunity. So if we need to pay attention to older data because they're rolling off of our chance to fix anything or address something, we need to give them a priority so we don't miss our opportunity. That's all I'm saying. I'm not sure that's been clarified by anybody that that's our intent. I do appreciate the fact that, Pierce, I would just rephrase what you said earlier. This looks like we have a systematic process to make sure we don't make this error again. To me, that's comforting. I think that was very well stated earlier. My only concern is it sounds like we have a time window to deal with some of these things, and some of these things potentially have a tax implication to taxing jurisdictions, and I want to make sure we prioritize those such that we don't miss our chance to do whatever needs to be done. That's all I'm saying.

Absolutely. And I will obviously defer to Deanna on how she prioritizes those with our, like I said, I'm part of that team. So we will certainly make sure to look at those.

Thank you for the chance to speak.

Anything else? Thank you.

Thanks, Deanna. Okay, this next part could be very short or could be very long, right? I think it's, we're talking about budget. If the commission wants to bring anything up or talk about any of their potential motions or resolutions tomorrow, now is the time. Or if you want to add anything to the list, now is the time also. And Lindsay, do you want to go first?

Well, and I think so. Um, if we can, I'd like to take a couple of minutes just to cover with all five commissioners. We had an opportunity to talk with the chair and pro tem this morning, but just to reiterate R and R the revenue neutral rate protocol for tomorrow. And then yes, we'll circle back with commissioners on any of your individual motions. Plus we'll recap kind of those standard motions that we want you to be prepared for and see if you have any questions. So Justin, are you okay?

Certainly. Uh, chairman commissioners, Justin Wagner, County counselor, uh, As you all know, tomorrow on both the county agenda and then the fire district agenda, there's really three related budget items. There's the revenue neutral rate hearing, potential adoption of a resolution. There's the budget hearing and there's the budget vote. That's the order that they'll be in on each of those agendas. I'm talking about the revenue neutral rate. I think you all are quite aware of this revenue neutral rate. Essentially means to be revenue neutral, you have to bring in the same or less amount of ad valorem property taxes as the prior budget year. So if you exceed R&R by Revenue neutral rate or R&R, just by levying $1 more, you're exceeding R&R. There's no exceptions in the law that count for growth or property values increasing. WSU mill levy, for example, we've talked about before. So all those things don't influence this. It's just if there's $1 more or $0.01 more. coming into the county or the fire district, and you're exceeding R&R. And so under the revenue neutral rate statutes, taxing subdivisions must indicate their potential intent to exceed R&R on or before July 20th of each year. You all did that for both these taxing subdivisions on July 15th. And for the county mill levy, there is a maximum potential mill levy of 26.842 approximately as what you intended. The manager's recommended budget does contemplate reducing the mill levy from 27.567 approximately what it was for 2026 budget to approximately a maximum of 26.842. But R&R would have been, again, if you're taking the same amount of money coming in and no more, would have been a mill of you for 2027 of 25.654 mills. So because Sedgwick County is proposing to exceed the revenue rate, we don't know yet because you all take action tomorrow. The board's required to hold a public hearing for folks to be able to provide comments specific to the R&R issue. And if the board wants to exceed the R&R rate, then would need to adopt a resolution. We have a pretty standardized script for the chairman to follow. I think it's the exact same that Commissioner Beatty, when he was chairman last year, stepped the board through. I'd be happy to stand for any questions on this, commissioners, if you have them.

Yes. Any questions?

Okay. Okay, so commissioners tomorrow, we will start with, we will do two separate series of items, one each for the county and fire. You'll start with your R&R. I think it's important. I think Justin mentioned it, that you're going to approve a resolution before we close the public hearing. That's really unusual for what we do, but the chairman, again, has a script and Justin has offered to jump in if necessary to keep all of us on track. So we'll go through that. Then you'll go into your second public hearing, and that will be a normal public hearing. And you will close the hearing and you will receive and file. And then we're going to get to the fun part, budget adoption. We're all going to take wagers about what time we're going to wrap up. So if you want to get on that, you let us know. And a large part of that's going to depend on what you all decide to do. So when we get to that, we do have a number of motions that we have talked about already that staff is recommending to you in terms of making adjustments to the recommended budget. So we will have those independent motions ready for you. That will include changing EMS ambulances. You don't have these motions in front of you today. I'm just talking through them with you. I didn't want to. We didn't want to give you too many pieces of paper, but you will have a motion that's going to allow you to change the makeup. It's not going to change the funding, but to change the makeup of what's being added to the fleet. So, in lieu of the 2 ambulances and 2 operational support vehicles that were included in the recommended. We are going to recommend that you change it to three E350 ambulances, which are the smaller ambulances. Those will be for the basic life support programs and three operational support vehicles. That will not increase the overall cost. This, to be clear, is at the request of EMS. This is not something that management is suggesting. This came at their request in talking through various deployment models. Then, you know that we've already talked about Lynn's request to reallocate the Northwest Expressway funding, that $740,000. We have built a motion for that based on the email that he sent on July 13th. I know that we talked last week about a possible counter motion. So that can be made by that commissioner if he so chooses. We also know that we need to increase the amount of budget authority. This is a new one. You have not heard this yet. We want to increase the budget authority for B382. which is 63rd Street South Pathway. The reason is we're going to get extra money from Butler County, and then we need to spend that money. So it's not going to be any kind of financial impact to you all, but we need to increase the spending authority by $172,544. So we will make sure that you have that motion in front of you, and it's just going to be one long sheet of staff motions. Who who wants to fight and when we'll leave that up to you guys and then obviously, as we talked about, this is also on a specific commissioners list of motions, but it is going to be a staff recommendation to eliminate the project for the 2 floating docs and the transfer out grant match within the parks budget. And so we'll have motions prepared for you for that. So those are the stock motions. And in addition, Lorian has spent a lot of time with her team putting together different motions, depending on what you actually authorize for the CIP, because we have a motion set up for you to adopt an operating budget. And then we have a motion set up for you to adopt the capital budget. So depending on where you land, we will bring up at the conclusion of your discussion the budget adoption motion that you need to use. Normally, we'll give you a whole pile. We're going to just not make life so confusing this year and just have it ready for you. So unless you throw a curveball at us, we will be ready. If you throw a curveball at us, I am going to tell you right now on record why. We're going to have to take a recess so we can go and prepare some motions. So with that said, that's the general game plan. I think to this point, most of you have talked about some motions. I think there might be a few others if anybody wants to bring those up. I'm not going to bring them up. It's up to each individual commissioner if you want to do that. We did receive some additional information from Extension. I believe that we will share that around with you. We did find out that there is $120,000 provided by KSU to the Extension Council. There was some information that they provided that said the larger contribution is the university infrastructure behind Extension. K-State Extension employs approximately 300 research scientists, 180 faculty specialists and program leaders, and 270 county and area specialists across 23 departments and five colleges. So what they say to that extent is Sedgwick County doesn't have to employ its own research scientists or specialists. We don't have to pay for the research enterprise that produces extension recommendations. And it says that we receive educational, intellectual property and infrastructure. So we're happy to send this around to all commissioners. We also, they were able to provide some different statistics on how Extension is funded here locally relative to others. And so we'll send that around to you too. There's a lot of metrics. I don't want to necessarily get into that right now because I know it's already 1125 unless Chairman would prefer that I do that.

Yeah, will you just throw out a couple, like what's some of the top metrics

um allocations and then where are we at in the state with that okay so if we look at sedgwick county our allocation is listed here at seven hundred five thousand seven hundred eighty six dollars we are the second highest population rank um if we look at johnson county they are ranked first they provide one million fifty seven thousand um in whatever the wildcat district is which is We have a lovely little map here that I'll send around. That is a collective group of about 100,000 people, and that's about $1.7 million in funding that's allocated there. Central Kansas District, which is here, That is 1.3 million with a population of about 59,000. So those are the top. Those are three, I think, to give some context. But we will be happy to forward this information around. We don't yet have confirmation on whether these allocations represent facility spending or not. The impression from the extension director was that it does not contain that funding. And so ours, of course, does not. That's funded out of the facilities budget. So when we talk about $705,000, just to be clear, that's just the allocation to them.

um with that that was the only other additional information i wanted to provide i know you sent an email around the commissioner yeah and and um and i've been talking to the extension office quite a bit you know since they've had the freezes um they're just trying to get back to their funding what was their funding they're trying to get back to 23 funding or funding 24 and it was 825 yeah and from what i understand they've they've froze all the raises. Whenever someone leaves, they're not, they're not rehiring anybody. And they're just trying to, um, get back up to that funding. And, and, um, I think they're wanting to get a marketing person because, um, I'll go through here and show, I'm going to read a potential motion to you, but I just want you to understand, um, the volunteer hours and stuff and how they're wanting to utilize that money. And I think they're wanting to, But some back into their facility and stuff. I understand a little bit too. So, um, here's 1 of the motions that I'm looking at. Um, I want to. Move that we transfer 119,960 or 119,695 dollars from the operating reserve. to the Extension Council budget, increasing its 2027 allocation to $825,481, consistent with historic funding level. And I'll make this motion based on the following information provided by the Extension Director. First, the Extension is able to leverage more than $39,881 39,800 volunteer hours annually, valued at $1.34 million, an equivalent of 14.2 FTEs, full-time positions. Second, and in grant-funded extension position, contributes to 25 SHIC volunteers who... helped almost 2,200 local seniors, saved almost $2 million in Medicare costs. And then finally, Extension reports serving over 100,000 residents and providing programming in the county agricultural sector and put a value of the Sedgwick County agricultural sector at $175 million in annual marketing output. So that's one of the motions that I'll be making. Anybody has any questions about that right now?

Not as much questions. I appreciate the information on Extension Center. I think it's been helpful to understand all they do. And I'll just say in the outset, I think Kelly is phenomenal. I think she's a great hire for our community. I'm really excited about all that she's going to do there. She's really engaging us. I'll tell you my only heartburn, because I appreciate what they do at Extension, and they do it a lot. And for people that are rural people, we have a greater... appreciation, I think, for all the work that they do. My biggest heartburn in some of this is when I look at the list of what we had to choose to cut a couple of years ago, we had to choose to cut for reasons because we had to take those dollars. We prioritized investments into 911 and other areas, and we prioritized the mill levy decrease is what we did. My heartburn is that if we're giving, if we're picking and choosing who we're going to increase back up to funding i've got tcam on here the african-american museum it was a really hard case for me to say that i'm going to support an increase in return and funding for the extension center but then look at tcam who is one they are very dependent on this funding and say that we can't do it for tcam that's my biggest that's my this is hard for me in this one i i think that it's hard practically but i think i want to be very careful about the message that we're sending is too that i would be sending Not just to my district, but a broader message that we're picking and choosing extension center, but we're looking at the African American museum and saying, we're not going to return your funding. So that's what Lindsay and I will be processing. Hopefully later on today with some more questions of what this actually looks like. And it's a challenge. This is good. I appreciate it.

And I love extension center and all the work they do and come back with commissioner is, you know, I appreciate I know how they're leveraging their dollars or their, but I guess the business case, what money are they putting back into such a county?

Sure.

And. Volunteer hours and what they're leveraging for the. For the vast community.

Yeah, I think that. She can could make a case what they're doing for the African American community and the historic value that they provide for the African American community. And so that's the challenges on these community development funds. If we start looking at threat for what we do and who we choose, that's why it just makes it hard. And again, I. I'll just push in this with a broader conversation. I want to have an entirely different approach to how we fund community development organizations, entirely different approach with a formulaic funding. I think that see, which actually does have a decent model. I wouldn't do it on property taxes. I'd do it on sales tax, but where there's competitive grants as a process, I would love to take all of this and say, Hey, we're not going to do it this way anymore. That if you want to participate here, that we have an entirely different program that we can work on. But again, I do know the value of Extension Center. I believe in the value. I believe in their leadership. But that's the tension and heartburn I have right now in regards to how I'm going to look people at TCAM in the face and say that I advocated for Extension Center increase of return to funding and not them. That's going to be an impossible conversation for me to have. So I just want to – well, sure, we'll talk about it more tomorrow, but I want to –

Could I jump in on that? Yeah. I agree. This is a hard conversation. I think I've been singing praises for Kelly in the extension office since my very first brand-new commissioner tour. So I believe in what they're doing. I want to ask a question, though. She had mentioned when she... I think it was at our last commission meeting that maybe there are some improvements that could be made to the facility itself that can help them increase their rental. That's something that we've let them keep that income as additional support. I would maybe do an alternate motion that is there a way that we could put a certain dollar amount back into the facility upgrades or a budget to that. I would much rather... put that money into a building asset that we own um because I don't feel comfortable rescinding what we have already tried to put in place where we need to focus property tax dollars on core functions of government and that's why some of these community partners received a little bit of a haircut um I don't want to go back on that but I do want to support extension and if we can help them um with sponsorships or outside dollars that can come in that aren't property tax funded and then improve their building where they can have more success renting it. I think that I'd like to see that as an option that maybe we could talk through. Lindsay, if that's okay.

Sure. And so, Commissioner, we can talk about that. Obviously, right now, I don't know that we have an estimate prepared, but one of the things that you could state is your intent to do that. And then we could work with facilities maybe to put together some quotes and using either reserve funds from this year or next year. That could be something that I think Tanya's team could maybe look at and figure out options and talking with you.

Right. And I know we need a list from Kelly to see exactly what that is. I know. i had my uh cab meeting there my last uh cab meeting i don't know a month ago um i see what she's asking for and i think that um we could probably figure out how to help with that and there'd be some win maybe on both sides of how we handle this is there deferred maintenance there that they are lining i'm unaware of any deferred maintenance there

I know that Andrew met with Kelly and so there is a short-term list and there's a long-term list and we're working with her currently on a short-term list and then long-term list would go on the CIP.

Okay, so the short-term list is what Commissioner Wise would be referencing?

Yeah, and we are working with her on those short-term items, such as right now we're working on replacing carpet in some of those conference rooms. I know one item that she brought up was painting some of the rooms. So we're working with her on those items.

It is our facility. It is our responsibility to do that.

There's income that comes from it, and there's community benefit. So I think that there's a different way we can look at helping her – You know, and still supporting what they're doing there.

My only thing I'd say that I doubt, I'm skeptical that it would increase revenue for her coming in because if we don't even know about the deferred maintenance, I doubt that it's stopping any rentals she has today, but.

Do they retain the revenue?

Yes, they do. And in the 2019 agreement, when we last negotiated with them, prior to that, the county had received the rental revenue. As a part going forward, they are able to keep that rental revenue now.

Which would motivate them to have maybe some more focus on getting those rentals done because they get to keep that revenue.

Can I ask one more question, Jeremy? Yeah.

I'm on the website right now, and I don't see any place for them to do fundraising on the website. I know, like, for example, TCAM has a large fundraising arm of what they do. The Historical Museum does fundraising. Arts Council does fundraising. And on it goes. But I remember having discussions about some of the things we used to fund a long time ago. that i challenge them to do fundraising and actually create if you will an effort you know how hard do you try from the community to encourage them to donate if they're if the users would donate because they enjoy it and they use it they have the wherewithal to do that to do that that's another way of solving this problem i'm not seeing anything on the website that's even trying to do that you think how many people use the extension in a year What's our user count? It's huge, right?

I would imagine.

If everybody donated $5, I think this problem is immediately solved. Are they trying to solve the problem without additional taxpayer support? It's been a couple of years since they started their reduction, started a couple of years ago. And I'm just wondering, what have they done to recover from the private sector

I guess I was looking back at my motion of 39,800 volunteer hours and what they're doing out there with the seniors and everything else.

Let me just give you an example. The SHIC, and I have to say that very carefully, S-H-I-C-K, SHIC program is highly valued. I get it. And I appreciate the people getting... benefit from that. I think it's fantastic that they do that. I'm just wondering if they just said, if you really appreciated the service you got today, it's free. But if you appreciate it and you want to donate to support this cause, there's a way that you can donate. I don't know what that would be exactly, but I would think that they could come up with a way to do that.

Whenever I get into my second motion, I'll get into some donations. Thank you. Teaser.

Teaser.

Teaser.

Okay. Okay.

Technical question, Lindsay, and whether it's on this or any other item that commission brings up, if we go into operating reserve and spend money, that means we have to course correct that in the 2028 budget. If it's an ongoing expense. So just FYI, no matter what topic we're talking about, if you go into the operating reserve, we'll have to fix it in the next budget cycle.

Okay. Okay. Just a quick comment. Thank you for the discussion. And. Over the years, I know that I've asked before what a lot of these questions that just now for the first time, Lindsay just read off some information. And that's kind of a lot to digest. And plus the fact and the comparables with the other extension offices around the state is very helpful to understand. to digest it. So you're going to send that all to us. I don't know that I'll be ready. This almost could be a, a really healthy discussion in a, in a, but maybe you can prove it, but, but it's healthy discussion for a future staff meeting to actually find out. And what commissioner house said about marketing and other things, a big, big picture, um, But I'll look at what you send us and compare it to the potential motion that you're making, and I'll have a better feel for it tomorrow morning. Sure.

Well, and we can. I mean, for a future staff meeting, to Commissioner Beatty's point about TCAM maybe having stuff, we can always circle back. with the other community development agencies and ask them, or if the commission wanted to choose to use some of the WSU special project funds that we get from the mill levy, we could ask there to be an economic development analysis done of what some of these places contribute back. I know the exploration place has done something like that and the zoo have done something like that historically. So we can take this wherever the commission would like to go. I know that doesn't help you for tomorrow, but going forward, we can. Right.

Let's remember what's the what's the dollar value for the WSU mill levy?

So it's 1.5 mils. So we are used to talking about 1.5 mils as $8.1 million, but we need to remember that that also drives motor vehicle tax. And so that also gets added into it. So for the 2027 budget, they are in at about $13.7 million. That is some contingency that's built into that. But it's a healthy chunk of money.

Okay, so we're doing 13.7Million for WSU. What kind of agriculture programs are they offering for Sedgwick County? Do we know? I mean, I'm just curious. We've got over 100Million dollars worth of export grain commodities out of Sedgwick County and we're paying 13.7Million to WSU. I just didn't know of any ag related programs that are working with us on.

That is a trick question, and I don't know the answer.

I can get into my second motion if you guys don't have any other questions. Okay, so basically, whenever you look at the county fair, and I know some of you guys have some experience with it and some of you don't, it really helps a lot of kids out there. And even the small things with having their livestock judges come in there, all the events that they have. It was around $11,000, and I think they had a $5,000 allocation. They fundraised for the rest of that to pay for everything. So here's a second motion I'm looking at to increase 4-H funding for the Sedgwick County Fair. I move that we transfer $5,000 from operating reserve to the Sedgwick County Fair line of the culture fund. and recreational community program budget and direct the additional funding to the fairs 4-h program i make this motion because the additional five thousand dollars would cover nearly all of the reported gap between the fair expenses and the fair board's baseline contributions without replacing that contra contribute or without replacing that contribution. And because this year's fair included 470 youth exhibitors, you know, all Sedgwick County kids and nearly 2,500 exhibits providing a measurable base for the additional 4-H program. I just, it's a large program. It affects a lot of kids. And I just, they are fundraising to, and I'm just trying to make up the gap that they had to fundraise. This wouldn't completely do it, but it'd be pretty close. $5,000. And if you look at those fair premiums, they're like a dollar and a quarter apiece or something. I mean, they're not much money. The majority of this was just trying to get judges to come in there and judge their exhibits and things.

Do the kids that participate in that, do they pay an entry fee or anything like that, or is this a free program?

Yeah, generally they don't charge the kids an entry fee.

Well, and fun fact, we did have a kid discover a dinosaur fossil, and that was on display at the fair this year. It's pretty cool.

right pretty cool any questions on that okay does anyone else have another motions they would like to bring up new things okay i know lynn probably don't like this one but public works has an intern of about fifteen thousand six hundred four dollars i don't probably support that i just think that that money could be used other elsewhere in the budget To me, it's something we don't have to do. And, again, if we do give this person experience, there's no guarantee they'll work with Sedgwick County going forward. So bring in somebody that doesn't have the experience. We give them OJT, which is valuable to them, and they may or may not become permanent staff. But I would – I guess I would say – and I would probably do the same thing with the DA interns, although I was explained to me that probably legally we can't do that. So as far as I know, this is the only other intern – that is in the budget that potentially is subject to discussion and all that you're not going to support. You know public works doing what they need to do I just would rather see this money used to help in a different way so what I would have a motion potentially to a trim off that in a public works intern. Any questions on that how much was that again commissioner 15,604 dollars. And I have more I have a few more things to talk about so when you're ready. With the respect, I've mentioned everything else before with a couple of exceptions here. I'd just like to reiterate the delay on the $2 million for interest bank arena. I appreciate the email from Justin the other day about midnight kind of explain some things to me. I apologize if you felt that I was pressuring you to give me a quick answer. That wasn't my intent. My intent was to encourage the commissioners to give us time to solve the problem, not to pressure legal staff to come up with a legal opinion. By the way, the opinion, I think, supported my idea that we have options to go for the transit guest tax, for example. Let me restate this again. I did my calculations. If Wichita wanted to help solve this for the county, again, let me remind everyone that we're doing this with WSU for the city. But if they wanted to help out the county, it's a 1.25% transient guest tax would provide the revenue we need to take care of the building that's in the heart of the city. And I think that since we built this for the city, that's a reasonable thing for them to do to help solve this problem. Otherwise, we'll become, I'll argue once again, it ends up being a property tax problem. No matter where you get the money, if you don't create a new revenue stream, it ends up being property taxes. So I think that that's reasonable for us to have conversations with Wichita regarding the 1.25% transit guest tax. And should that not happen, again, Justin, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like we do have the option of doing a countywide transit guest tax. And since this was a countywide vote, It seems to me that the countywide electors that wanted this should also be able to support a 1% transient guest taxes countywide.

Yeah, Commissioner Howell, on the transient guest tax countywide, do I apply within city limits? I think that's your question. That's real murky. So I think what's clear from what we looked at, and Scott Anderson in our office looked at this as well, is that Um, if, for example, I think what you were talking about primarily was if the city of Wichita, could they increase theirs above 6% where it's at now? And the answer to that appears to be pretty clearly. Yes, they could. Um, and they could reach an agreement with the county to where some of the money would go to this for for a particular purpose. Like you're saying for the arena. Um, also, I think it would be an alternative the city of Wichita if they would agree to do. So I think it would be up to their city council. could agree to take some of their 6% money to go towards the arena as well, like you're talking about. So I think those are pretty clear options. But the statutes, there was actually two different acts. It's very unclear as to cities and counties, the powers they may utilize in enacting those within each other's jurisdictions and how those interact is just very unclear. And there's not a lot of case law to bear it out either.

Well, the unincorporated doesn't solve the problem. So either it includes cities and it becomes a solution we could look at. And since it's murky, I interpret that as it's either yes or no. It's like we're not sure yet. So I throw this on the table saying murky means we need clarification. We need to decide legally what is the option. If that's an option, I'd like to know that. I'd also point out that transit gas tax in other cities across the country are higher than this, sometimes 20%. So the idea that one and a quarter percent for Wichita is somehow going to cause someone not to buy a hotel room or not to rent a hotel room for one night, I don't think the risk is there at all.

I think there's zero risk. Commissioner Howe, I would just supplement that by saying there's a handful of cities in Sedgwick County that charge 7% and 8%, so I don't think you'd be out of line saying that. That's accurate.

So, again, I think we have a problem. We have a solution I think is reasonable. It's going to require some negotiation with Wichita. And I think we need some time. So I need to reiterate, I would rather not see, I see there's a motion, a suggested motion here to use gambling funds or whatever else, interest on our, you know, interest income or whatever. I would say that those, in my opinion, ultimately are property taxable. And I say that because you're shifting money within the budget, but you're not creating any new revenue. So it ends up being whatever those things are funding now ends up being funded through backfilling a property tax. So I think at the end of the day, I would rather buy us some time. We have several ways to do that. And I had a suggestion that we would simply delay this and give ourselves some time to solve it. And then any questions on that? I have one more item to discuss. Okay, I'll move on. I don't know if you guys have the Intersection Safety Enhancement Program sheet. Do they have that, Lindsay?

Okay, well, I just go print copies if you'd like.

It's okay. I talked about this at length the other day. The only thing I would add to this is there are nine mitigations listed here that could be available to be used. I did some analysis. I know that it's subject to someone who's much smarter than me. to come up with a better estimate. But my estimate is we could address up to 50 intersections with this money, 50 intersections. And there's nine mitigations. If I add the one that's not listed here, it's cross traffic does not stop sign. If you added that to the list, there's nine mitigations we can entertain at different intersections. I'd like to point out just this one intersection where Cindy Carter died, there was in... There was another fatality, so she died in October 7, 2022, and there was another fatality at the same intersection August 14, 2025. It's at that point we added some mitigations. So again, I'll argue we're reactive, not proactive. I don't know what would have happened on 8-14. Had we done that earlier? We don't know. There's no way to know that. But I make a point, though, that between September of 2021 and August of 2025, there's been 16 crashes at that intersection. 14 of those were failure to yield. 14 out of 16 were failure to yield. Of those, eight of them were injury accidents and two of them were fatality accidents. So the question is, do we want to spend $740,000 or $750,000 to address 50 intersections that are similar? And I would argue that undoubtedly in a single year, we will see lives saved somewhere within Sedgwick County. I would like to name this program after Sydney Carter. Her dad was here begging for something to memorialize his daughter. I would suggest we name this program after Sydney Carter. And with that, again, we can take the same money and we can, I know there's a staff recommended motion here to put the money towards three other things. I don't think one of these is a 2028 issue. And one of these is very routine in the fact that I think that we, again, we tend to Most of the time we have money left over on some projects enough to create a reserve fund that has been used to cover some of these overages on other projects. And so I don't think this is an emergent issue in terms of using the $740,000 for this. If it was, it should have been added as its own item without having to use Northwest Express money. If these were urgent issues, why weren't they proposed independently without the $740,000 from Northwest Expressway? I will argue that these are not emergent issues. The three things we could spend money on. I do think what is important is the intersection safety program. There should be commissioner-led because I think everyone understands the need for it. This is an opportunity to invest in intersection safety. I would just ask you guys to seriously continue to think about that. I hope that maybe on tomorrow we can We can finally get something passed.

Thank you so much. I appreciate that. And I mean, say, in the outset that I fully agree that. What should it should be a priority for all of us as we kind of government responsible growth and how do we do some of these safety measures? So, Lynn, I got a couple of questions because I want to formalize a program. I think that's important. I think we do need to formalize a program of modernization of many of these areas. So a couple of questions, Lynn. So the dollars that are being redirected from the $740,000 Northwest Expressway, those are ongoing projects where we would have to fund no matter what. Am I correct in that assumption? We either fund it with these dollars or we're going to have to fund it with other dollars. Is that correct? Correct. So these are outgoing expenses no matter what, because these are ongoing projects that are already in our CIP and maintenance. So it's not saving dollars. These dollars are going to get allocated. I just want to make sure I'm correct in this. These dollars are going to get spent either from this source or another source. But either way, these $740,000, they're going to get spent, correct? Correct. My next question is, can you help me understand? I fully agree that we need to modernize and look at a plan of responsible growth in gen incorporated parts with road safety. And then we need to modernize many of these things. But do you have a program? I mean, she's my words real wisely. How could we utilize what you're doing now and formalize the plan and make it a real plan? Or does that exist now? You've told me that there are already dollars being allocated towards these things and there is a strategic plan. Could we formalize that plan that the commissioners could really understand it and.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely, we could. The issue with formalizing a plan is really twofold. Number one, it allocates and takes money away from our local sales tax program overall. So, when we need to go ahead and utilize those funds for something emergent or something that needs additional money, that becomes a little more difficult because we've taken this program and said, we're going to put X dollars into it. The second issue we have is by formalizing a plan such as that, my biggest concern is now I have elected commissioners coming to me saying, you have X dollars. I want to see right now where those dollars went and what you fixed. So ultimately what's going to end up happening is we're going to make improvements to intersections that are not warranted. And when you do that, you dilute the safety improvements you've made. You're making them everywhere, whether warranted or not. So people are going to come to intersections. This is well studied. It's in the MUTCD. And they do not recommend making improvements to intersections that are warranted because you are going to eventually end up basically making those intersections less secure, less safe by diluting those traffic improvements.

I appreciate that. This is a tough one because on both sides of the coin, I can say we want to make sure that all of our intersections are safety and unincorporated areas where growth is happening. I agree with that 100%. On the other side, I have an engineer with a traffic engineer that's advising traffic in areas that I don't fully understand. I'm not a traffic engineer.

And as I mentioned, and I can provide, if it helps, I can provide additional details for the group here. As I said last Wednesday, in the last 2024, 2025, we've addressed 17 intersections. The proposed CIP will address an additional 16 intersections just within the CIP. And then we have the local road safety plan which identified programs that are, how do I say this, they are on a heightened level when we go after highway safety improvement program money. So when we go after those grants, that's why we got those seven intersections with the HRUR, the high-risk urban road program. We basically, by bringing those projects to them, we're telling them it's the local road safety plan. They check a box and go, yep, you get that money. That is coming around for Phase 2 in October. We expect there's a very – I can't ever say we're guaranteed, but there's a very likely chance we're going to get those Phase 2 monies for that as well. And then we are also – 2026 is an even year, so we have done our traffic counts this year. That means one of the things we're going to do after we get all these traffic counts in, we're doing gravel roads now that fall school's back in.

Okay.

We're going to reevaluate a lot of intersections based on traffic growth, and we're going to make the exact changes that Commissioner Howe is talking about, those low-cost measures. We're going to be making those intersections. So we expect next year we'll be easily doing at least 10 more intersections.

okay well i i think the question that i have is this is a priority i these are these are uh sunk costs in some regards as these costs here on the motion is they're going to be used we're going to find a place to use them for these are ongoing projects i guess what i'm asking the county engineer is if i don't support commissioner howe's motion tomorrow can we I want to ensure that this is a conversation where safety of intersections and upgrading and modernizing is a formal project, a formal... This is something that we're talking about a lot. There is a game plan. We're executing a game plan. I just want to trust that we are.

I don't know if this... gets to the level you're looking for one of the things i thought about is every year i turn in a memo to you guys uh describing what we spent and how we spent our monies uh throughout that year one of the things i can do is cut out a portion of that and specifically address intersection improvements and let you know what we've spent and where we spent that money you know i mean obviously we go through it at uh periods in time a one-on-one but That would actually every year put a place marker that would need to report.

I think that'd be helpful. I think that you're hearing from a commission that we want to prioritize intersection safety. I'll tell you the wild card for me is the things in my mind that I think we need to do immediately. Our county engineer and our traffic engineer is saying that actually will not help. It may make things worse. in regards to really doing things and setting expectation. That's the wild card for me is it's like, we have people that we've hired to do this work and they're saying that's not going to make this safer. And that it could make things worse. That's the wild card for me. And I don't want to, that's a,

And that's my concern with actually having a resolution saying you're going to spend X dollars. We're going to end up being told this is the only thing you can spend this on, spend this money on an intersection, and we're going to put up some type of intersection controls that are not necessary. And therefore, we're going to get, we eventually will get to the point of, like I said, devaluing those countermeasures.

I don't begin to understand it, but I want to be able to trust the program.

Thank you. I just wanted to supplement a little bit what Lynn's saying is I think in theory, if you were to do something like this, there could be a presumption or it could be worded in language that you would follow the MUTCD subject to the interpretation of the county engineer. That way, if there was any concern that you're going to get into projects that Wouldn't adhere to those standards, then you would, you would have, you could rest assured that would be part of the resolution or the motion language.

But I don't know if that changes how Lynn feels about it, but just try and saw that as I mean, this is, I so appreciate commissioner house heart in this. I appreciate this is a priority here and I want to just make sure that we are.

I love the fact that we're talking is important, especially in a county such as ours. It's beginning more and more urban suburban. One of the things that also, if reporting on this at my end of year memo isn't enough, might be to memorialize this in a resolution that doesn't have a specific monetary attachment to it. That way it is a program, it is something we're watching, and then that actually forces me then, like I said, to address that in my end-of-year memo, what I've done and what's there.

Could you, Justin and Lynn, could you work on maybe providing what that would look like for us, that way we can entertain it? Thank you, I appreciate it.

Is your expectation to have that for tomorrow? No, it's not. It's not budgetary? Okay.

No, it's not a budgetary item, correct? I don't want to debate this too hard here because I think this deserves the time tomorrow, but let me make a point here that of the three projects that are suggested to be used to spend out this $740,000, one of them is an existing CIP project that's overrun. It's the R354. Then again, it's very appropriate to use the reserve funds that we have today. And I know that you said how much was in the reserve fund, Lynn? It needs $150,000 to solve that problem. And that's money basically that was saved up through projects that came in less than what we expected. So we approved larger expenditures for projects, and they came in and they were completed for less money, and that's where that money came from. So $150,000 would be for that. $225,000 is for R365, which again is a 2028 project. If we need more money for that, we certainly can have that discussion in the 2028 budget discussion. And $365,000 for B-520 is more than double. We are putting out $350,000 a year for B-520 every year for five years. That's the standard budget for that line item is B-520 is $350,000 per year. We're going to talk about transferring $365,000 specifically. which is more than double that budget would have in any one normal year. So again, I don't know if there's some emergent issue that we need to know about. That should have been requested before we transfer the money from the Northwest Expressway. That should have been requested. Let me make one other point here, and that is that 135th Street West and 29th Street North, are you telling me it was warranted for a four-way stop?

Yes, that is correct after the accident we had a year later after the city Carter accident, yes.

Are you telling me that every time we add these types of mitigations that it's always warranted? No. Okay. Why do we do it sometimes when it's not warranted then?

So, oh, I think I misunderstood your question. We always aim for a goal of adding these improvements whenever we're warranted. There are times, however, where we'll be very, very close to a warrant. We have a project that's come up. You know, there's no sense in not doing this improvement as part of the project. We made it up there. We're just close enough to do that. We've had several, and I think we'll end up, like I said, we have 16 intersections that are part of the CIP, the proposed CIP that we're suggesting. I'm sure we'll get to a point where an improvement will be made there, where we're not quite to the crux of needing that improvement, but we're really, really close. We're now doing a project. It's a growing area down here by X city, so we'll make those improvements.

were there any warrants met before the second fatality that we needed to go out there and put larger stop signs in and things like that?

I need to go back and look at that data, but my understanding is we had made some improvements prior to that, obviously not to the point of going to four-way.

I've been following this pretty closely, and I don't think we did, but maybe I'm wrong, so I'll stand corrected if I just didn't know what I'm talking about. That's fine, but... I would say this. I'm not suggesting we reconfigure intersections like adding turn lanes or turn it into a traffic signal or change it from a two-way to a four-way. Those are things I'm not asking for.

Correct.

So in the opinion of a normal person, and I say that because that's the phrase that the legislature uses in some bills, in the opinion of a normal person, they would deem these mitigations as enhancing safety, not creating liability. You say we get numb to these things, but let me name them one again. Once again, what we're talking about. We're talking about pavement markings. that alert you to a stop line or a stop ahead caution that's painted on the pavement. Larger, up to 48-inch stop signs. Now, I know that the MUTCD only requires 30-inch stop signs, and we target 36-inch stop signs everywhere. Not because it's required, but because we think it's a good idea. That started before I was a commissioner. And I understand correctly, we probably still have some 30-inch stop signs out there. We would change them. When the reflectivity gets bad enough, we'll replace them with 36-inch. But our standard right now is 36, which exceeds MUTCD's requirements. Overhead solar-powered illumination. That, my opinion is, by the way, it's not solar-powered, but there is illumination at that intersection I just pointed out. They also have 48-inch stop signs there. And now there's also stop ahead warning signs and intersection ahead warning signs. Those are also at that intersection. Subsurface rumble strips are not there. They could be. And again, I'll just say this. One thing that neither one of these fatality accidents did was apparently they were half asleep. One of these guys was on drugs. And again, something to give you the tactile input. Wake up. There's something about to happen here. Signs and reflectors and lights may not solve the problem. A rumble strips are, in my opinion, the one thing we can do that's the most effective to get someone to pay attention to what they're approaching. And that should have been, in my opinion, would have been the number one thing we could have done. And that's very inexpensive, by the way. Reflective sheeting or reflectors on the stop signposts. Flashing beacons, yellow or red, in the appropriate directions. And, of course, the cross traffic does not stop. Those are all things that I think enhance people's awareness of the danger they're approaching. If someone is numb and they don't see any of that stuff, especially the rumble strips... We've done everything we possibly can at that point. There's nothing else we could do. And I don't think any of those are considered anything that would create liability, that somehow we get numb to them. I would appreciate any or all of those things as I'm approaching a dangerous intersection. I use that word dangerous meaning if you miss a stop sign, it can kill you. These speeds are 55 miles an hour, or as we know, people travel much higher than that sometimes. So if you have a conflict at the intersection, someone's probably going to get injured or die. And again, I'll point out this intersection specifically had 14 fail-to-yield accidents in that time frame. I don't know. MUTCD, in my opinion, is telling us the minimum standards. It doesn't tell us the maximum standards. And again, I can tell you, we have reacted over and over and over again. The public says, we have to do something about this dangerous intersection. We react with some kind of a thing to mitigate that comment. we're usually reacting to a bad accident so all I'm saying is for less than a million dollars does anybody think we're not going to save lives this next year really I think I think this would absolutely save lives we can't prove what we don't know but for $750,000 I would say as big as this county is we're talking about talking about improving up to 50 intersections I understand MUTCD tells us what we have to do. It doesn't prohibit this.

No, but it does directly tell us that putting up intersection controls that are unwarranted diminishes the safety effect of those countermeasures.

I'd like to react and just say, if you put a four-way stop in when a two-way stop is needed, or you slow the traffic down needlessly when it's not necessary, those things tend to be ignored. I get that. But if you say you put a 48-inch stop sign, someone's going to ignore it because it's bigger than a 36-inch stop sign?

I would counter that with you will end up with putting flashers on stop signs that are unnecessary. Eventually, that lets us know that, hey, you need to be careful. There's an intersection here. And if they find crash traffic is coming, if we put those up and that is in those locations where – it's not happening, people just understand when you put up cross section or cross traffic does not stop, people get used to the idea that I need to look for traffic. There's never traffic ever here, so whenever they see those signs, they tend to ignore them, even in those more important intersections. And that's why I think that having a resolution is fine, but putting a monetary value to that makes us go out and address, and I can tell you right now, $740,000 is gonna have us address intersections that do not need to be addressed.

It doesn't mean we have to spend it all. It just provides a fund. My final comment would be this. If it doesn't decrease these accidents, at least we did what we could. I don't think it's going to increase accidents. None of these mitigations will increase accidents.

The potential is that it will increase accidents because you're going to diminish the value of the signs.

And that's where we have to respectfully disagree with one another. Thank you so much.

And right now, you know, I do want to, as the board in general, we have been successful in getting grant money for these particular low-cost intersections. We addressed seven intersections with those this year. We expect to get additional monies for next year to do the exact same thing. Next year, they actually will open up additional materials for us to claim as part of the grants. And... i would if we were to put a monetary value uh to these intersections going forward i really wouldn't feel comfortable going after that grant money um it would have to be all locally absorbed because we're going to touch intersections that we don't need to be touching okay what else

So I think we've discussed all of the potential commission motions. You will then have three project authorization. Well, like I said, Lorraine will have motions prepared for you to adopt a budget. Once we get through budget adoption, then you will have three project authorizations, one for the 9-1-1 hangar, or I'm sorry, the 9-1-1 um system radio system uh next will be for the hangar uh if the hangar and commissioner howell had mentioned that's a motion that he will likely bring up um so if if you keep the hangar on the cip Then we will do that project authorization. If we don't, there will be no reason to hear that motion tomorrow. And then the 3rd, 1 will be for your emergency preparedness center again, even though that's a later expenditure. We need to have the project authorized so we can receive the grant funds. So, then we will also have a kind of an acceleration agenda item. Lorien sent you an email and we talked about it last week and that will be the conclusion of the county. Then we will go to the fire district. We have no motions from commissioners on the fire district, nor do we have any corrective motions. from staff to present. So that will be much more straightforward. R&R, second hearing, budget adoption, done. So we're done with the budget discussion unless commissioners have other questions or concerns.

Okay. What else? Commissioner Meister, you got anything?

All right. See you guys tomorrow.