Board of County Commissioners - Regular Meeting

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Sedgwick County Board of County Commissioners meeting. Welcome to those joining online, Facebook, and YouTube, and everyone joining us in person. We're glad you're here today. When you walk in, we encourage you to grab a meeting packet agenda that allows you to follow along with all the items we'll be discussing at the county commission. If you're ever curious about supporting documents, you have access to those at www.sedgwickcounty.org. Let's get to work. We've got a full agenda today for September 16, 2026. Madam Clerk, first item.

Invocation to be led by Pastor Adam Leichner, West Evangelical Free Church. Please remain standing for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Heavenly Father, we come before you today just humbled by your grace and your kindness to our county. Lord, we just pray over this meeting today. We pray over our county leaders and just pray that you give wisdom and discernment, help them to lead in such a manner that they would honor you and lead the community that we live in well, Lord. And we just want to thank you for them and their families. Lord, we thank you for our first responders and pray for them and their families that you would keep them safe, watch over and protect them. We pray all these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Madam Clerk, next item, please.

Roll call. Commissioner Meitzner.

Present.

Commissioner Beatty. Present. Commissioner Howe. Present. Commissioner Weiss. Present. Chairman Blubaugh.

Present. Next item.

County announcements.

Good morning, Nicole.

Good morning, Chairman and Commissioners. Nicole Gibbs of Strategic Communications. We're going to take a slight step from our normal programming, and we're going to talk a little bit about the boil water advisory that the City of Wichita has issued. It does affect county buildings, so if you are in a county building, please do not use any of the fountains, the drinking fountains. For staff, we have advised them that they do not use the ice machines to unplug those or turn them off until the boil water advisory has been rescinded. Also, I want to talk about the different department responses. The plans that they have made are being implemented and are in place. Some of those include, specifically, the adult residential facility, otherwise known as the Central County Jail, has had water brought in, so those folks are taken care of. The children, young people in JDF, the juvenile detention facility, are having bottled water brought in for them. And Crisis is also working on bringing in water for those people on staff and those that they are serving. So it happens to be preparedness month, and it also happens to be that emergency management is here. So I will ask Julie to come up and share some additional information and cover anything else that I may have missed.

Thank you. Morning, Julie.

I love this one. Good morning. Julie Stimson, Sedgwick County Emergency Management Director. We're standing by right now. We're keeping an eye on the community impacts, especially to some of our critical infrastructures like schools and hospitals and things of that nature. So like Nicole said, a lot of folks have plans for this type of stuff, and right now they're executing those. And hopefully this will be a short-lived boil water advisory. But we're Preparing in case this isn't, we always like to prepare for the worst case scenario. So we are just kind of keeping an eye on things. The state is aware. So if we need to get additional resources, we have the means to do so if that time comes.

Okay. Thank you very much. Commissioner, do you guys have any questions about the Boyle advisory? Okay.

Don't go far, Julie. You might or might not be first. So the Sedgwick County Local Emergency Planning Committee, in partnership with Emergency Management, will be holding its second annual Emergency Preparedness Safety Expo on Saturday, September 26th from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. This is at Century 2. Julie Simpson is here not only to talk about all the good stuff, but also to talk about this. She'll also be sharing some county good news from the chemo conference that happened last week.

Okay, so from response mode to preparedness mode. I do want to give Ms. Ann Houck, she is our local emergency planning committee chairperson. She's been our chairperson now for eight years, maybe nine years. Last year, we had our first annual safety expo. It was very well attended. This year, it's going to be bigger and better. And I also have Jessica Ferreira, who is the vice chair of the LEPC, also our public health emergency preparedness manager. So I'm going to give them a little bit of time, if you don't mind, just to kind of share some details about what this expo is and why people should attend.

Good morning. Thank you for allowing us to be here. Our goal this year is really to bring preparedness to the community and make them have one place, one location that they can gain all the sites, resources, have an opportunity to speak to those people who respond to emergencies. My goal for the last eight years has been to prepare our first responders, and now it's to our community. So this event has over 85 vendors at this time that will be there to share their tools, their trades, their tricks, and everything to respond to emergencies just like the boil water emergency we're having today. So what a better day than to have an emergency than to test your plan. But that is what we are doing. It is going to be on Saturday, September 26th from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. And it will include first responders. It will include our mental health arena. It will include vendors from every response network or even preparedness, you know, keeping our roofs nice and safe and tucked in tight. So that's what we're doing this year.

Yes, we are so excited to thank, first and foremost, all of our amazing sponsors and helpers and community organizations, including several Sedgwick County departments that will be present at the Expo, including the Health Department, the Police Department, our Fire Department and EMS, ComCare, Department of Aging. So we are really excited to have all of them there. The City of Wichita has so graciously donated Century 2 Expo Hall for us to supply this event to make it free not only for vendors but for our community as well. And we'll be giving out lots of wonderful resources from organizations like the American Red Cross where we'll be having a blood drive going on at the same time. They'll also have their disaster preparedness team out to talk about what to do in a disaster. All of our attendees, or sorry, the first 500 attendees will receive a bug-out bag that they can use, so graciously donated by Home Health and Hospice. But we just want to educate our community on how to be prepared and what to do if something were to happen so that they're able to more quickly respond. So we're so excited, and we brought some posters if anybody needs some for their departments or want to share and publicize about this event. It's just so important for our community.

So we appreciate you taking the time to hear us, number one, but number two, to put some vested interest in our community's safety and awareness. Thank you.

Sounds like an exciting event. Thank you very much, Commissioner. Do you guys have any questions or comments? All right. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. Fantastic. Thank you, ladies. So it is National Preparedness Month, and we always focus on educating the public and businesses how to be prepared. Well, our staff also needs to be prepared. So last week, or two weeks ago, we attended the Kansas Emergency Management Association's annual conference. And I just want to kind of share, we, myself, Jonathan Stropfer, and Kenji Brooks received the Kansas Certified Emergency Management designation. To receive this certification, we had to come up with two years of experience, complete over 100 hours of professional emergency management training, and participate in multiple roles in at least two emergency exercises in a year. Most notably, we also had to be sponsored by a member of the CHEMA board to be considered. So with us three receiving our certification, my department of five was 100% certified through the state. as emergency management professionals. And then also at the CHEMA conference, Cody Charvet was awarded the CHEMA Life Member Award. It's presented to an active CHEMA member who's contributed significantly to the purpose of the association over several years. A few of highlights of Cody's award nomination, including serving on numerous committees, the CHEMA leadership roles since joining in 2009, Also presented several educational sessions at annual conferences and mentoring new emergency managers, including three emergency management directors here in Sedgwick County. So very deserving of that award. We're very happy and pleased that he was a recipient of that Life Member Award. With being a National Preparedness Month, again, we want to emphasize to folks to be prepared, stay informed. I got a push for Civic Ready, another tool in the toolbox, to receive emergency notifications, such as a boil water advisory. For folks who signed up to receive those alerts, they should be getting an alert. If they haven't already, they should be very soon. making a plan and building a kit that fits to the individual household. We have all kinds of things to think about, but every household is individualized on what they need to survive and get through things if it's up to 72 hours before we can get professional help to those neighborhoods. So this is the month to think about those things before disasters happen, and emergency management is here to assist with that. Thank you for your time this morning and questions or comments.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

And thank you for helping out with the messaging this morning.

Oh, I stole your paper. I'm sorry.

Hello. Okay, so following on the emergency management trail, they are also hosting their final community emergency response team, which is CERT. Basic training weekend, October 16th through the 18th at Sedgwick County Park. This weekend is designed to end open to all adults, all abilities, backgrounds, and skill levels. To learn more, sign up and visit Sedgwick County website. Excuse me. Just a quick reminder that the tax and tag office for Sedgwick County will be closed this afternoon for staff training. They close at noon and will open tomorrow, Thursday, September 17th for normal operations. And then last but very not least, I would like to invite Chief Human Resources Officer Sheena Schmutz to the podium to recognize an upcoming county retirement.

Good morning, Sheena.

Good morning. We knew this day was coming, but I have with me Brent Shelton. After 33 years of service, Brent will be retiring at the end of the week. Brent is a true public servant. He is reliable, he's a leader, and he is steady in our workforce. Brent began his career on January 14, 1993. He has held the following positions. Chief Deputy County Clerk, Administrative Project Manager in the Division of Public Works, Chief Deputy Treasurer, Grants Manager in the Division of Finance, Tax System Director, Economic Development and Tax System Director, Assistant Chief Financial Officer, the Interim County Appraiser, and as he is leaving us here as the Chief Excuse me, Deputy Chief Financial Officer. It is my great pleasure to present his retirement plaque for all of his dedicated service. Frank, congratulations.

Good morning, Verit. Thank you, Chairman Blubon, Commissioners, and thank you for that. That was overwhelming. I'll take it, even though it's probably because you know I'm not going to deliver the quarterly financial report. There's a number of folks from finance that are here today that I get the privilege of serving with on a daily basis. They're all back here, many of them dressed in red. I think that may be cardinal red, but we're 19 and a half games out of first place.

It doesn't mean we're in the red, right?

No, we're not in the red. We're in good shape. But this is an amazing team of people that I get to work with. As evidenced by the awards that they've received, the clean audits and so forth, they deliver for this county sound fiscal management day in and day out. And one of the things that I recall about this team is when COVID separated us, we all came together and managed an additional couple hundred million dollars in federal funds, CARES, ARPA, Shuttered Venue Operating Grants, And all that happened with changing guidance, a number of different deadlines that this group of people, this team met and did so with distinction. So I want to thank them for all their work at that period of time. Also here today, I just want to recognize some members of my family that are here. I've got our daughter, Monica, who was almost two months old when I started. Hi. Most of you know Haley that works in human resources. And then my wife, Carol, is also in the audience. I know that Carol is looking forward to this next chapter in our lives. And I think maybe the main reason is that she's not going to get nightly briefings over dinner about tax increment finance or HID.

Yeah.

Industrial revenue bonds, and not to mention those really hot economic development deals that are right here. Lots of jobs, lots of capital expenditure, cutting-edge tech, but I can't talk about it because I'm under a nondisclosure. But I want to thank the commission, thank Tom, Lindsay for your leadership, and the trust you've placed in me. It's been a pleasure to serve.

Brent, certainly appreciate all the hats that you've worn for Sedgwick County and helped us out specifically last year with the appraiser's office. Really, you stepping up and helping us make that bridge. Really appreciate it. Commissioner Howell?

Thank you, Chairman. I'd be remiss if I didn't share a few of my thoughts about you. You're a friend. You're an extreme professional. I think you could do anything. You have a can-do attitude, and we've given you some very difficult things to do, and you just mastered them beyond our imagination. So you've done a tremendous job. I can't tell you how much I appreciate just getting to know you a little bit. You're one of the few people I've ever met that I don't think I've ever seen you angry about anything. You're always kind. You always have a smile. You always have a good word. Those are some amazing character traits that makes you unique and different than most other people. And I think we're going to miss you unbelievably. You're leaving a giant hole behind that's going to be nearly impossible to fill. So thank you for your service. I don't know what else to say. You're brilliant, you're skilled, and you're an extreme professional, and you're extremely kind. And I think that those are the skill sets for someone in leadership, for you to do all the things that you've done. You have really blessed Sedgwick County. You've been worth every penny we've ever paid you and so much more. Thank you for all you've done here. Thank you.

I see your girl snickering back there a little bit about never being angry.

We always knew this day was coming. I've been here for three and a half years, and we knew this day was on the horizon. I get asked a lot in three and a half years, a lot of people from the private market, I know those that have had private business dealings, they get asked us a lot, like, what's it like working in local government? And there's a lot of things that I like to share, a lot of things that I think the public isn't aware of, of the weight of the decisions and just the busyness that happens here with 3,000 employees. But the thing that I share the most, and I don't think it caught me off guard, Brent, but I was just blown away about the talent in this organization. I mean, up and down the org chart, 3,000 employees. I mean, these are really, really talented individuals. And Brent, I think you topped that list. 33 years of service. I know based on your capacity and your knowledge and your production, you could have had a number of opportunities going to the private market and you probably would have been paid more. You probably would have moved up in other organizations and done some big things and made a lot of money. But you chose to have a career here in public service. And for many people, I think those, some of us do it in an elected fashion. Some of us do it by first responders. Some of us do it by finance and being good stewards over the taxpayer dollars. Up and down, people serve this community in different ways. But it's community service nonetheless, as you chose as your vocation to serve Sedgwick County. And I don't think the public will fully understand your legacy, but I know the people in this room do. You have left your mark in a profound way on Sedgwick County, and the public doesn't know, but we know. You have, I agree with Commissioner Howell, you're not replaceable in many ways, but you have a successor behind you that you've prepared and groomed. Meredith, I think Meredith is here. Is Meredith here? There she is, shrinking in her chair. You have a little disciple that's coming behind you that we're excited to work with too. We think she's going to be really talented. And we think she's going to be really talented because you have your fingerprint on shaping her and crafting her. Brent, you are one of a kind. You are remarkable in so many ways. Your only downfall is that you're a Cardinals fan. But I remember telling Tom and Lindsay, literally, I think I'd only been here a couple months and I'd only had a few meetings with you. And I remember telling Tom and Lindsay that we're going to build a statue of that guy one day. Like, he is that impressive. And I'll tell you, Brent, I don't know if the public will allow us to build statues with their public dollars. But we do have a statue that's been built for you, bud. A little bronze statue of Brent Shelton. He looks a little like Pete Meister. You're worth your weight in gold, man. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for your leadership. Thank you that you've steadied the ship at Sedgwick County. The fruit of that finance department, the fruit of these financials that we talk about every month and every quarter is in large part to your leadership. So thank you for your investment into the people of Sedgwick County. Thank you for your investment into this commission and the staff. We absolutely love you and appreciate all that you've done. So here's your statue, my friend.

Thank you.

It's almost a size. Commissioner Meister.

Thank you.

That was good.

I feel like Ed McMahon, you're the Johnny Carson. Out of respect for the chair and the vice chair to wrap this up as well. But Brent, your early resume that was read off by Sheena was just remarkable about what you've done here. And that's just an example of your broad reach in our county government for years, way before I was here and currently. But it's been, and most recently as the chair referenced, Filling in the county appraiser job interim was kind of an introductory to us to learn more about the appraiser office and maybe the first couple of big steps you helped implement on. We talk about reform that we need in a number of departments, but that was a catalyst that even is going to help us try to get reform on property tax at the state level. Really, I credit you and Finding Deanna helps. This is good. So that's just one more stamp of approval that you've done. And your comment about sound fiscal, you're the calm in these storms. And I want to thank you for you and Lindsay and finance during the COVID years. All of a sudden, we get a check for $101 million, whatever it was. Yeah. Yeah, $101 million. And we're supposed to figure out how to spend $101 million by a certain day, followed up by another, how much was that? $300 million. Another $100 million about a year later. Right. And those were, besides all this... the trying times of management in the COVID world of what a nightmare that was at the time. But you were a steady, steady, calm, calm influence in that and got us there. We got through it. So a lot of people just see you on your quarterly reports and the public and even maybe a lot of employees may think, well, here's a quarterly report and that's what they see of you. But your speech Earlier, just right now, everybody got to see a side of you that we get to see, which has got humor and humility and very subtle friendships and humility. It's been a joy for me to work alongside with you on a number of things. we could go through a few of them but but just know that i i truly appreciate our when we work together on a couple of things especially in the ecodemo world and and other other challenges so i want to thank you and uh carol good luck to you Daughters, good to see you both. Carol, it's been nice getting to know you a little bit these last few years. And I look forward to seeing you at Livingston's for breakfast and on Sundays or whatever with your dad and with family. So good luck in my sincere appreciation and friendship. Thank you. Thank you.

Brent, I just want to echo the comments about your can-do attitude and anything we've asked you to do, no matter how big the ask is, your face says it all. It's like, yep, I can do that. I can take care of that and really appreciate that. I don't think there's any ask that we wouldn't have that you wouldn't gladly take on for this commission and for the citizens of Cedric County, and I genuinely appreciate that. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you. You have permission to retire.

Yep.

I can't possibly have anything better to follow up with that. So I'll stand for any questions for county announcements.

Any questions? All right. Thank you, Nicole. Thank you. Madam Clerk, next item.

Proclamations. Item A, Proclamation Declaring National Suicide Prevention Week.

Okay. And this proclamation will be read by Commissioner Beatty. Yeah. Thank you, Chairman. I'd like to read a proclamation of Sedgwick County, Kansas. Whereas in the United States, one person dies by suicide approximately every 11 minutes, with an average of 134 deaths by suicide each day. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death overall in the United States. About every four days, someone in Sedgwick County dies by suicide. In 2025, 90 Sedgwick County residents died by suicide. Whereas, psychological studies have consistently found that 90% or more of people who died by suicide had a mental disorder at the time of their deaths, and often, these disorders had not been recognized, diagnosed, or adequately treated. Whereas the mission of Sedgwick County Suicide Prevention Coalition is to promote and implement evidence-based approaches, local research, and community change to reduce the impact of suicide with the ultimate goal of zero suicides in Sedgwick County. Whereas, in Sedgwick County, help is available by calling the Suicide Prevention Hotline 24 hours a day, 7 days per week at 316-660-7500 or by dialing only three digits, 988. Now, therefore, it be resolved that Chairman Jeff Blubaugh and the Board of County Commissioners do hereby proclaim the week of September 13th through 19th, 2026, as National Suicide Prevention Week, and we call upon the residents of our community to join us in gaining an understanding of the risk associated with suicide and learning to recognize the signs of someone at risk, taking those signs seriously and knowing how to respond. Chairman, you've heard the proclamation. I'll make a motion to approve it as read.

Okay, and I'll second that motion. Madam Clerk, I'll move motion to second. Madam Clerk, please call the roll.

Commissioner Meitzner. Aye. Commissioner Beatty.

Aye.

Commissioner Howe.

Aye.

Commissioner Weiss. Aye. Chairman Blubaugh.

Aye. And the motion passes 5-0. And this proclamation is being received, I know, Dr. Nicole Cross from Associate Professor at KU Medical Center, Michelle Calvert, our Director of ComCare, and obviously Jennifer Wilson, Director of Crisis Services at ComCare. Welcome.

Good morning. I'm Jennifer. I'm the Director of Crisis Services with ComCare. Thank you, Chairman and Commissioners, for recognizing National Suicide Prevention Week and for issuing this proclamation. Suicide prevention is a shared community responsibility. It begins with helping people know that they are not alone, that support is available, and that it's okay to ask for help, whether they are experiencing a crisis themselves or they're a concerned family member or friend. This recognition honors the individuals, families, first responders, health care providers, and other community organizations who work every day to promote hope, connection, and access to care. Thank you again for bringing attention to this important issue and for supporting the community where everyone and every person knows that their life matters.

Thank you very much. Yeah, Commissioner Beatty. Hey, Jim, thank you so much. Could you tell us a little bit more about the coalition and the work you're doing? And I'd also like to know, and I'm not putting you on the spot on data, but what is the trend line in regards to our local community, those that are losing their life to suicide? Are we making progress? And if not, what do we need to do?

So the work that the Sedgwick County Suicide Prevention does is to educate community providers, review evidence-based practice and strategies to support our suicide prevention efforts. And then we also review suicide in Sedgwick County and provide data and identify trends so we know targets. Dr. Klaus will be reviewing the trends later on today during this meeting, but we have seen a trend downwards in Sedgwick County, which is great to see. We've done a lot as far as providing mental health care and intervention, crisis services to improve access to early intervention, and I really feel like the efforts that we've been really putting forth towards prevention activities have helped save lives.

Well, that's great. And I appreciate that Dr. Glass is here. She's going to give us more of a broader update and trend lines. I'd be amiss if I didn't ask. We have a large project being developed right around the corner here, right next to the Biomed School. It's a new ComCare Crisis Center. Can you tell the community a little bit about where we're at in the progress and what all that facility will be doing?

It is moving along. We are targeted to move into the new building in March of 2027. I probably will sleep a few more times, it feels like, before that happens. It's just racing right by, but we're going to be able to provide expanded crisis stabilization services, the 988 services that we provide to Sedgwick County. Our partnership with SAC is going to be able to increase the capacity for sobering and detox services, and then our screening and suicide prevention interventions at the building itself. So we provide a wide variety of services at our crisis center, and we're really going to be able to do that in our new building, and we're really excited.

We're excited for that thing to open. Thank you for all that you do.

Yeah, thank you.

I want to second that. Thank you very much for all you do. It's so important, and I'm I'm so happy to hear that the trend is starting to come down, and you guys will continue to work on that because it's something that every one of us in this room has been affected with at one time or another. So thank you very much.

Absolutely. Thank you. Okay.

Madam Clerk, next item.

Item B, Proclamation Declaring National Co-Responder and Crisis Responder Weak.

Okay. And this will be read by Commissioner Wise.

Thank you, Chairman. I'd like to read a proclamation of Sedgwick County, Kansas. Whereas mental health crisis, substance use emergencies, and behavioral health challenges impact individuals and communities across Sedgwick County, requiring compassionate and effective intervention. And whereas ComCare's Community Crisis Center, in partnership with Emergency Communications and the Wichita Police Department, has dedicated teams to respond to these urgent situations with expertise and care, connecting individuals to appropriate services and promoting public safety and wellness. And whereas ComCare co-responders and crisis responders serve, on average, over 250 people each month. providing timely and appropriate behavioral health interventions to reduce arrests and hospitalizations. And whereas National Co-Responder and Crisis Responder Week honors these dedicated professionals for their commitment, courage, and compassion in serving those experiencing behavioral health crisis. And whereas it is important to raise public awareness about the value and impact of co-responder and crisis responder programs, enhancing crisis response, reducing harm, and improving outcomes for individuals and families in crisis. Now, therefore, be it resolved that Chairman Jeff Blubaugh and the Board of Sedgwick County Commissioners do hereby proclaim the week of September 13 through the 19th, 2026 as National Corresponder and Crisis Responder Week. in honor of the tireless efforts and invaluable service of co-responders and crisis responders for ComCare Emergency Communications and the Wichita Police Department. Chairman, you have heard the proclamation. I'd like to make a motion to approve.

Okay, and I'll second that motion. We have a motion and a second. Madam Clerk, please call the roll.

Commissioner Meitzner?

Aye.

Commissioner Beatty?

Aye.

Commissioner Howe?

Aye.

Commissioner Weiss? Aye. Chairman Bubba?

Aye. And the motion passes 5-0.

And we have Regina Stout, Program Manager, Community Crisis Center at ComCare and Malachi White, Crisis Team Supervisor at ComCare to accept this proclamation.

Good morning.

Good morning. I'm Regina Stout, Program Manager with ComCare. And with me, I have Elena, Deputy Director of 911 and Malachi Supervisor with ComCare. Thank you, Chairman and Commissioners, for recognizing the work our co-responders and our public safety partners do. With us in the audience, we have many. They can wave. Yay. Cedric County is a leader nationwide in the movement to ensure those experiencing a behavior health crisis get timely and appropriate response. This helps reduce unnecessary arrests and improve access to behavior health care in least restrictive environments. Thanks again.

Thank you very much. Any comments or questions?

Yeah, just a profound thank you. The co-responder models and what's happening in this community I do think is cutting edge, and I think it leads to less, I choose my words very wisely, on-scene disruptions when the right personnel are there to handle the right type of call. I'm kind of curious, Landon, how does this work on the 911 dispatch side, on the co-responder thing? Help us understand how this works and when the decision is made to send a unit that's a co-response unit, any number of our co-responding units.

Landon Marino, Deputy Director of 911. When we have a suicidal person, we do an automatic page out to the teams. If one's available, then they will respond. If it's requested by an officer at the scene to send a co-responder team, we will let them know. And it's always by availability. In addition to that, we have the calm care specialists that are in-house with 911 and can pick up calls. And so... If we think that they can help and avoid sending an officer, then they will pick up the phone and try to do that as well.

Can anybody speak to what that's like to be able to divert that way a law enforcement officer isn't taking as many mental health calls on scene? Do we have better... outcomes in those situations? Is there less friction in those situations? Why is it important for the community to understand why we invest in models to where we have trained professionals going, particularly to mental health calls, which I'd imagine I think our sheriff's office and WPD would tell us that there's a lot more mental health calls over the last decade than there were historically. Why is it important to send this type of team to that type of call? What does that do to mitigate these situations? Malachi?

Good morning, Malachi Winters, supervisor with the integrated care teams. You bring up a really good point. For several decades, there was a shift nationwide of mental health emergencies having to first be responded to by police officers because of a safety issue. Unfortunately, along with that, there was a burden that was put on the police department to be experts in this and managing those type of situations. I think as a community now with this collaborative type of approach, we can now put that burden back on the mental health professionals who are trained and have the experience with it. And we do it in a collaborative way that is in cooperation with the police department. And we have that safety aspect really sealed down tight. um as far as our outcomes go since the beginning of the program we've strived to be able to safety plan and keep people in the community where they're at greater than 50 percent of the time and we've consistently met that since the inception of the program well thanks for those details malachi thanks for all the work that you do modernizing these models on local government and local response i think is crucial and to see that i believe that our community is

is trying to put our foot on the gas and modernizing some of these models and get the right people on scene on the right calls, I think it is a better outcome. So you see a lot, you do a lot. God bless you guys. Thanks for the work that you do.

I just want to make a couple comments. I was on the Wichita City Council whenever we originally looked at this model and very thankful for each and every one of you for what you do out there and that we have the right people show up on these scenes and the right resources that are there to handle that. We generally appreciate that. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. And I do want to, hopefully everybody's done a proclamation here. You guys stick around. We've got one more proclamation. We want to go out and get a picture with everybody. So hopefully everybody hangs right here pretty quick. Madam Clerk, next item.

Item C, Proclamation Declaring Constitution Week.

And this will be read by Commissioner Howell. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I really appreciate the chance to read this one. It says, whereas September 17, 2026 marks the 239th anniversary of the drafting of the Constitution of the United States of America by the Constitutional Convention, and whereas it is fitting and proper to accord official recognition to this magnificent document and its memorable anniversary and to the patriotic celebrations which will commemorate the occasion, and whereas Public Law 915 guarantees the issuing of a proclamation each year by the President of the United States of America designating September 17th through the 23rd as Constitutional Week, Now, therefore, be it resolved that Chairman Jeff Blubaugh and the Board of Central County Commissioners do hereby proclaim the week of September 17th through September 23rd, 2026 as Constitutional Week. We ask our citizens to reaffirm the ideals of the framers of the Constitution. that they had in 1787 by protecting the freedoms it guarantees, remembering that lost rights may never be regained. Mr. Chairman, I am very pleased to make the motion to adopt the proclamation.

Okay, and I'll second that motion. We have a motion to second. Madam Clerk, please call the roll.

Commissioner Meitzner. Aye. Commissioner Beatty.

Aye.

Commissioner Howe.

Aye.

Commissioner Weiss. Aye. Chairman Blubaugh.

Aye. The motion passes 5-0.

And this is supposed to be received today by Mary Jo Drury. Thank you for being here. I also know that Karen Oliver is also here with you today. They are members of the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution. So you're welcome to make some comments and I also have some comments after you. Good morning, ladies.

Good morning, commissioners. On behalf of the National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, I want to thank you and the Council for this proclamation to recognize September 17th through the 23rd as Constitution Week. This year, we celebrate the 239th anniversary of our nation's founding document, the U.S. Constitution. Although it has been amended 27 times since its ratification, the Constitution still stands as the supreme law of the land. The Daughters of the American Revolution celebrate the work of American patriots who sacrificed so much for our freedom and way of life. During Constitution Week, local DAR members will be participating in activities and sharing the story of the Constitution and the beginning of this great nation with the future leaders of tomorrow. Thank you. And my understanding is there will be a public reading of the Constitution Thursday during lunch at the old courthouse. So if you are available, please go listen. It's very important.

Thank you very much. Commissioner Howell?

Mr. Chairman, thank you for the chance to speak a little bit as well. And I love knowing that that's going to be read.

Well, I'm knowing that's going to be read at the courthouse. That's fantastic. Thank you for that. And you might wonder, how long does it take to read the Constitution? I'll just tell you, it's 4,400 words. And if you read somewhat thoughtfully and slowly, you can finish the Constitution with the Bill of Rights in about 30 minutes. So I would encourage us all to read the Constitution at least once this week if we can. And with that, I will give a few copies of the Constitution to my good friend Nicole. And I'll just say this. I don't have enough for everybody, and I apologize for that. If you don't have a copy of the Constitution but you'd like a copy and you promise that you'll read it one time, Now, Nicole will be glad to give you a copy until I run out. So with that, I'll give these to Nicole. I do want to make a couple comments about this. Again, it was signed. I know the proclamation says it was drafted, so here we go, Nicole. It says it was drafted on that day, but really it was signed on that date 239 years ago today. And it's a fairly simple document. And by the way, the second document that's in that booklet is the... Not just the Bill of Rights, but the Declaration of Independence. And the Declaration of Independence is only 1,458 words. So you can read that really in about six or seven, eight minutes. You can read that pretty easily. These two documents may be the best documents ever written by humans in this country ever. I would say the scriptures are far better, but this is maybe the second document ever written by man that I think is worthy of our respect. And I'm so glad we have a chance to think about it and honor it. It sets up the structure of this country. which has surpassed, if you will, any other similar government around the world. We have proven that democracy actually, as constructed in the Constitution, does in fact work. And so we have a wonderful country because of the founding of this document and the adoption of this document, which, by the way, the people who signed these documents put their lives on the line. They would have been killed had it been caught by... by King George and England, they would have been put to death for signing this document. It was considered treason. But these documents are incredible, and it is structured very simply. There are seven articles. And by the way, the Kansas Constitution has 15 articles. There are 27 amendments. The Kansas Constitution has had 99 amendments. The U.S. Constitution is 239 years old and the Kansas Constitution is only 166 years old. So at the end of the day, our Constitution for the state of Kansas is much more complex and more difficult to understand and to comprehend and to read. The U.S. Constitution is intended to be simple. And one more thing about that. The Bill of Rights were not part of the Constitution when it was adopted. They were added four years and three months later. There was a huge debate going on at the time about whether these rights were considered self-evident or not. And they decided to go ahead and to adopt the Bill of Rights. They adopted them as a package of ten. The first ten amendments were packaged together. They were adopted three months later. four years and three months after the adoption of the Constitution itself. And that's where we get what we call a Bill of Rights, where we talk about the right to freedom of speech, the freedom to worship, the freedom to assemble, the Second Amendment, the right to have a search warrant when your house is searched, the right to remain silent, for example. Those are all part of the Bill of Rights that were added later on, and there was a big debate whether these were even necessary. And today, I think our U.S. Supreme Court probably spends more time trying to figure out ways to apply those specific amendments to issues that come before them. So I'm actually kind of glad they wrote those and glad we adopted them. I think it was actually very wise for them to do so. But with that, I celebrate the Constitution, and I would encourage all of us to read it at least once this week. And I appreciate the fact that you make this important every single year. And I know if it wasn't for you, I don't know for sure we would do it. So thank you for making this important. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you very much. Thank you. I appreciate everything you guys are doing. I'll at least get the preamble down this week. Thanks to Schoolhouse Rock. All right. I believe that's all of our proclamations, so we'll take a quick five-minute recess. We'll go out and take our pictures, and we'll be right back. All right, we'll call the meeting back to order. Madam Clerk, next item, please.

Public agenda.

Okay, public agenda. We do not have anyone signed up on the public agenda. Next item, please.

Consent agenda.

Okay, Tom, what do we got?

Chairman and Commission, good morning. Tom Stolz, County Manager's Office.

Asking for approval of consent items D through M this morning with the exception of item E, which I'd like to move to do business. Okay. Does anyone have any questions about consent items D through M with the exception of E? If not, I'd like to make a motion to approve items D through M with the exception of E. I have a motion and a second. Madam Clerk, please call the roll.

Commissioner Meitzner. Aye. Commissioner Beatty. Aye. Commissioner Howe.

Aye.

Commissioner Weiss. Aye. Chairman Blubaugh.

Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Next item, please.

New business, item N, report of the Board of Bids and Contracts regular meeting on September 10, 2026.

Good morning, Mr. Chairman and Commissioners, Joe Thomas, Purchasing Director. The Board of Bids and Contracts meeting of September 10th, we have four items that we're seeking your approval. Our first one is the two all-wheel drive Dodge Durangos for fleet management in the Sheriff's Office, and that recommendation is to accept the low bid from Parks Motors in the amount of $79,358. Item number two is six current model Chevrolet Equinoxes for fleet management in the Sheriff's Office. We're asking to accept the low bid from Don Hatton Chevrolet in the amount of $160,500. Item number three is QuestionPro employee experience survey system for human resources. This recommendation is to utilize the interlocal purchasing program tips, contract 230105, in the amount of $171,840, and that's for a contract period of three years. And our final item is the Media Monitoring Solutions for Strategic Communications. This recommendation is to accept the quote from Meltwater News, U.S. Incorporated. It's in the amount of $135,000 for a period of three years that begins November 27th, 2026, and will go through November 26th of 2029. I'd be happy to try to answer any questions you may have and recommend approval.

Okay. Commissioners, do you have any questions? If not, I'd like to make a motion to approve the recommendations of the Board of Bids and Contracts.

Second.

We have a motion and a second. Madam Clerk, please call the roll.

Commissioner Meitzner. Aye. Commissioner Beatty. Aye. Commissioner Howe. Aye. Commissioner Weiss. Aye. Chairman Buwal.

Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Thank you. Next item, please.

Item O, Cedric County Suicide Prevention Coalition 2025 Data Report. Is this how you do it?

Good morning, Dr.

Good morning, Chairman, Commissioners. Thank you for giving us the time to share with you some data on suicide in Sedgwick County over the past year. I am Nicole Klaus. I'm a psychologist with KU School of Medicine. And this work would not be possible without the collaborations of some of my colleagues in the Health Department and the Forensic Science Center and ComCare, who have put forth effort into collecting and analyzing these data. So in 2025, we lost 90 residents of Sedgwick County to suicide, which is a slight decrease from 2024 when we lost 92 residents. And this continues a trend we've been seeing over the past few years, which is a slight downward trend. And that's consistent with national trends, which are heading in a positive direction. However, Sedgwick County is still significantly higher than national rates. And this year, Sedgwick County's rates are the lowest that we've seen them in the past 10 years, since 2015. So when we break down the suicide rates by age, we had an increase in that orange bar, the 25 to 34-year-olds in 2025. And we had a decrease in our youth suicides, the lighter blue bar. Similar to previous years, males make up the majority of suicide deaths in Sedgwick County, accounting for about three quarters. I think it was 77% this past year. Also similar to previous years, Firearms continue to be the most prominent means of suicide deaths, but we have seen a downward trend in those firearm deaths over the last several years. When we look at known mental health and suicide history, we see that these percentages are pretty similar to previous years. About half of individuals who die of suicide had some known history of mental illness, most commonly depression or substance misuse. And that means that there's at least 50% or half of our suicide deaths that had not had contact with the mental health systems in our community or had awareness among relatives or their physicians of what was going on. We have been looking at life stressors over the last several years. And so this is a compilation of data over several years together. And we consistently find that relationship problems are the most significant issue in our younger individuals up to about 54, and then in individuals 64 and older, it's the physical health problems that are the most common stressors leading up to their deaths. So I want to highlight some of the local suicide prevention efforts by the Sedgwick County Suicide Prevention Coalition. We have been involved in multiple public events over the last year, as well as activities in schools and supporting survivors of suicide loss, as well as having representation in statewide suicide prevention efforts. A variety of trainings have been delivered by our partners and the Suicide Prevention Coalition. And so those continue to be available. And coming up in a couple of slides, I have contact information if anybody would like to reach out and obtain some of these kinds of trainings. Comcare answered just under 39,000 988 calls in 2025, providing significant support and that lifeline to individuals in crisis. I also want to highlight some of the community mental health initiatives. It seems like we've got a lot going on in our community now with ComCare's new facilities coming up, as well as the Regional Psychiatric Hospital and the First Responder Health and Wellness Center. I think these all reflect the investment that the community is making in supporting mental health and suicide prevention efforts. So I think suicide prevention is everybody's business. And so knowing the signs of potential suicide risk are important, as well as what you can do in that moment if you know somebody that you're concerned about. So primarily taking it seriously and reaching out for help. And you can always call 988 and they will walk you through some of those next steps about how you can support somebody or get help yourself. There are several ways to get involved in Suicide Prevention Month. There are a variety of trainings. And if anybody would like to get involved in the County Suicide Prevention Coalition, we would love to have additional community engagement. We will also be hosting another Survivors of Suicide Loss Day in November. That's traditionally the weekend before Thanksgiving. And I just encourage everybody to be aware and support each other and get involved in whatever ways that you can. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I appreciate you sharing all this trend data. I don't see a lot of consistency with age. It seems like it's all over the place. But I do see two sharp things that stick out to me, males and firearms. Okay. I mean, that seems to be your largest trend indicator of anything that I see out here.

Yeah, and those are consistent with national trends. So, yeah, I think age does tend to bounce around, especially when we are looking at this local level, just because we have lower numbers overall. So we don't see a ton of consistency, but, yeah, method is pretty consistently firearms and males are higher. are generally higher, more risk.

Okay, that's, yep, I appreciate that. That's really standout data there.

So, Commissioner Beatty? Yeah, Dr. Klass, thank you for being here again. And I kind of prompted and led the witness earlier knowing that we were going to be able to have some conversations about trend lines and I want to talk specifically about children. I see that death by suicide for our youth seems to be, we have a downward trend and trajectory. Although anecdotally, I don't think we could say that children's mental health or behavioral health issues are following that same trend. I think we see anecdotally in our schools, particularly families that children are having, more children are having more behavioral health, mental health problems and challenges. Help me understand, is this downward trend in death by suicide for our children, is that because system interventions are working? Is that because there are more resources? We've reduced some stigma? Help me understand, are we doing something right that is deliverable as to why that data is decreasing? Yeah.

I hope so. I'm always cautious because we do have so much variation from year to year in these numbers. I would like to keep an eye on that over the next few years and hope to see that continue to fall or to stay lower. But one of the things we do see is that there has not been a decrease in the need for mental health services and help seeking and those sorts of things. Actually, those are going up. And so the hope is that by decreasing stigma and making help more accessible, that more people are getting the supports that they need before engaging in suicide.

One of the things that I remember when I first got on the commission was there was a deficit of child psychiatrists in the Wichita metro area. Significant. I don't... You may or may not be able to validate this number. I remember when I first got it, there was only like one child psychiatrist that was in the city of Wichita. And I remember hearing that number and thinking, that has to be an error, correct? It wasn't an error, right? There was one child psychiatrist. that was certified in the city of Wichita. So alongside KU Med and the county commission, our health department and ComCare, I don't know who could speak to this, but we developed a partnership to try to increase the pipeline of child psychiatrists in the city of Wichita. And there's been some fruit from this that we now have more than one, correct? And more in the pipeline. I don't know who can help us understand what that partnership looks like, but this is significant as we talk about children's mental health.

Good morning. Michelle Calvert, Executive Director at ComCare. We have had some significant effort in growing our child psychiatry pipeline. So we actually have a child psychiatry fellowship program. We're working on training about four child psychiatry fellows. From that program, we've actually increased. So we do have one more child psychiatrist here in Sedgwick County that is working with us. So we currently have two, and then that's a continuing pipeline program. We also have an addiction fellow program as well. So we're training in that area too. We know that that's a growing need. And you had asked a question about youth. And I would say that as CCBHCs have come along, part of the intent with that is to really increase access to care. And in the past few years, we are serving about 1,000 children more than we were. So we definitely are seeing youth... access services more often. So we're working on making sure we have the manpower to connect those youth to care.

Well, those are incredible numbers. I want to thank you again publicly for KU Med, the partnership that we have there, ComCare, our health department's been involved, and the leadership at the county and the commission for investing in a program, in the fellowship program, to try to get this pipeline at South Psychiatry and growing there. So we have two. So the public's, we have two. This is a significant need that we have to continue to grow in this community. And I know it's an investment that we're making here. So thanks for letting me.

Psychiatrist at ComCare. But we've also grown our child psychiatry fellowship training program. We just graduated our second class. That's right. So we have more that we've created to the community and more that we're graduating. And many of those are staying local.

Oh, that's great.

ComCare or elsewhere.

Good news. Okay. There's progress. Yeah, I was like Commissioner Beatty as well. One of them was a lifelong friend of mine. When she came back here, I was amazed to hear that we didn't have any childhood psychiatrists here. So I think it's very important, especially as we have discussions about talent. This is just as important as anything else that we need the talent for our region. Commissioner Howe.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I always appreciate this report. It gives me some time to think about what's going on. A couple of questions for you. Did you state how many suicides happened in 2025? You did say that already. It's on the slide, I believe. 90. I'm looking at slide number six. And just trying to do the math here. It looks like they had about... If I was going to interpolate that graph, I would say he had about 35 per 100,000 times our population of Sedgwick County. He'd be about 160. So I'm wondering why those numbers are so different.

Which slide are you looking at?

Look at 2025 right there. If I extrapolate those numbers, about 26 or 27 plus about seven or eight, to add that together, say it's about 35 times our, that's per 100,000 population. That would give us about 160 versus 90. This is per 100,000. Right.

So this is 17.5 per 100,000 for our overall rates. What I'm saying is that 17.5 doesn't seem to line up with slide six.

You see, just the males alone are about 26 or 27 on that chart.

So that's looking at the number of males and county versus deaths.

I'm not sure I'm communicating well. What I'm saying is this slide seems to indicate we had about 160. You take the males and females, add them together, times 5.26, let's say, or 5.3, because we have about 530,000 people in Central County. That would be about 160 deaths for Central County, if those numbers are right. The other one shows a much lower number. That's why I'm trying to figure out which one of these slides is correct.

The 90 deaths is correct, and some of these rates get into kind of relative percentages.

I guess I'd like to have someone review that slide right there, make sure that those numbers are, in fact, right. One of the questions I have is, again, there was a previous comment about firearms, but what wasn't stated was the increase due to drugs. There's a large increase on slide seven. It's due to drug overdose and poisoning.

Yes.

Now, I'd like to know whether this is only unintentional deaths or does this include accidental overdoses? Someone who takes drugs on their own, maybe they did not intend to die, but again, they were alone when they died. I'm not sure how you define that as whether that's considered a suicide death or not.

We define it according to the coroner's determination on method of death. So whatever the coroner decides.

I understand they died by drugs. One question is, we don't know from the coroner if it was intentional or unintentional. If it was drugs, we understand that. The question is, is it called suicide if it was unintentional? They're just messing with bad drugs and killed themselves by accident.

Yeah. They'll categorize it as an accident if it was determined to be unintentional, but they make that judgment call about whether it's suicide.

I guess I don't understand how the coroner would know. They don't understand whether they left a suicide note or whether there was some type of financial problems or relationship problems or whatever, health problems, maybe that they were depressed because of health problems. Looking at the life stressors slide... You have relationships, legal problems, financial problems, job issues, school problems, physical health, gambling, and then there's other. And again, I don't think a coroner would have any idea. Based on the physical evidence of someone who came in and did an autopsy to find out what actually caused their physical death, they would not know if they had a gambling problem. They would not know if they had a relationship problem. So the question is, back over here, if someone died by drugs and they go through the coroner's office, And they died because of drugs. Does that add to the list or does it not add to the list if it was non-intentional versus intentional? Because, again, suicide is for people who are trying to kill themselves. It's an intentional death versus someone who's simply messing around with drugs and dies because they did something dumb.

Yeah. So the Forensic Science Center has forensic investigators that do go out and they get information from the first responders on the scene, from anybody else who's present. And so all of that information is incorporated into the autopsy report and is included in the coroner's decision-making process. They also get toxicology reports, and so they're able to integrate all of that information.

And again, I understand they died by drugs. I get that. I see Rusty's up there as well. My only question is, so I'm going to include, I'm going to say these were everybody who died by drugs, and if they had some intent to do this or not, if they were by themselves, they did drugs, they died, they would be included in this list. That's what I'm trying to find out.

These are of the people that the coroner's office determined were suicide deaths.

Go ahead.

This is clearly only those who indicated as a suicide. So they would have had to have some proof that this was a suicide death. So this is not your accidents. There's a plethora more in accidents that would be considered accident only.

That's what I want to get to. So, again, I think there's another number that we're not seeing here. That's people who messed around with drugs that died, maybe not intentionally, but there's a number of people who died alone or maybe with someone else. But the cause of their death was drugs. And it was something that they self-administered. So they did something that caused their own death.

Yes. And those are not included in these numbers.

Okay. And so I would assume that every other item on here, we don't know what other means exactly, but firearms, if someone died by a firearm, but it was unintentional, that would be not included as well. Right. Okay. All right. Another question here on the slide eight. Are these overlapping statistics? In other words, can someone be included in the mental illness that also has suicidal ideation, someone who also has suicide attempts, for example? Are these numbers overlapping numbers, same population? What I'm getting to is how many people actually end up completing suicide that are on any of these demographics? They're simply... they're exempt from these types of classifications, but they completed suicide anyway. They're separate from these. In other words, the 49% might include the same people that are on the 23% versus exempt. You see what I'm saying? Yes. It's overlapping characterizations. There's some people who complete suicide, they're not on that list at all. Yes. What's that number?

So, yes, these are overlapping numbers. So... I don't have the exact percentage that do not fall into any of these categories, but it's close to half.

About half, okay.

Yeah, half of people who died of suicide.

When did we start the 988 line? Do we know what year that started?

2022.

Have we seen any change in our data before and after that date? Has our data had any type of a knee in the trend lines? Go ahead.

I don't have the exact number, but there is an increased trend in 988 calls since the number has become those three digits. So that line has had an increase in calls. Specifically, over the last few months when we've had our marketing and promotion, like from last month to this month, we've had 100 more calls to 988. And before that, there was a 60-call increase on the 988 line from July to August.

I understand that. I believe that that's absolutely true. We've done a good job promoting the number, and people do know about that. The question is, for those people that complete suicide, have we seen a change in the trend lines on that specific data before and after that date?

I mean, it would all be anecdotal, I think, when we talk about the reduce in trends and the increase in services we're providing.

Okay. I guess a final question. Our trend lines we have here in Central County, I'll just classify it. I mean, there's a chart here. We've seen over... really since 2011. I'm actually going even further back than that. These trend lines are increasing somewhat slowly, but I don't see a trend line change really anywhere on that entire graph on slide number four. What I would say is, I don't know, it's just because there's a larger population. I don't know. Our data is more dynamic. The blue line there is quite a bit more dynamic in terms of up and down. The orange line is much flatter, and then the gray line is very flat. They're all increasing slightly. I guess I'm curious. We've known for a long time that Sedgwick County seems to be on the high end of these numbers. It's been that way really this entire chart. So do we know why that is? Has anybody dug into that and figured out what's causing that to happen here in Sedgwick County?

stay up here. I think there's a couple things that can contribute to that here in Sedgwick County. We have a high military population and we have a high aircraft population as well. And when we've looked at our data over time, those two populations are populations we've seen some higher rates of suicide in. And I know that it is trending upward, but I really want to reiterate that it's trending downward since 2022. And I think that's really, really important. there have been massive efforts in our community to really impact and reduce suicide. And I don't want to mitigate all of those efforts by saying it's constantly going up because there's a lot of effort and we are seeing impact.

Okay. I look forward to seeing another few years of data on this. Hopefully we will see that drop. I hope so. That would be our goal. I guess I just have one other thing I would notice here is on slide nine, the number of people who complete suicide that are elderly because of physical and health problems is notably high. That is something we should pay attention to. A lot I could say about that. I think there's opportunities there for us to help. And trying to find things to help people address their issues that's causing this type of decision, I think we have maybe the greatest opportunity would be right there on that slide with the elderly who are suffering with physical and health problems. So I just want to point that out. Thank you so much for the chance to answer some questions or ask questions.

Okay. Commissioners, any other questions? Thank you very much. At this time, I'd like to make a motion to receive and file the information.

Second.

A motion and a second. Madam Clerk, please call the roll.

Commissioner Meitzner. Aye. Commissioner Beatty. Aye. Commissioner Howe.

Aye.

Commissioner Weiss. Aye. Chairman Bluelaw.

Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Next item, please.

Item P, DER 2025-00022. Amendment to the July 9, 2009 addition of the Wichita-Sedgwick County Unified Zoning Code adopted by City of Wichita Ordinance Number 48-431 and Sedgwick County Resolution Number 137-09. As amended, dealing with accessory apartments.

Good morning, Scott. Good morning. Scott Waddell from the Planning Department. So the recommended action for this item is for you to approve the proposed amendments from the MAPC. There's some other stuff that goes with that, but that's the gist of it. In terms of what this is about, it's about accessory apartments, or otherwise known as accessory dwelling units. They can be attached, they can be detached, and sometimes they're referred to as carriage houses or in-law suites, and you can see them on this graphic here. They're the ones that are in the blue color. In terms of background, generally accessory apartment zoning cases are approved. They generally are not controversial. Here's some statistics going from 2021 through 2025. 100% of these cases were recommended for approval by the MAPC, and I believe it's true that the governing bodies approved those as well. This is an overview of the review process for consideration of these amendments. It started with MAPC advanced plans, but very close to the start was also a county commission staff meeting back in November of last year. Following this meeting, I'll just point out that following this meeting, we're also planning on taking it to the city council. So that has not occurred yet. That will be after. In terms of our existing regulations, the code currently includes the definition of accessory apartment. It permits accessory apartments by right in the zoning districts that are listed up here. They still have to be accessory to a principal single-family dwelling unit, as well as meet all the supplementary use regulations, and I'll cover what those are in just a moment. There are other zoning districts where it requires a conditional use. So I would point out that rural residential is one of those zoning districts. And likewise, it still has to be accessory to a principal single-family dwelling and meet the supplementary use regulations. So here are the supplementary use regulations. I'll just point out that it limits it to one accessory apartment. The second one is that governing the appearance, that it shall be compatible with the main dwelling unit and the character of the neighborhood. You'll notice that's a little bit ambiguous, very subjective, and we'll talk a little bit more about proposed changes to that. Ownership, it's got to be under the same ownership as the principal structure. And utility services, you'll hear me refer to utilities have to be shared. Well, it's actually just water and sewer services. So just want to emphasize that. There's also some standards that apply to all accessory uses, regardless if it's an accessory apartment or if it's a garage or other structure. And the one that I would point out here is the front setback, and number two, that accessory structure shall not be located nearer to the front property line than the principal structure. except on lots that are five acres or more. I just point that out just so that you know that these generally will not be located in front of the home or house on the property, unless, of course, they have more than five acres. In terms of the process, so a conditional use, again, really focusing on rural residential because that's most common in the county, a conditional use process takes about 60 to 90 days. There's public notices involved, and there's a number of places that it goes for review, MAPC, the Board of County Commissioners, but also possibly a Citizen Advisory Board or Small City Planning Commission. So it's a pretty in-depth process, and so we're proposing some changes to that. So here are the recommended changes. They fall in general into three categories, the definitions, approval process, and conditions. In terms of definitions, we're proposing to change the term from accessory apartment to accessory dwelling unit. This is a more standardized term that you'll see across the country. So same interpretation or same definition, basically, except just changing the term so it's more commonly known. The other issue that we find is with accessory apartment. That term, people get confused. They often think there's an apartment building that's going to be built or for sure that it's going to be for rent. So it would also help to eliminate some of that. Another definition that we're proposing to add would be subordinate. And that means that the accessory dwelling unit would be smaller than the principal structure. So just providing that clarification. In terms of process, there's a number of changes that are recommended. Some are for the city, some are for the county. I'm going to focus, obviously, on the ones that affect the county the most. And so the proposal is to make accessory dwelling units allowed by right as long as they meet the regulations that we reviewed earlier. There would be no public notification process for this. In terms of conditions, there are some changes to the conditions that are recommended. This one, one of them is to just clarify and make sure it's very clear that it's a limit of one accessory dwelling unit permitted per property. So just some language to help clarify that. Second one is related to appearances. The appearance standard would only apply to the established central area within the city of Wichita, so where the recommendation is to remove the appearance conditions as they would apply in the county. And then for ownership, there's some language to clarify that in instances of a duplex, that both sides of the duplex must be under the same ownership. So generally will not apply in the county too much. We don't see that as too common of an issue, but just making sure that that's in there. also want to point out that there are some that are not changing and that is utility services again water and sewer need to be cannot be separate from the principal dwelling unit and then also they still have to meet all the similar standards that we went through earlier In terms of size, there's a restriction for the established central area that would not apply out in the county. And a change that we would make is that parking, none would be required. I think in the county that's generally not an issue. These are fairly large properties where it's taking place, so generally parking is provided. Now, in terms of the review process, there were a couple of questions that did come up. We do have a representative from MABCD who can correct me on this one, but I'll just provide some quick highlights on these. One of the questions that came up was about driveways and whether they have to have a shared driveway, whether they can be a separate driveway. The answer is it can be both. What really matters is where the driveway enters onto the public street and what type of public street it is, then whether or not there's access controls that have been placed on the property at a given location. So they do have that ability. Then the other one was about addresses and that generally it sounds like it sounds like this one is a little bit variable that they would have the option of getting a separate mailing address if they want but that's something that would need to be worked out with the Postal Service so they don't have to necessarily but it sounds like they do have that opportunity So, oh, and one final thing that I'd like to mention is also that a question has come up about HOA regulations. I didn't include it as a slide, but just know that this does not override anything with HOAs. That's a separate level of regulation. So the recommended action, again, is just to adopt the findings of the Planning Commission and the related actions with that. So with that, I'll stand for any questions.

Scott, thank you for that. Can you help me understand cost? What kind of cost is someone going to be looking at to do one of these? In terms of construction? No, no, no. As far as our fees.

Oh, okay. Well, in this instance... Right now, it's a conditional use. I think I would say venture maybe $300, $400 maybe, ballpark. How much? $300, $400 maybe to go through the whole process with the ownership list and the fees, application fees. But right now, what we're talking about is making it so it's by rights. So there would be no fee. There would be no interaction with the planning department as long as you meet those regulations about setbacks and height.

Okay. Help me better understand some of the struggles they had, like when Phil Meyer is trying to go in there and work some of the core areas. And I kind of heard some war stories as to tens of thousands of dollars for permits and stuff like that. Is that the case or is that exaggerated?

No, it's not. And I'll look to Chris if he wants to jump in on this. But my understanding is that what's commonly referred to as fees sometimes includes like the tap fee and the water mains and all that kind of stuff. And so those utility fees are usually the larger chunk of the actual permitting fees that people are referring to. So yes, those do occur, but there's a cost associated with those.

Okay, okay. Commissioner Brady. Yeah, thank you. And I just want to thank the Planning Department. We've been talking about this for a couple years. I know we kind of pushed on this rather heavily here a few years ago, and then we got really busy with a lot of things. And you've been very busy. And I think this is going to be a big step in the right direction, in my view. Accessory dwelling units are more practical for families nowadays, especially with Parents that are aging in place and trying to get unique creative opportunities, kids staying on the property, I think it's very relevant in the county. Typically, this process and a conditional use would be, what, 90 days just to get the permitting before you can start. To do this by right with some stipulations and regulations I think makes a lot of sense. Not sure what the city of Wichita is going to do, but I also want to make it very clear to the public, you mentioned it at the end of your remarks, that subdivisions that have HOAs can have covenants that can not allow this sort of ADU. So that would be the superseding regulation is the HOA covenant. But if an HOA does not have this covenant, this... is by right and should be by right in the county for a lot of different reasons. So I'm glad we're at this place. I want to thank your work on this and all the thought that's gone into this. I think the regulations are really right on.

Thank you, sir. Commissioner Howell. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a couple of questions. I see on slide 18 it says a maximum of one ADU may be allowed on the same single-family dwelling unit or duplex. Please clarify, you can have a duplex by right on a single-family property? No, sir.

The intention here is that you could have an accessory dwelling unit along with a duplex on a property, not just a single-family home. So we're expanding that capacity.

I do understand that. I want to make sure this is not ambiguous and can be misinterpreted. Maybe it's fine, but okay. I think that's fine. You may have already stated this. I'm not sure that if you did, I apologize for not hearing it, but is there a minimum lot size to have at ADU?

There'd be a minimum lot size for the single-family structure. So that would apply because in each zoning district, you have to achieve the minimum lot size, unless you get a variance, of course. But no, there's not an additional square footage that needs to be provided in order to have the accessory dwelling unit.

And two adjacent properties that wanted to share a lagoon, do we allow that?

I don't believe so, sir. I think they'd have to have separate ones.

But in this case, they could share a lagoon. An ADU and a main home could share a lagoon.

They're actually required to because they have to share water and sewer services. Right.

And if there was a municipal sanitary sewer line, would they be allowed to have two taps on that sewer line? No.

They would have to come in for special permission in order to be able to do, I believe, in order to be able to do that for the sewer. For the water, definitely they would have to come in because they have one meter. They would not be allowed a second meter. They'd be in zoning violation.

But they potentially could have two taps or one. One of those would require a variance or something?

It says that they need to share those services, so... It comes down to the definition of services. So for water, I can definitely tell you one water meter. For sewer, I would envision that that would be one tap unless they come in for that special permission.

Okay, so we look at probably one electric meter, one water meter?

It's only for water and sewer. So for electric, they can actually have two separate meters.

Okay. And this being one parcel, we would have one tax bill for the entire property with two structures on it. Is that right? Yes, sir. I believe that's correct. And down the road, if they decided they wanted to sell the accessory structure, could they sell that to someone else? How would that happen?

And I believe that's why the regulations have been written the way that they have for so long is to prevent that. Because that's why they've got the requirement for the shared services. as well as shared ownership because under the requirements here, they have to be, it has to be under the same ownership as the principal structure.

So for them to sell this, they would have to meet all the requirements of separating utilities and everything else would have to be.

And they would also have to meet, then they would have to do a lot split or otherwise replat it. And then they would have to meet the minimum standards in terms of square footage and all of that as well.

So the two homes could be the same size, um, the the first one we call that the main the main residents And the second one we envision, that would be the ADU. I'm curious why that matters. If someone built a larger home subsequently, why can't the larger home be the main home and the older structure be the ADU?

It certainly could. There's no requirement that the first one be the principal structure. We have actually seen that. There was a case, oh, I don't know, a couple years ago, in fact, down by Derby, where there was someone who had an existing home and they wanted to build a larger home. Now, what would happen is they need to make sure that they meet all the setbacks and requirements that are there for the accessory structure, so they could not have it necessarily out in front.

So if the smaller structure was out in front and they weren't five acres, that would be a problem?

It would. It can be fixed. There's ways that you can waive those requirements, but there's a zoning process that would be required.

So beyond the setbacks, is there any other reason why we have these classifications of main residence versus accessory?

Yeah. In my mind, it comes down to expectations. And I think generally people are not expecting something very large to be built that dwarfs the principal structure in the rear of the lot. And I can think of a couple instances here in the city of Wichita where that has occurred. And it definitely, you notice it. It stands out. It's out of place. So I think it's a matter of matching people's expectations.

I think that we should go forward. I do support this. I think there's going to be some learning on our part on some issues that might crop up from this whole thing. We might need to come back and do some cleanup on this at some point in the future. But I think it's a way for us to get started. So I don't think this is the perfect document. I don't think it's going to do everything we need it to do. But I think we can get started and we'll learn. And we'll probably need to make some adjustments at some point. I did say earlier in the staff meeting earlier when this was presented that I do think that, for example, for group homes, each one of these structures could have five unrelated people. So I understand that we have strict group home requirements. You can't have more than five unrelated people living in the same home unless you have a group home license. It requires special permitting to do that, but this would get around that. I do think there's people who would potentially, let's say, build a garage of some sort and live in the garage where they build their main home or save up for a main home. Maybe they would live less expensively while they save up for the construction of a much larger home down the road, or they would live in the small structure while they construct the larger facility. larger building. So this does create those opportunities. I do think also for some people who have enough space, they may want to build an accessory dwelling, an ADU on their property and then charge some rent to someone that would offset their mortgage costs of living at the property. So this is a way to use the property to lower their own living costs and also then creates a place for someone else to live that needs a space to live. Overall, I think this is generally good. I just think we're going to see some interesting things will crop up at some point. With that, Mr. Chairman, I'll support the motion whenever it's made, if there's one.

Okay.

Thank you. If we don't have any other questions, I do want to open this up to the public. If there's any public comment, if you'd like to comment on this, please come up. You all have five minutes. Please state your name and address for the record. Okay, I'll bring it back to the Commissioner. Commissioner, do you have any other questions or comments? If not, I'd like to make a motion to adopt the findings of the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, approve the proposed amendments to the Unified Zoning Code, side the resolution, and authorize the resolution to be published.

Second.

We'll have a motion and a second. Madam Clerk, please call the roll.

Commissioner Meitzner. Commissioner Beatty.

Aye.

Commissioner Howe.

Aye.

Commissioner Weiss. Aye. Chairman Blubaugh.

Aye. Motion passes five to zero. Next item, please.

Item Q, consideration of a letter of intent between Sedgwick County and the Wichita Airport Authority related to a hangar at Jabara Airport.

Good morning, Chairman, Commissioners, Justin Wagoner, County Counselor. What's in front of you on this agenda item is a letter of intent that's proposed to be entered into between Sedgwick County and the Wichita Airport Authority, which is in charge of Jabbar Airport, as you know. This letter of intent that's drafted is part of a potential partnership between the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office and the Kansas Highway Patrol. to share space with respect to a jointly utilized aircraft hangar at Jabara Airport, one that doesn't exist today, so it would be the construction of a hangar on that location. I know you're all well-versed on this. You've probably had four or five public presentations and discussions on it, so I'll go through a few details, but I'm going to save the really in-depth details that you've already heard. But I will say that Colonel White from the Sheriff's Office is here today if you have any questions for him. So, in terms of background, in June, it was June 17th of this year, there was an MOU entered into between Sedgwick County and the Kansas Highway Patrol. That MOU recognized that in the 2025 legislative session, the state legislature had already budgeted $650,000 annually for the Kansas Highway Patrol. Sometimes I'll refer to them as KHP, to lease a hangar for its aircraft. that the parties, being KHP and the Sheriff's Office, would jointly occupy the hangar, and the KHP would reimburse the county for costs through a sublease. Just to explain, the KHP has multiple aircraft, a helicopter that serves this region, also they have multiple airplanes. The Sheriff's Office has an aircraft that is used principally, an airplane that's used principally for transporting extradited inmates out of state to Sedgwick County when that occurs, to and from. And so that's occurred. Another step that already occurred, the same day that you guys adopted your budget for Sedgwick County, there was a project which included approving this as part of your budget, but then also there was an item to get the ball rolling on bonding for any construction costs that would be incurred. And so that brings us to today's item, which isn't the last step. I'm going to talk about other steps that may come later. But if this LOI would be approved, it's non-binding, lays out the intended arrangement between the Wichita Airport Authority and Sedgwick County. It's a preliminary step. It does not commit Sedgwick County to any expenditure of funds. Essentially, it's like an MOU. It contemplates a 50-year land lease. The Wichita Airport Authority has indicated an intent to lease the land at a rate of 50% of its normal rate that's charged, with annual escalations of 1%. Based on estimates on this, the cost per year would start at approximately $22,600. Per the MOU with Kansas Highway Patrol, a copy of this draft LOI has been provided to Kansas Highway Patrol, and they were generally comfortable with the conditions. Again, they're not a party to it, but that was a term in our MOU. The expectation would be for the use to be continued by the Sheriff's Office and the Kansas Highway Patrol, but the LOI does have a provision and they're allowing a sublease if conditions would change in the future during those 50 years. So that was an accommodation the Wichita Airport Authority is willing to make. The county would be responsible for the maintenance of the premises and the buildings on it. I did mention there would be future steps past this LOI if it's approved. Those would include a land lease agreement with the Wichita Airport Authority, an agreement with KHP for the sublease and shared space arrangement, including payments from KHP to Sedgwick County to reimburse a majority of the cost of this project. I think it's roughly 78%. And then also, there would have to be competitive bidding to contract for the construction of this. And then lastly, there would be bond issuance steps that would be taken as well. The recommended action for today's item is to approve the LOI and authorize the chairman to sign it. I'd be happy to stand for any questions. And again, Colonel White's here if you have any questions for the Sheriff's Office. Thank you.

Okay. Commissioner, do you have any questions?

Commissioner Howe. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a couple questions here. You said that the annual land lease value, I guess, is $22,600 per year? That's correct, Commissioner Howe. And that's a 50% reduction of what they would normally charge?

That's correct. And to be clear, that's the estimate. I think the way it's worded in the LOI is that it would be 50% of whatever their rate schedules and Wichita Airport Authority has certain rates, and those could change between, I think, the time that we got those from them and the time that any lease may be entered into. But, yes, that's in general the intent.

So one of my questions is where does that revenue actually go? I know it goes to the airport authority, but ultimately where does it go and how is that money utilized in the future?

I don't know how the Wichita Airport Authority uses those funds, and I don't know if Lindsay, she's shaking her head that she's not sure. I'm not sure how the Wichita Airport Authority...

Does it end up in the Wichita, the general, the Wichita budget? Do they have access to this money at some point?

Again, I don't know the answer to that question, and I'm not sure what the arrangement is. I think, Commissioner Howell, you... I mean, the ultimate governing body over the Wichita Airport Authority, the Wichita City Council, I believe, is the entity in charge of that. I know they have an executive director at the Wichita Airport Authority. But, again, how the finances work on that, I'm not certain.

Is the 50% reduction, again, that was a discretionary decision of the airport authority, airport advisory board. Who had the authority to make that decision?

I'm not certain who made that decision, Commissioner Howell. I see Tom Bishop. Of course.

Jesse Romo is the one who gave authorization to me for that. Okay. So is that a discretionary? Do they have to charge something? Is the range zero to full price is what I'm wondering? I believe that's correct, yes. I think he has some discretion, though not total discretion, the way he was describing it to me. Well, knowing that we still have a cost on this hangar, I wish that, and then again, to the point, this is primarily to the benefit of Wichita. I wish that they would have brought that down to zero as their, if you will, support for the hangar. We're going to be putting property taxes into this, and they're going to be charging us $22,000 a year. I would rather see them make this as affordable as possible to Sedgwick County, and I wish they would give up the $22,000 so that we could do this without costing our taxpayers. But on the sublease provision, it says the prospective tenant may sublease all or any portion of the premises. So we're the prospective tenant, and what this is saying is if we wanted to sublease this to somebody else, we could do that under this MOU. Am I saying that right? I think you're getting that right, Commissioner. Yes. I'm curious, what would be a situation where we would have that? That would come up. I mean, for example, if the Highway Patrol decided to do something different, we end up with this hangar on airport authority land, I would want to sell this property, probably. I would want to get out of the business of owning the hangar. Can we – is this land leased with the Wichita Airport Authority? Is it transferable? Or do we have to maintain – do we have to continue to own this because we would only be allowed to sublease the land?

I believe that the way the lease is structured would be just with Sedgwick County. It would not be transferable to a third party. And to the sublease question, I mean, it's a good question. I guess first off, there is anticipated to be a sublease with KHP in terms of them subleasing property. But we also have the flexibility built in here. Again, it's not binding, but the idea would be that if for some reason in those 50 years something would change and KHP was no longer a sub-lessee, that we could have a different sub-lessee. There's language that we've included that says the landlord's approval of a sublease would not be unreasonably withheld. Tent there is. You know, circumstances obviously could change over that time frame. The use could need to change. But the lease itself would be with the county. And I don't, that's not something that the way it's structured, that that would just be transferable to another party. And that's really outside the scope of what I think is intended in this arrangement. Does that answer your question, Commissioner?

Not really. I guess I'd just say I'm looking at the what-ifs. What if we end up with a hangar that KHP decided they didn't want this hangar for something? They want to do something different. We end up with a multimillion-dollar hangar on airport authority land. What do we do? I'd like to know what my options are at that point.

I think at that point, and it's a good question to ask, is that we would be looking into other sublease alternatives potentially to – to make it to where the county would not have the revenue gap that we otherwise could have. That's part of the reason we negotiated that into the LOI. Again, this isn't the binding lease between the parties, but that would be the intent. Because you're right, circumstances could change in 50 years is a long time.

Well, again, we don't have a contract with the state, so we don't know for sure what they will do going forward. We don't know. There's no way to...

That's correct. And the contracting stages, I mean, those are going to happen later, of course, and there would be a sublease with the Kansas Highway Patrol and then also an actual 50-year lease with Wichita Airport Authority. But you're correct. At that point, those are items that have not been fully negotiated into lease terms, and those will be in front of the board at a future date.

Let me ask Mr. Manager a question. The conversation about the 50%, was that a discussion where we negotiated to that number, or was that simply... A short conversation. That's what they offer. We said that sounds good. I'm going to describe that as a short conversation. That was the best they could do. Okay. Once we do this, I think our chance of negotiation is gone. So is there some reason we have to do this today?

I mean, from the legal standpoint, no, there's not. I realize this is throwing it back to the board as a whole. It would be a question for the majority of the board in terms of if there's an exigency viewed on the board's part. But legally speaking, from my standpoint, no, there's not any reason this would have to be approved today.

I continue to have concerns about this. I'll be voting no on this today. That's probably not a surprise to anybody. I still think there's issues that are potentially going to cause some second guessing on whether this is the right direction for the state to go. We're now creating obligations for us that I'm not sure we're ready for. And I think there's, again, in terms of negotiation, the fact is it's going to cost us, I think our general consensus is it's going to cost central county taxpayers roughly $80,000 a year to do the state a favor without a contract for the state of Kansas, and Wichita is going to make $22,000 a year off of our 50-year agreement. To me, there's a lot of things about that whole sentence that doesn't sound very good to me. So thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the chance to speak. Commissioner Weiss?

A couple of questions. So we're looking at $0.12 per square foot, and that's monthly, or $1.44 per square foot per year, just from a commercial real estate perspective. It's pretty good rent. Of course, I'd love for it to be lower. I'd love for it to be nothing. Rent, it shows that rent should start six months after execution, I guess, of the agreement. Have we asked them if we could have the rent commencement date to line up with completion of construction? I don't know how long that process takes, but I'd hate to start paying rent when we don't have a building constructed.

we haven't asked that question specifically that i'm aware of commissioner wise um but that's something we could try to ask we you know i think that's a reasonable ask and i also uh which direport authority has been willing i think to work with county on this and so i think that's something we could seek i see lindsay walking up here i know she wanted to address that more fully

or even an on or before date so that we have time to complete, and then they have a security of knowing that we're going to have a date in mind.

So, Commissioner, Lindsay Purcell, your CFO, the concern I would have with that is in our historical agreements where we've had a ground lease in place, we have maybe not been required to pay the lease, but that ground lease has at least been required to be in place in order for us to do the construction and have the light. covered. So I know that when we did construct NCAT, we did begin paying rent before we actually constructed. So there's precedent for us to do this, but it's certainly something we could talk about.

Yeah, I think there's different dates we could have. We could have a lease commencement date and then a rent commencement date, and those two dates could be different. I'd like to ask the question at least.

And there would probably be a couple ways to do it. I mean, this has been agreed to in principle by the Wichita Airport Authority. I mean, if there was a will of the board to modify the language in the LOI, I think that's something that they, it seems like a reasonable request to me. We could look to build in there. Alternatively, you could approve it how it's worded today. Nothing in this is binding. And there could be, that's something at a staff level we could try to seek to modify it in the actual lease agreement. Again, I think they would be willing to work with us on that because we're talking probably about a matter of a handful of months here, I would think.

And some of this I'm asking just to have it on record that this is where my mind is so that if we can further negotiate some of these when we get to a final agreement. I know in an LOI we want to be as close to business terms as possible. I don't want to throw any curveballs at them. And then a couple more questions. How long of a lease, this might be for Colonel, how long of a lease do you think we could get signed with KHP. Can we get a 20-year lease? Can we get longer? Just take a seat.

So, Commissioner, and then I'll give it over to Colonel White. When we have talked with the administrative folks at KHP, we have contemplated at least a 20-year lease because that would align with the bond issuance structure, and we would need to ensure that when we sell the bonds that we are able to say that that payment source is in place for 20 years.

Yeah, I would just echo that comment. The 20-year lease is what we have discussed. Okay, I appreciate that. Absolutely.

And is there a way that we could get that lease...

signed or have this agreement contingent upon executing a 20-year lease minimum with khp can we include some contingency language in there i think we could commissioner wise at least preliminary preliminarily had been my thought that it would probably make sense to run these items more or less uh at the same time yeah so that you wouldn't have some sort of gap or lag in there

Yeah, I want to make sure that we don't tie ourselves into something and then something changes that's out of everybody's control from the KHP side and then we don't have a tenant or a use for it. We just have an expensive lease agreement. So protecting ourselves on that end, I'd like to get that lease started simultaneously so that we can have that commitment and that level of confidence that we've got a tenant for the building that we can... Sure.

That's a good idea, Commissioner.

I think those are my only ones. I'll look at it closer and let you know if I have any other. But I appreciate the work that you guys have done, and obviously this is an area I can kind of geek out and get excited. Appreciate that. But thank you. Those are, I think, all the questions. I think I'm okay with moving forward knowing that a letter of intent is just what it is. It's not a legal binding document. These are the overarching business terms that we would like to continue conversations. There might be some tweaks or some requests, and I think it's all for the betterment of everybody that we all serve, all of the different entities involved. So thank you for your work.

Thank you. Commissioner Meister. Thank you, and good questions. I just commented myself and Commissioner Blubaugh formerly served on the city council, which was over the airport authority, and there was numerous cases where hangers and land were subleased or exchanged or sold and all that stuff. So that does all fall under the Wichita airport authority's guidance with city council approval or rejection. So in this being non-binding and an intent and understanding that there are steps that have to happen, I appreciate especially Commissioner Wise brings her commercial experience in commercial buildings. leasing and selling and so I appreciate you taking an interest in the as the next step goes on and what maybe is reasonable and and helps us as a county on that that kind of document but that's not this document so but I so I'll be supportive I actually I'll make a motion to approve as presented okay

And I'll second that motion. I have a motion and a second. I do have an additional question. Justin, we've had public discussions on this numerous times now. Can you give me a timeline as to what other action will this commission need to take?

That's a good question, Chairman. And I'm looking at Lindsey and Tom to see if they have any different thoughts. But if we're talking about these other agreements, getting them in front of the board and finalized, because there's going to be drafts of them. There's going to be discussions, negotiations, that kind of stuff. I would anticipate somewhere in the ballpark of two to three months is a probably reasonable time frame. There's a lot of variables there. That's probably the best. I saw Lindsey and Tom both nodding their heads, so I think they think that's probably a time frame that would line up more or less with that. I don't know if – Colonel White is also nodding his head. So that sounds like a timeframe in which this could be completed by. Obviously, there are things that can change that in the future. There are unknown variables that could crop up. But does that give you a reasonable – Well, so there will be one additional action or do we need to wait until the legislature – And then after those things are done, there would have to be competitive bidding. So there'll be a bid board item that would be in front of you. And then there will be a bonding item. Now the bid board item and the bonding item will probably, those items will probably be early 2027 if everything happened correctly.

So the bid board item, yes, that would be, I think, the soonest we could expect it because it will take some time. We'll still have to go through the design and then the construction. But in terms of the bonding, you all actually don't have to take another action. You have authorized, you've done the project authorization, and so that now preserves our right to spend money and get reimbursed through bond proceeds. And so we would anticipate you getting all the way through project authorization almost complete project completion, then we would sell the debt so that we were selling it for precisely the amount of dollars that we need to avoid any federal arbitrage concerns. And so we would reimburse ourselves at the end of the project. We would essentially borrow against the general fund, which is what we traditionally do with bond-funded capital projects. So we always have that precise figure that we bond for. And so that would happen at the conclusion of construction. And I have no idea what that timeline is. But I think we've put in our documents that it won't be until 2028 or 2029 in terms of when we do that sale.

OK. And Lindsey, help me better understand Is this rent fixed? Do we have an escalator? Like right now, they're talking about raising the rates again. And I just want to make sure that we're still, we've got some kind of CPI or some kind of escalators.

There is, in the letter of intent, yes, there's an escalator clause of 1% annually. That is, again, an intent, though. We still have an opportunity to negotiate the terms. This just outlines the general terms so that the attorneys know what to work on for a formal agreement so we can continue to have that conversation.

Okay. So we've got a motion and a second.

Commissioner Howe, did you have an additional question? I do. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just to clarify, this letter of intent is not binding. It is simply just an indication to our council on what to work on. You just said that. That's correct. The lease we do sign with the airport authority, that will be binding? That's correct, Commissioner Howe. Okay. So then ultimately there's going to be a lease agreement. You just mentioned a lease agreement with KHP. Is that binding?

That will be legally binding between the county and the state. It would be legally binding. Now, I think what you may be getting to, and just to fully advise, I know that I've advised the commissioners about this publicly two or three times, a standard term and condition that we would expect to be in that's in the state's standard attachment in any contracts called the DA-146A form. It has language that allows the state to terminate the contract and their obligations if there's not appropriation of funding from the legislature. To this point, I've talked to legal counsel from the State Department of Administration, and they're in charge of that form and how these types of contracts operate at the state level. They've indicated this is not a provision they would be willing to waive. They said it's a provision they've not waived, and he couldn't think of any contracts they had waived it on. So I do think it would be a legally binding contract, but if, for example, the legislature did not follow The continued funding, we're talking about a 20-year timeframe, is at least what's contemplated with KHP. There is that vulnerability. I think we have two years of funding so far approved by the legislature. I think it was the 2025 and 2026 legislative sessions. They've already started funding it and conversations with, we had communications with our lobbyists This is the type of funding that the way it's set up in the budgeting process, that there would have to be like a specific action of the legislature to pull it out of the expected continual funding for each year. And I would note that in our MOU with KHP, which I realize this wouldn't address all of your concerns, certainly. It would be more of a short-term item. KHP has indicated that if there's not enough money to cover the costs on this, they would intend to pull these funds from other areas to help pay for this. And that's language that we would, from their funds that they're in charge of, I think it was their operational funds, if I remember correctly, which would give us a little bit more of assurance on a short-term basis as well. And we would intend to work language like that into any lease agreement with KHP to try to mitigate some of the risks to the county.

I didn't know that that's a comment that they had made. I wonder if the legislature would be supportive of that type of fiscal plan. I don't know that they would be. But anyway, if they did, again, I understand that they're not willing to sign a lease agreement without some type of wiggle room to get out of it if they should choose to do so. My question is, why are we going to sign a binding agreement that doesn't have the same wiggle room? If they backed out, why can't we also find a way to... I guess, have the same right to not continue this and possibly sell the land or whatever without some type of a long-term commitment to the airport authority or and have the right to sell the hangar and the land.

That's a fair question, Commissioner Howell. There's a couple pieces to that, and I'm looking to Lindsay to see if she would want to supplement or correct anything on that. I think one piece would be, first off, I don't know if the Wichita Airport Authority would agree to that. That could be something that, if the will of the board was to do that, that would definitely change the nature of this LOI. In fact, this would be a substantial change to the LOI. If that were the will of the board, I would not suggest that. proving it today just because it would substantially change her relationship in terms of how a lease arrangement would work. Then also this project is being bond funded and as part of that there's a secure commitment of sorts that having the out language like that would not square with bond funding a project. Lindsay's nodding her head. I don't know if there's anything more she would want to say in terms of our commitments.

Sure. So, Commissioner, when we sell debt for a project, we are committing to pay that in totality over a structured term. And there are a number of significant legal documents that get filed with the IRS, with the SEC, with others. And so we are on the hook once we sell that debt for 20 years. So there would not be any opportunity for us to back out on that. without major repercussions to our credit rating and potentially even some obligations. So we issue the debt, but then people buy it and those people who would buy it would have legal recourse against us.

To clarify, I'm not suggesting we would default on our debt. I'm suggesting we have the right to sell the property and recoup whatever monies are available for the sale as we continue to pay off that debt. I see. Whenever that happens. So I'm not suggesting there's any defaulting of the debt. I'm simply saying I don't want to own a hangar forever because of a 50-year lease that we can't sell the building that we constructed forever, even though the state's not committed to the same level that we're being committed to. And just one final comment. Again, I know I'm beating a dead horse on this topic, but the state does have other options. They could have purchased the land and purchased the hangar that they're currently using. This is 14 times more expensive, and it creates this type of long-term issues. The building they're using right now would be something they could outright own it, which is actually what the governor wanted in the first place. The governor wanted to own the facility. And that was something that they would have been able to do. I know that this is wasting everyone's time, so I'll just stop talking. Thank you. Commissioner Wise.

Okay, a couple other questions. He asked one of them, and that was if we did want to sell the building, do we have that option? So I guess we don't for the reason of the bonds.

Not under the current LOI. Okay. Yeah, not under the current LOI. Sub-lease it. Yeah, a sub-lease would be the alternative that may exist there, commissioner-wise.

Okay. And then was a 50-year lease the only option, or they can't do anything less than that?

Commissioner Wise, I'm not aware of them offering anything different than that. I don't know if anything else. I think that's standard, but I can ask that question. Okay.

Happy to ask questions if it's appropriate for me to talk to Jesse. I haven't talked to him about this. And then I had one more question. Oh, so as I look up on the GIS, Wichita Airport Authority at Jabara, they don't pay property taxes. So would we pay property taxes on this building? Okay. So I don't know if I heard Commissioner Howell mention that as a concern, but I wanted to clarify, we would not have property taxes then?

Well, I remember we guys had a separate public meeting where Tom Henry from our office had commented on this. We would try to seek probably a tax exemption on this. We believe it would fit within that. I will advise that that same standard contract form with the state of Kansas says they're not going to be responsible for any taxes. That's another provision that they have not been willing to waive. I don't think in their legal counsel's view that they've ever agreed to waive it. We think an exemption would be granted. I believe Tom Henry had given some comments that there is a possibility because there would be a sublease agreement that we wouldn't get that. We would hope it would because it would be being used by two public entities who would normally be exempt. So that would be the intent and the hope, Commissioner Wise. That would ultimately be a call for the Kansas Board of Tax Appeals to determine whether the exemption would be granted, though.

Do I remember correctly, is it on this project or a different one that has Jesse already pursued a grant or some sort of funding to help us and it got denied? Okay. All right.

That is correct and it was denied.

I think those are all of my questions. I think that there is some contingency language that we should probably craft in there to help protect us, even on the LOI side, just so they know that we have some risk that we want to make sure we're covered on. But again, I think as long as we can feel comfortable with the LOI right now, all of those things need to be worked out before the agreement's made, and surely they understand that we've got business to do, too.

Thank you. Yep. Justin, I want to ask again. I thought the property at the airport was property tax exempt regardless. I thought that was part of our... our mission to try to lease out for commercial development more airport property. But you're saying you have to go through an exemption process?

Chairman, I'm not aware. I mean, and I'm not the tax attorney in our office, and I also am not certain on how the airport authority is structured. So I operate under the presumption that properties are taxed and are not exempt. I know that it was our intent on this to seek an exemption because, again, it would be county leased for county purposes, which are generally exempt purposes, and for state of Kansas purposes that we believe also would fit into an exempt purpose. under the law. So I think that was our intent at a staff level was to try to seek that exemption. I'm not familiar with Wichita Airport Authority more specifically on if there's any generalized exemption there. But that's something we can look into further, Chairman. Okay, okay.

Yeah, go ahead. There's a motion and a second. Does it make sense to go ahead and add, to amend the motion, to go ahead and add particularly the rent commitment date, rent commencement date, and the contingency on a contract with KHP? Does it make, that way we don't have to, if you fix it in this LOI, that way you don't have to redline it later. I mean, it's just an amendment to the motion just to include those two factions separately. understanding the spirit of what's trying to be accomplished. That way you don't have to send it over. We're approving what is here, and then you have to send it over and then redline it later. Why don't you just send it over? Why don't you suggest it and send it over?

It's just an LOI. I think, Commissioner Beatty, what we could do on that is to suggest, I mean, I'm trying to think of through how you would do this as a governing body. It would probably just, if the will of the board is to have that language modified for certain issues, then we could just make a change to the language and I'll need to look at it more specifically on how we would address that. Lindsay, were you wanting to comment further? I'll let Lindsay address that more.

So my concern right now is that the LOI has been approved by the Wichita Airport Authority. And so at this point, you wouldn't be approving an LOI. You would be approving a draft to go back to KHP and then for review. I think if you give us that direction to be part of the negotiation consideration, I think that's something that we can do. But I think if you want us to go back and actually have the negotiation on an LOI, I'm not sure that that's as time effective as simply understanding that that's the preferred direction of the board and incorporating that in additional negotiations.

Okay. Well, for me personally, the rent commencement date, I think that's very standard. I don't think that's... unusual for land leases. And I think the contingency in regards to a contract with KHP, I think that would be a, those are very standard, I would believe. So the maker of the motion and whatever, we'll allow you guys to do what you want. Just those two things I think are very reasonable things.

And Commissioner Beatty, if you or any other commissioner wants me to come up with some motion language to substitute in there. And I agree with what Lindsey said, that it has been agreed to by them. But there's a decent chance that they may be amenable to an amendment, as you suggested. So I could come up with motion language if there's one.

So can I ask a question? So we drafted the LOI, sent them. Did we approve the LOI previously?

Actually, the LOI was drafted by Wichita Airport Authority. I see.

So they're sending it to us, and we're going to redline and send it back.

Well, I'm sorry, maybe I wasn't very clear. What I had in mind was if today you all as a board wanted to do something slightly different, we could send this back to them with a change to the language where it talks about until six months following commencement of the lease, and instead say, or at such other date as may be agreed to by the parties in a lease agreement. That would, I think, accomplish what Commissioner Wise mentioned, but putting them on notice formally in the document, and I think what you're getting to, Commissioner Beatty, without having to have a definitive thing, it would give enough flexibility that we probably wouldn't have to come back to you a second time if they weren't. I think that makes sense. I think they would agree to it, I guess. I don't think that's going to be a sticking point. I wouldn't think so. Right. Okay.

SLOIs typically are redlined back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, then you go to the rent document, the lease document. But what you're sounding, it makes sense. I just think those are two very practical elements that would offer protections to the taxpayers that I think we need.

Commissioner Howell? Thank you, Chairman. It just seems like there's three options here. You could approve it as is. You could redline it right now and approve it with a redline. It's got to go back. It looks like it only has one signature on the LOI. That's the director of the airport authority. So it's not hard for him to review that and potentially sign it again. But again, the third option, of course, is to push us back one week and have that conversation first and approve it without the redlines. In either case, I'm going to vote no, but I'd just like to point out, I don't know if there's any reason you have to do it today. You could simply go clean up this document a little bit and bring it back for a clean approval. which I think is actually better than a red line, if he doesn't agree to it, then you're going to bring it back anyway. So I don't know. I just think that maybe out of respect, and by the way, and I also do think, since you're swinging the pendulum slightly in the county's favor, it's hard to do that once you sign the LOI. So if you approve it right now and you sign it, why would he change it? I don't think you have as much negotiation power. Not that there's a lot changing here, but I just think it's better negotiation policy not to sign something than ask for changes.

Any other questions or comments? We have a motion to second. Madam Clerk, please call the roll.

Commissioner Meitzner? Aye. Commissioner Beatty? Aye. Commissioner Howe?

No.

Commissioner Weiss? Aye. Chairman Buwa?

Aye. Motion passes 4-1. Next item, please. Thank you, Commissioners.

Item R, Review Service Plan, City of Goddard Unilateral Annexation.

Morning, Chair. Morning, Commissioners. Kirk Sponsor, County Counselor. Deputy County Counselor. Apologies.

Promotion.

That wasn't meant to be public. I apologize. All right, so what we have before you today is a City of Guard unilateral annexation proposal. What I'm going to do is I'm first going to go over the broad concepts of these unilateral annexations, and then I'll go directly into the parcel and the item that is for your consideration today. So big picture, this is governed by statute. KSA 12-520 says that cities may unilaterally annex land into the city if certain conditions exist. And so any one of these items could be a basis for them to want to do the unilateral annexation. That would mean that they can do this annexation without the consent or the request of the property owner. In this situation, they've identified number five as their basis for this unilateral annexation consideration. As part of the statutes, they require the cities to prepare reports that indicate, broadly speaking, the land to be annexed, the boundaries of the sea, and the impacts by the proposed annexation, the current streets, water mains, sewers, and other utility lines, and their proposed extension, the general land use patterns, and the statement that sets out really their plans for extending those municipal services into land that's potentially going to be annexed. They also need to include the estimated costs, the methods by which the city plans to finance the extensions, and the means by which the services being provided will continue to be maintained by the city at a level equal to or better than the services currently being provided. And then it also needs to state information regarding benefit districts. So when you're reviewing this item, the county's obligations and authority, first and foremost, the county does not have the authority to approve or deny this unilateral annexation. Second, you actually have no duty under statute to even review these proposed unilateral annexations. The reason this is before you is pursuant to county resolution that I'll discuss in a minute here. Now, I will say that the Board of County Commissioners comes into play immediately three years from now, if the annexation does go through, by statute, you are required to review whether or not the services plan was implemented. I believe it was on that basis that the county resolution 109-212 was adopted. And as part of that, the board has considered the report and reviewed the service plan for various elements and considerations, which include conformance with the requirements of the service plan set out in statute. how the services are to be maintained at the level equal to or better than the current services, whether this is annexing a public right-of-way, whether proposed services overlap service areas of other governmental entities, and the conformance with the comprehensive plan. So in essence, once again, you don't have approval or denial of authority, but this does give you the opportunity to review the services plan and see if there are any gaps, if there are any concerns. That way we can raise those concerns before the formal public hearing that the safeguard is going to hold. Timeline-wise, July 20th, 2026 is when the city published the resolution that indicated their interest in potentially pursuing this unilateral annexation. August 27th of this year, the MAPC reviewed the annexation. They voted 11-0-1 that the proposed annexation is consistent with the comprehensive plan. September 16th, today, this item is before you for your review. And then September 21st is when the city is scheduled to have their public hearing on the proposed annexation. This is a regional map. City of Guard is highlighted in the pinkish-purple, and the parcel in question is outlined in red. This is a closer view of the property in question. It is highlighted in the blue. As you can see around it, the only properties in question that are not already in the city of guard limits are the proposed parcel and then the parcel immediately to the west of it. I will indicate that that parcel immediately to the west is currently owned by the state of Kansas. Here's an indication of the land zoning in the area. They've indicated there's some light industrial to the south. There's also anticipate, I believe, some more commercial development that was planned to occur more to the east. City of Guard has indicated the existing streets. Those are shown on this map. They've indicated that they don't formally have plans to extend streets to this property in question. Its driveway is currently off of US 54. However, they said that potentially streets could be extended to the property in the future. It just kind of depends on the development in the area. They said that that would be done in reference to the statutory requirements. They said that development of infrastructure would be done pursuant to bonding and that ultimately costs would be conveyed to this parcel by establishment of a special district. Existing sewer, those sewer lines are shown in bright green on the map above as provided by Save Goddard. For whatever reason, I didn't transfer to the map in your PowerPoint, but within the plans that Save Goddard did provide, they indicated that the property to the immediate southwest of the parcel in question, they had text with the map that indicated that they are currently looking at providing sewer in this area as it is presently being developed light industrial once again the city of guard did indicate that the development of sewer lines further and extension to the land would be done through a city bonding and then on back end through the establishment of a special district they did not indicate there's presently plans but it is certainly available I think if there is interest down the road For this existing sewer and for the potential provision of new sewer lines, they did provide estimates with their service plan of what that would potentially cost. Existing water lines, you see the lines in bright blue. Once again, it would be done through bonding and then establishment of a service district for the passing on of the cost of the property in question. And then, as with the sewer, they said they don't have clear plans to establish those connections, but it's certainly available if wanted, and they have provided estimates there as well. Other services, it's already in Fire District Number 1. It would remain in Fire District Number 1. It's already currently served by County EMS. It would continue to be served by County EMS. For policing and law enforcement, it's currently served by Sedgwick County. It would now be served by the City of Goddard. City of Goddard Public Works would be responsible for the building out of the infrastructure. And then City of Goddard Zoning Enforcement would govern here. So before I get into the recommended actions, I will say that in your backup materials, you do have that service plan from the city of Goddard. You also have a document from the MAPD, which outlines the approval that was done by the MAPC. And then you have documentation from myself, which kind of goes through the requirements under statute of what they're required to provide information-wise. And I've indicated on those items that I do believe they have substantially complied with providing that information. So with that said, I am before you today. The recommended action is to receive and file. With that said, like I alluded to earlier, if you do think there is additional information that could be helpful for our action three years down the road, for our review three years down the road, Or if you do think the service plan is somehow deficient, there are alternative actions you could take. For example, you could require the county councilor to notify the city regarding any comments you want to make today. You could direct the county councilor's office to prepare a resolution stating our findings. You could also direct a county representative to appear and testify at the hearing held by the city on the proposed action. Once again, that's going to be on September 21st of this year at 7 o'clock at their city hall. I would reiterate the Board of County Commissioners does not have approval or denial of authority over this unilateral annexation. With that said, I am open for comments, and I would point out that the City of Guard does have a representative here today, Mike Escoggin. I see him currently in the audience.

Commissioner Beatty. Thanks, Kirk. I just want to, for the public and their awareness, I just want to make sure you repeat what you just said 37 seconds ago, which is the county commission has no authority to decline this, correct? This is by state statute. We just have to ensure that the service agreement that they've entered into, they remain compliant to the service agreement.

You are correct. By state statute, they've consciously kept the county out of the approval or denial process.

So my next statement is in no way a disregard to Goddard. Goddard's growth plans and what they're doing is phenomenal. I'm a big fan of what's happening in Goddard. I have heartburn over unilateral annexations as someone who lives in an unincorporated part of Sedgwick County. My direct representative is a county commissioner. I don't have a city elected that I report to. I don't pay city taxes. I didn't get to vote in the city elections. It's the county commission. And there's one property owner here, and I've spoken to this property owner. I have no idea how they truly feel about what's happening here. their direct representative is the county commission in District 3. For the county commissioner not to have any sort of say as to an annexation that's going to force this individual property owner into the city limits and pay city taxes without their consent, I think is, I have a lot of problems with that. I would tell you if Mays tried to do that to me, it'd be like the Battle of the Alamo, right? That's, we're not going. So that's frustrating to me as someone who lives in unincorporated Sedgwick County, that my representatives can't help make this decision for me. Now, and that is, I would also say that of all the ones we've seen here, this makes a lot of sense for Goddard. I totally understand that. This checks all the boxes of what the unilateral annexation was designed to do with the state, and you said as much, so. My heartburn is not in what Goddard is doing or even what Andell was doing the last time we had this conversation. My heartburn is in the statute. It's in that these individuals, their county commissioners, are their direct line of representation, elected representation, and we have no authority to speak on their behalf on some of these things. So, that being said, I will support it because it does fit in statute, and I... have to support it. But, and again, it's no slight to what Goddard's doing. I think Goddard's doing a terrific job, and they've got big growth plans, and we're really proud of what Goddard's doing. But for the record, these unilateral annexations, I have a lot of heartburn with how this statute is created and how it's executed. Commissioner Wallace?

Thank you. I did receive a phone call from this homeowner. It sounds like there's been a series of events. I'm not sure I followed completely, called me on my cell phone while I was driving, so I asked for a follow-up email to kind of tell the story of what's happened so that I could understand it better from the homeowner's perspective. I never received that email, but just knowing that there was some discontent, I would like to ask if you'd be willing to speak on behalf of Goddard. Can you tell us about what the homeowner situation has been? Have you guys smoothed that out or talked to them about it? I think just repeating what Commissioner Beatty said, we feel a little helpless to help our people at this point, but I would be curious what you guys have done and what efforts you've taken.

Yes, my name is Micah Scoggin. I'm the Economic and Community Development Director of City of Goddard. Been there almost eight years. So unilateral annexation, as Mr. Beatty said, by its very nature is contentious. Because unilateral means you don't have a say in the matter. We are going to bring you in, and you're welcome to complain all you want. But at the end of the day, if we meet statutory requirements, then you're SOL. So in this particular case, I did speak with the property owner. And we discussed it. There was some differences of opinion about statutory interpretation, which I believe he was dramatically incorrect about, and so at which point he stormed out of my office. But for the most part, to... somewhat defend Goddard a little bit more. The property owner doesn't actually live there. So it'd be a little bit different, right? If you were in your house or like, hey, Mr. Beatty, welcome to Goddard, right? Then you'd be like, dude, what just happened? In this particular case, this property is dilapidated and burned down and is not currently occupied. So We actually consider ourselves doing the county a favor because it is dramatically blighted. And so without having the county have any, you know, directing any resources towards remediating this blighted property, like I said, it's unhabitable. It's unfit for habitation. It is mostly burnt down. It is overgrown with weeds. The city sees the U.S. 54 as the gateway into Wichita and in that area. And so we would like to improve the aesthetic quality of the 54 corridor. This property is kind of a standalone example of how we can make that happen. So, unfortunately, of course, if we reach out to the property owner and they say, no, thank you, but it's blighted, burnt down, junk, overgrown with weeds, you know, basically another form of Cedric County Zoo in a micro version, then we want to go ahead and remediate it immediately. So, in this case, of course, it has to be in the city limits for us to implement any type of code enforcement and bring it up to standard. So, yes, of course.

So you just answered what I was going to lead into next is once it comes into the city of Goddard, there will be code enforcement. What does that include for the homeowner?

That means that we're going to send them letters per our code stating that where the deficiencies are in terms of blight, in terms of unfit for habitation, in terms of grass, in terms of junk motor vehicles, anything of that nature. If you view the property and you can see it from an aerial image, it doesn't take long. You jump on Google Earth, on Apple Maps, whatever you want. Just zoom in on the property and you can immediately see that's blighted. And so for us, we're going to send them letters, give them the opportunity to come into compliance with code. If they fail to, then, of course, we're going to enforce that code by sending them certifications and certified letters and everything else. and then go through the process of potentially condemning the property and moving forward. Like I said, they don't live there, so it is just a blighted property that just happens to be under their ownership.

What is the timeline that a homeowner has to comply with such? It sounds like it's not just mowing a yard, you know, fixing a fence. Right. This is a... This is a huge expense that perhaps it's not been fixed because they don't have the financial capacity to do so.

Right.

What's the city going to give them for a timeline to come into compliance?

Really, it depends on the city council. So once letters go out, it depends on the means. We don't dive into the personal finances of individual property owners, so we can't determine whether or not they have the financial means. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But we just have to enforce city code. So once somebody's in the city limits, city code has to be abided by, regardless of who the property owner is, regardless of their means. And so then we send out the letters. And then, of course, they have a certain amount of time per our statutes to comply. The city council can give them leniency. It's well within their purview to give them additional leniency if they want to, if they show good faith in terms of remediation of the property. That's completely up to the city council. But we're obviously willing to work with the property owners. We're not here to beat anybody with a stick, but we do want to see compliance and aesthetic approval in the property.

Those are all my questions.

Okay.

When I was on the city council, I had a similar issue with the trailer park just east of there, and they wanted out of the city of Wichita, and I had similar concerns because that's the gateway right into Godfrey's. Mm-hmm. So hopefully you guys are addressing that. If you don't have any other questions, then I'm going to go ahead and make a motion to receive and file and take any other action deemed appropriate.

Second.

I have a motion and a second. Madam Clerk, please call the roll.

Commissioner Meitzner. Aye. Commissioner Beatty. Aye. Commissioner Howe.

Aye.

Commissioner Wise. Aye. Chairman Blubaugh.

Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Next item, please.

Item S, transaction fee for county treasurer's office.

Good morning, Brandy.

Good morning, Commissioners. Brandy Bailey, your Sedavit County Treasurer. First, I want to start off this morning, Commissioner Howe, he handed out the United States Constitution, and we left the meeting and came back, and so we opened up the Constitution. And I want to say when I opened it up, there was a quote that attributed George Washington on the first page, and it says, if to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which a wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God. The words that stayed with me the most are, let us rise the standard. It made me think about this organization and what we're building together. We have a responsibility to work what we can stand behind and to serve with integrity, take pride in our responsibility, and earn our community's trust. So I just wanted to share that this morning.

So thank you, Commissioner Howe.

So today I'm here to discuss a request to approve an increase in Tag Office transaction fee of an additional $4.50 effective January 1st, 2027. I also want to explain how the Tag Office is funded because that's an important part of the conversation today. The TAG office is primarily a fee-based funded organization. Unlike many county departments, we do not primarily fund our office based on property taxes. The TAG office receives revenues from the fees associated with the motor vehicle transactions we process. Before July 1st of 2026, the Tag Office received $10.75 for certain registration renewals processed and $15 for each title transaction reprocessed. Through the legislative changes that happened in 2026, the County was authorized to add $5 transaction fee to eligible transactions. As a result, the Tag Office currently receives $15.75 for an eligible registration renewal and $20 for an eligible title work. That revenue is not simply just extra money. It is what pays for the operations of the Tag Office, including employee salary and benefits, training, technology, facilities, supplies, mail, equipment, customer service systems, and other day-to-day operations. Even at the current $15.75 registration renewal, that revenue is not sufficient to cover the full cost of staffing and operating the office at the level necessary to serve the public effectively. That is why the Tag Office has needed the support from the County General Fund. When the fees collected through the Tag Office transactions do not cover the cost to provide these services, other county resources must make up the difference. I understand that any increase in a fee is difficult, and I understand why people have questions and concerns. My goal today is to clearly explain what this fee applies to, why the increase is needed, and how that money would be used. This is important. The transaction fee does not apply to every single transaction that is processed in the Tag Office. Under Senate Bill 325, the fee can only be charged on certain vehicle-related transactions. Those include registration renewals, title and registration transactions, temporary permits, special plates, and salvage vehicle transactions. This fee is not a tax. It is a transaction fee. It is paid by customers using the transactions and using the Tag Office services. State law allows the counties to charge up to $10 per eligible transaction. The current fee is $5. My recommendation is $9.50, which is a $4.50 increase and remains below the maximum allowed by the state. The TAG office has significant responsibilities. We process hundreds of thousands of transactions each year, both in person and online. In 2025, we process more than 551,000 transactions. For our 2027 planning, we're using a conservative estimate of 537,000 transactions. And I tell you, I did that because if you recall last year was the surge year for personalized plates. So I've reduced that down since that's a five-year implication. The Tag Office must have enough funding to do three basic things. One, we must provide timely and accurate service to the public. We must hire and retain qualified employees. And we must operate without requiring continued support from the County General Fund. In 2025, the Tag Office needed approximately $831,000 in General Fund support to cover its operating costs. Since the $5 transaction fee was implemented on July 1st, including on eligible online and mail-in transactions, that additional revenue has helped move the TAG office from operating at a deficit more towards working into the black. At our current funding level, we do not anticipate needing to request additional general fund supplement this year from County Commission for the ongoing tag operations. However, maintaining the current $5 transaction fee does not provide enough funding to address the additional needs we have identified. Specifically, improving employee pay and retention and addressing future pay compression and implementing a queue management system that can improve the customer experience and wait time information. That means county funds that support services used by all residents, including public safety, roads, health, and other services, are needed to help cover the cost of the TAG operations currently. My goal is to establish a sustainable funding model for a TAG office so that the cost of providing these services is more appropriately supported by the transactions that create the workload. When I spoke with the legislators about Senate Bill 325, I explained that I might only need to increase this $2.50 to $3.00. That was accurate at the time because the goal was primarily to reduce the amount of funding that I needed from County General Fund. Since then, we have taken a closer look at the operational needs of our office. We have identified two immediate priorities that must be addressed if we are going to improve service and operate responsibly. First is the employee pay and retention, and second is the customer service wait time and queue management system. A $2.50 or $3 increase would help reduce the shortfall, but it would not adequately address these operational needs. The TAG office relies on frontline employees who worked directly with the public every day. They handle titles, registrations, renewals, permits, special plates, and many other transactions that require accuracy and knowledge of the state requirements. Our frontline employees currently are making $17.04 an hour. Like many public service offices, we face challenges attracting and retaining trained staff. When employees leave, it affects wait times, service consistency, and the workload placed on remaining employees. We are working currently with Human Resources on a tiered plate plan for our frontline staff up to the supervisory level. That gives employees a clearer path for growth and pay progression as they gain knowledge and experience. You may recall that we previously appeared before the Commission to discuss the 16 vacant positions within the TAG office. During that process, we recognized more clearly how far behind our pay structure had fallen. Many of our current employees are long-term tenured employees. Because they have stayed with the office and progressed over time, the extent of the pay issue was not visible until we began actively trying to recruit for these positions. As we tried to fill vacancies, we found that our starting pay was not competitive with other local employers. In one instance, we approached an outstanding young man at McDonald's who we thought would be a perfect fit for the TAG office. He was interested until we started talking about pay. And we were unable to get him because the pay at McDonald's was much greater than what we could offer him at the tag office. There was a clear indication that we needed to address our compensation structure. That work performed at the TAG office employees require training, accuracy, accountability, and knowledge of the state laws of the motor vehicle system. To recruit and to retain people who provide that service to the public, our pay must be competitive. The estimated cost of this employee pay plan is approximately $487,000. This is not about unnecessary expansion. It's about retaining trained employees, recruiting qualified applicants, and reducing turnover and ensuring the public receives accurate and timely service. The second major issue is the customer weight management system. I hear the concerns from the public, and I agree that the experience can be improved. One of the biggest challenges is our current queue management system. We issued an RFP here recently and explored available vendor options. The system we reviewed could cost between $300,000 to $400,000, plus then an additional $50,000 a year for maintenance and support. After speaking with other treasurers, not just Kansas treasurers, treasurers across the United States, and discussing options with County IT, We believe it may be more cost-effective to develop a queue management system specifically for Sedgwick County's needs. The estimated cost is approximately $300,000 as a one-time investment. If County IT can support the system after it is developed, we can avoid ongoing vendor maintenance costs and have a system designed around how our office actually operates. I anticipate that since this is a one-time cost, that we'll understand before you guys next year requesting the fee, that fee could be reduced. This investment is intended to help improve customer experience, better manage appointments and walk-in traffic, and reduce the unnecessary wait times. We've reviewed several possible fee levels. If the fee was to remain at the $5, the TAG office is projected for 2027 to have a $2 million shortfall after accounting for normal operations, the employee pay pan that I just discussed, and the queue management system. At $750, the office would still have an estimated shortfall of approximately $674,000. At $850, still an estimated shortfall of approximately $136,000. And at $9, the office would have an estimated remaining balance of $133,000. This is not enough to responsibly prepare for future pay compression issues involving back office staff and supervisors who we're not taking into account during this tier program that we're looking at right now. At the recommended increase of $4.50, the office is projected to have an estimated year-end balance of approximately $401,000. That balance is not excess funding. It gives us the ability to address future compensation needs, including pay compression while maintaining operations and continuing to improve service. There are also necessary operating expenses that are not fully addressed in this projection. For example, the tag office is required to use two printers that are approved by the state. Two. That's all we have the option to use. One of the approved printers is already obsolete, and we can't even get parts for it. So when it dies, it dies. The second printer is nearing the oscillation phase. That means the state is going to have to need to identify a replacement printer model that counties can use. The TAG office has approximately 100 of these printers and eventually will need to replace them at an estimated cost of $1,000 to $1,500 per printer. That's what we pay right now for the printers. That represents a future equipment expense of approximately $100,000 to $150,000. This is another reason it is important to establish a sustainable funding level The requested increase is not intended only to meet today's operating costs. It also helps the Tag Office prepare responsibly for necessary equipment replacement and other operational needs that may arise. State law permits the fee to be up to $10. I am not requesting the maximum. At $10, the projected balance would be approximately $670,000. Based on the information available today, I believe $9.50 is the appropriate and responsible amount. It provides the funding needed to address the immediate staffing and queue system priorities, reduces reliance on county general fund, and provides a reasonable amount of flexibility for the expected compensation needs. My request is for approval of an additional $4.50 for the facility slash transaction fee. Effective January 1, 2027. On the specific eligible vehicle transactions authorized by Senate Bill 325, the proposed fee is intended to one, reduce the tag office reliance on county general fund support, retain and recruit trained employees, create a clear and fair pay progression for my frontline staff, improve customer wait times and service delivery, develop a better queue management system for Sedgwick County, and prepare responsibly for future employee pay compression concerns. Now, the media has done a lot of stories, so I just want to take an opportunity before I close, and I want to speak directly to the members of the public who have shared concerns about this proposal. I've read your concerns and your comments and complaints. The questions I hear often is how will paying for more staff and purchasing a new queue system actually reduce the wait times? That's a fair question, and I want to explain it in plain terms. First, staffing directly affects the wait times. When we are able to pay employees fairly, we are more likely to retain experienced staff and attract qualified new employees. Retention matters because every time an employee leaves, we lose the knowledge and the experience that have gained while working at the TAG office. There is also no immediate operational impact. When we hire a new employee, it effectively takes two people off the service line for a period of time. The new employee who is being trained and the experienced employee who is now having to train the new employee. And that takes that person away from serving the customers in order to provide that training. That means turnover does not just create one vacancy. It reduces the number of staff available to serve public while training occurs. Retained training employees helps keep more knowledgeable people at the counter and available to process the transactions. Second, we need to improve the queue management system. Our current system is not designed to effectively manage the volume of customers in a county such as Sedgwick. Customers may check in and receive a text message that they are next in line, only arrive to find that they still have an hour's wait time. On the other side, a customer will be told they can wait several hours, but then receive a text message saying you're next in line. Those estimates are not reliable enough, and that creates frustration for our public and for our staff. We need a system that provides more accurate information, manage appointments and walk-in customers, and more effectively, and help customers make better use of their time. Fixing the system will require an investment, but it is necessary if we expect to improve the customer experience. I also want everyone to know that this decision was not made lightly. My team and I have spent countless hours talking with other counties, reviewing technology, and determining what will be best for Sedgwick County. Whether we request a small increase or the full amount allowed by the state law someone will not be happy this is a difficult decision but as the elected county treasurer i have the responsibility to make that decision that i believe is best for our employees the tag office and the constituents we serve The County Commissioner's role is to consider and approve the fee amount. As the elected County Treasurer, I am responsible for the management and the operations of the Tag Office. I want the public to know that I am accountable for this decision and this recommendation, and that I want to hear your concerns directly. I understand that this proposal may result in thousands of emails. I ask for your patience and grace as we work through all of them. We will review and respond to the concerns as we are able because transparency and public input are important to me. I understand the impact a fee increase may have on the public. I do not make this recommendation lightly. However, I believe that the $4.50 increase is the level needed to maintain a reliable, sustainable tag office that can better serve the residents of Sedgwick County. And with that, I will stand with it for any questions.

Brandy, thank you very much. And yes, you are the elected treasurer. But as you know, people come to the county commission and whenever it's a budget request like this as well, I'd ask you for information. You provided it quickly to me. And I was trying to get a good grasp as transactions. So I looked at 23 from your data, 618,920 transactions. So in 24, we had 636,215. So we increased 2.8% from 23 to 24. 25, with 645,787 transactions, went up 1.5%. I look at this year, and you've got data up until August. It looks like for this year, we're about a 1.8%. 6% increase. So less than 3% a year. And then how do we tell the taxpayer, hey, it's increasing. I understand you've said personalized plates, language barriers, things like that are more time consuming. But the increase overall in transactions only going up 2% to 3%. But we're asking for almost a 50% increase in the transaction fee. So how do we explain that to the taxpayer?

And it's not just about the number of transactions we do. When a customer comes in, there's many times that we have to turn that customer away because they don't have all the information that they need. They have to come back to the tag office multiple times. So, therefore, that's taking more time than staff. That's increasing the wait times for other people because now we're having to work them back in. When I talked about our queue management system not having accurate times for customers, for wait times, and you get a text saying you have a four or five hour wait, but yet 20 minutes later you get a text saying to come in those office. Our system allows those customers to come in, and if they come in within that 30 minutes, then we put them back in line. So we're bumping people from the line. So it's truly about having more staff on hand to be able to handle the amount of people walking into our office. Just because the transactions haven't increased as much, the amount of people that we're seeing, I will tell you, when we were at the Kellogg Tag Office, we were seeing between 650 to 700 people a day. Currently, at the Douglas Tag Office and our satellite locations, we're seeing over 1,000 people a day. So it's not just strictly transaction amount. It's number of people walking into our office.

Okay. Are you comfortable explaining what's going on with the legislature here with this three-year period so that everybody understands why you're charging this and it's not handled as it has in the past?

So the fees for under Senate Bill 325, it looked at the fees for the tag office. The tag office is supposed to be ran strictly based on the fees that you pay when you come in to register a vehicle. Like I said before, we were collecting $10.75 on a registration renewal, $15 on a title work. We keep a very small portion of what we charge. The rest goes to the state of Kansas. In one of those fees, you'll see a modernization fee that's on there. It's $4.50. However, that was intended to initially be used for tag office operations to approve, but that fee is now being directed over to KDOT. So we collect it. It still says modernization fee, but it's not... use that all for tag-related functions is going to KDOT. So part of this Senate Bill 325 is creating a task force to come together to figure out what is a good sustainable funding method, how do we modernize the system. So there's a lot of things in there for it to address, but for the fee specifically, fix for the legislature was to allow the county treasurers to charge this transaction fee because we advocated and we were close at one point of being able to retain more of the fees that we were able to collect. However, KDOT came in at the last minute, KDOR came in at the last minute, and they had heartburn because we were essentially taken away from their budget to fund the office. So that's another conversation that needs to happen. And this transaction fee was really, truly just a quick fix because county treasurers across the state of Kansas, it's not just Sedgwick County, all 105 counties are increasing their fee because they cannot sustain and operate with the fees that are being charged in those offices. Those fees haven't changed in over 50 years.

When did that prior fee schedule change to what we have today?

It was 50 years ago when it was written into legislation. I mean the $5.

It's been consistent?

That went in early 2000, 2002, I believe is when that $5 went in. Okay. I have to go look, but off the top of my head, I can't tell you right now.

When does this three-year period end with the legislature?

So the three-year period will end in 2030. So there is a three-year sunset on this particular transaction fee. We're just getting in. We are just getting started. This is the very first year for this. Okay. And the request per statute says I have to have it submitted to KDOR by October 1st at noon in order for it to go into effect January 1st of 2027. Okay.

I do hope, I know we've got a lot of other questions up here. I do hope this commission, we continue to work with our lobbyists and with Topeka so that we have updates as to what's going on instead of just waiting three years to see what they give us.

And we have asked the county when we submitted our legislative platform was to specifically address a more sustainable funding model and to specifically address the $4.50, either it be renamed or it truly comes back to the county. So that is on our legislative platform we've submitted.

Okay. Commissioner Brady. Yeah. Okay. Brandy, thank you. Appreciate it, Shannon. Thanks for coming and talking yesterday, a couple days ago, I guess, on some of these details. Senate Bill 325 was a victory on a lot of levels. The biggest thing on my end is it reduces property tax dependence to where what should be a fee-funded office is now a fee-funded office. And we're not going to have to loan the TAG office from the County General Fund a million dollars of property tax support. Plus, you said it was going to be $2 million estimated this year. So that's a big win. Wait times, this gives you resources to deal with wait times and there's things that we have to do and then ultimately reform. That's what you're going to be working on. I got a couple questions. I just want to make sure I have this data right. The fee, one of the things Senate Bill 325, it allowed the transaction fee historically It was called something different. It was only for people that came into the office. The facility fee was only for those that came into the TAG office you were able to charge. But more people were doing things online and by mail. And you had the same office work on the back end, clerical work, but you weren't able to charge that fee. That changed. You can now do that. And now mail-in and online can now, this fee applies to that as well because the clerical work is the same. Correct. The numbers that you've given us, did we calculate? I think I distinctly remember you saying $130,000 is what we estimate that will be. Is that calculated into these numbers too? I didn't ask you that the other day. I'm sorry.

They are calculated into there. As far as for 2027, I've taken those actual numbers that we're collecting from July to December. Those are included in the numbers going forward for 2027.

Next question. We talked about pay, and I do agree. I think part of the wait times is technology, software, and UQ line. I do agree that has to happen. I'm glad that IT can help with the custom system. I think that might be a unique opportunity for us. Can you help me understand, what is your starting pay for a frontline tag office clerk right now?

$17.04.

And we're uncompetitive at that point in attracting and retaining. Correct. What is your staffing situation like now? Right.

Right now, I am pretty much full staff. Well, no, I had two notices that just come in. So I will have two vacant positions that are on my frontline staff.

And you're looking at about $487,000 of what this increased fee you're going to allocate towards increased pay. Does that also include the plus 10 positions that we're looking at? No.

So when I said that I'm going to be approximately short $2 million if we stayed at $5 for 2027, in that number, in my personnel number, I've taken into account increase in employee benefits. So I put $700,000 in there on top of what my 2025 actual personnel cost was. Plus then I added an additional $688,000, which is for an additional 10 employees. And those numbers are the numbers that I got from budget. Okay.

Understood. Okay. That's helpful. I am very favorable to some of the things that you're working on in reform. I very much like the satellite office concepts. I love the idea of the auto dealerships being able to come on and work titles in the back end. These are things that I think that we can continue to push. I know publicly I think some people have heard some of these things and some haven't. But this commission was very supportive of the reforms that you talked about wanting to do and push through. And I want to try to get you the support you need. I want to really understand these numbers. And the biggest thing for us is I have heard Commissioner House say it multiple times that most people would be willing to pay a little bit more if they knew to erase the wait times. The question on our end with the statute has allowed us the authority is how much is a little bit more? Is it a... $2.50 more, up to $5 more. And those numbers may not sound like big numbers to people. I get that. What's the difference between $2.50 and $5? Let's just get a good system. In some regards, I agree. We need to invest, and I'm committed to wanting to invest. There's a principle involved here, too, is that when we talked to the state legislature, we said that Sedgwick County was going to lead. We don't need $5 extra to do this, that we can do this in a way. So trying to strike that balance is where we're at. I'll listen to more comments and questions, but you helped me understand better what these numbers make up and kind of the direction you want to go. So I appreciate that.

Thank you. Brandi, I assume you're working with HR and trying to find out what a competitive rate is. I know we've had issues in the past with 911 operators and other folks that weren't.

We're currently working with HR in that. Okay.

Commissioner Meister. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Brandi, for this. I've got a couple of questions. questions that I think if we could get clarity then I'll be way more comfortable approving some level of a fee increase and basically this this is kind of a big decision from my perspective and I first had a set of numbers from you at like two o'clock Monday We had a discussion. It was all brand-new information, a queue list, replacement, 10 people. Everything was new. And it was your numbers. Subsequently, yesterday afternoon... We received a corrected email from you with corrected numbers and explanation further. So my question is, all of this stuff that we've done, helping 911 and shortages at the sheriff's office and between technology, people, everything else, this falls into, in my opinion, what we've done in the past to try to help a department be more efficient and solve problems and everything else. I've tried. If what you're saying, it looks to me like these are your numbers. I don't think these numbers, if finance, who we just saw this morning, has had years of awards and we have full confidence, if finance, has finance seen these numbers and said, yes, these are good?

I have met with Lindsay multiple times. The numbers that I gave you yesterday with the new projections, because when I met with finance before, when I met with Lindsay before, we didn't have a dollar amount for what the budget impact would be for the tier play plan, which that's now $487,000 that was given to me by HR right prior to our 2 o'clock meeting.

$480,000 is the number that you basically need a $1 fee increase.

for the employee retention. But that doesn't take into account the 10 additional employees that I've asked for on my staffing table. And I will tell you, five of those have been approved now. So we have hired for the five additional. So I still have five additional that next year, once I have the funding in place, then I can come back and ask for five additional employees to my staffing table. And that 688,000, that is included for 10 employees in those numbers I've given you. Those numbers came directly from budget as well.

Okay. Well, I haven't, my comfort zone is not good because when we've solved other department, when we've added as a team, we had HR, we had a lot of information from HR saying this is the plan that we think will help recover and perform. We haven't had a meeting with HR and had HR weigh in on any of this. Of course, it all started on Monday afternoon and got updated yesterday afternoon. So I haven't had a meeting with finance to say this is good, HR to say this is good. You've talked about somehow an IT solution with your Q list. We haven't had IT get with us to say this is a good solution. I'm all in. So I know you need to, and plus you need a decision now for an October 1st deadline. This is really, this is a rushed situation. I'm more in favor of if we have one more meeting. Personally, I'll need to hear affirmation from finance, HR, and IT to say, yes, this is the right amount. Maybe it's the $450. Maybe it's a dollar. Maybe it's something.

That's just where I'm at. I understand that. And I will tell you, we didn't get the HR number until right before our 2 o'clock meeting on Monday. The $487,000, that didn't come in until then. So I got that. that last minute. And then we've been working to figure out what a programmer would cost. So we've been reaching out, doing some research and 300,000 is the number that we got. And we've just recently gotten that number as well.

I feel like July 1st, you effectively put in the $5 fee helped right away. You're getting great revenue to help solve some problems.

And that's truly covering what that shortfall is that we were anticipating having this year. So the $5 fee that went into effect on those online and mail-in transactions July 1st is truly helping to take care of whatever the shortfall was projected for 2026.

Well, I appreciate your explanation. I think July 1st, we could have watched everything through July, even August, and we could have had a better evaluation from all the departments required. any time between then and Monday afternoon two days ago for a rush decision. So I'll wait and hear what the comfort zone is with my fellow commissioners. But you know where I sit right now. And if we need a week to pause to get affirmation one way or another, then that would make my comfort zone be a lot better. Thank you. Commissioner Wise.

Thank you, Brandy, for all of the information and for our meeting on Monday, too, to catch me up on what you've been working on. I just wanted to share a couple of agreements, perhaps. I agree that the cost of doing business has increased since 50 years ago. I agree that this is a fee-funded service that shouldn't be propped up by property taxes for people that aren't tagging and utilizing your service for their vehicles. My concern would be if you could tell me if I have a family of six, what does that do to my total annual cost if I have six drivers in my family? I know that you said that this fee, this increase doesn't apply to all transactions, but if I'm registering maybe one or two cars a year and I'm tagging all six, what's the financial impact to that family?

So six times 450, so... 30. Yeah. You know, let's go less. Yeah. 30. And I mean, you're looking maybe 35, $40.

Yeah. I wanted you to do that math out loud because I think that's what, before I even knew what was coming on today's agenda, it seemed like I was already getting, um, emails from constituents that a huge concern that, you know, these fees are going to impact their lives. And I'm not saying 20, $30 doesn't impact someone's life annually, but, um, I think we have to find a way. I think so far the TAG office maybe hasn't proved, have the proof in the pudding. Is that what the saying is of improvement? And perhaps that's because you've had to, you're still swimming upstream a little bit with staffing and all of the things. I love that you gave options on different levels of increase and what those levels can help with your department. I wonder if going all the way up to $4.50 of an increase is too much year one. I know that you could do more year two. Each year you come back and reset that fee. Is that right?

I do, but I have a three-year sunset on this. So that's why the intent is to try to do more this year. So that way we can get those things in place. So then that way years two and three, we can potentially reduce that fee. There's no...

Nobody knows. Nobody has the crystal ball to know that we're not going to over-collect and then lower it because it doesn't seem like we get to lower much ever. We didn't lower our mill levy at Sedgwick County. But that's the concern of front-loading this is, okay, we front-load it. Why would you ever reduce it after that? And I'm just speaking from some of the constituents that have reached out to me.

And I understand that. And, however, I will tell you from my perspective that Whatever remains in the tag fund at the end of the year gets transferred over to the general fund. So there is no benefit for me as the treasurer or for the tag office to fund it more than what it needs to be funded because at the end of the year, I don't get to keep it in my fund. It goes directly back to Sedgwick County's general fund.

I think that's all the questions I have.

Commissioner Howell? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a couple quick questions. You mentioned there's, before the $5 fee started in July 1, what were the fees we were charging before that?

So we were charging $5 to those who walked into the office. However, those that did a transaction by mail or online were not charged the $5. On July 1, the fee went to the online and the mail-in transactions.

So that fee for people who were visiting the office did not change?

Correct. It did not change at all.

So the total fee was $4.50 for the state and then $5 for someone who visited the office. It was $9.50 total. Is that right?

$4.50 for the state. What do you mean?

Well, the state charges a modernization fee.

Well, there's a whole lot of other fees included in there. It's not just the modernization fee. That's just one of the fees.

The total is $450 for the state? Correct. How much of that today goes to KDOT? All of it. All of it. Okay. But there's other fees included in the $450 you just said?

There's other fees on top of the $450.

On top of the $450.

So you have a title fee. So out of a title fee, the state gets $29.25 of it. We get $0.75 of the title fee.

So if someone comes in and they just get a renewal, what's the total fee currently and what's the total fee that's proposed? Current fee total would be what?

On the transaction fee?

For everything that is required to do a renewal today. How much is the fee for today's renewal versus what we're proposing?

That's back at my desk. I have to go look. I didn't review that sheet before I came in here.

So title would be $29,000.

$29.25 is what it costs to do a title work. We get $0.75. The state gets $29.25. Or it's $30 to do a title work. State gets $29.25. We get $0.75.

I see. And then on top of that, we still charge $5, I assume, for us.

Correct, because they're coming into our office.

Okay. On the renewal, does the state charge fees for the online and mail?

For the mail, there's no fee for the mail because it comes directly to our office.

So the state does not charge a fee for the mail?

Well, they get their fees that are included in the registration renewal. And like I said, I'll go pull those numbers. Those are back in my desk. But if you were to do an online transaction... The state charges for you to be online to process your credit card, they charge 2.5%, whereas if you come into the county, it's 2.19%. And then they charge an additional 50 cents to do the online transaction that the state keeps that 50 cents. So there are additional fees that the state keeps. when you're doing an online transaction that does not come back to the county. However, when you do it online, all of it flows back to the back office to each of the county, respectively. And then we process that work and we check it for delinquent property taxes. We send out the letters if there's the delinquent property tax and they owe because we're not going to send you the tag if you still owe that. Then we're back and forth with the constituent waiting on those fundings. And then we print out that tag or the registration renewal and send it out to the customer as well.

A little bit ago, Chairman Bluebot gave you some numbers for, I guess, I'm not sure if his number is, or people visiting the office. He used the word transactions. He said, for example, he used the number 636 or 645,787 transactions, I think what he said. But your estimate here today is, if you add this up, For the things we can charge this permit fee or this fee on would be 537,421 transactions. That's my estimate. That's correct. Is the number that Chairman Blubaugh used including things we can't charge?

Correct. His is including all the transactions we've done. So that includes your disabled placards, lien releases.

Based on the 537,421 transactions in 2025, If that was the same number going forward and we charge $5, that's an increase of $2.687 million to your office.

Correct.

Our shortfall, the shortfall we talked about for the subsidy from the property tax funds was $831,000. Correct. And that was for 2026? That was for 2025. 2025.

Correct.

It would have been over $1 million in 2026.

Right. I believe the estimate from finance was over $1 million for 2026. Is that correct, Lindsay? Half again. That's right. Our commission did cap it at $500,000.

What I'm wondering is, again, I understand you have a salary concern and some other things we want to talk about here, but the $2.6 million is more than, if you wanted to talk about the subsidy, what we would have had in 2026 budget or 2027 budget. budget, it sounds like it would be less than the $2.6 million.

If we do not take into account the increase in the staff pay, me adding the positions to the staffing table and the queue management system, then $5 would be sufficient to cover the office. But I would not be able to add anything or do anything to the office. It strictly would cover the shortfall.

Right. And you said the starting pay today is $1,704. Correct. What's it going to be once this is done? What's your new starting pay going to be?

It's going to increase it by the 5%. Starting pay will still be $1,704, but when you go into the tier, I believe HR has said that each tier move-up adjustment was a 5% increase. But your starting pay is still going to be $1,704.

Starting pay is still $1,704. So the guy at McDonald's would still not want to come work here.

Correct. But the hope is that we have the progression in pay that after a few months you've gone through your training, you've gotten well-versed in the tag operations, then your pay increase goes up.

By the way, I don't want to compare Sedgwick County with McDonald's. I just Googled it because you said it. They say online in Kansas the starting pay is $11.20 an hour on average. There's a range. $10 to $14 is the range. And I would argue our benefits are far superior to what McDonald's would provide. So let's just be clear. I don't want to use data that, in my opinion, makes it look like we're not paying our staff. I don't think that's fair to Sedgwick County.

And I'll tell you, the gentleman from McDonald's, one of the biggest concerns was for him is they paid completely for his college tuition.

Okay. A couple of things. Just a couple of quick comments here. I do think it should be on our legislative agenda that we would rename this modernization fee, call it a KDOT fee. That needs to happen because, again, people get the idea that we're collecting money that we're going to use in this office somehow. Correct. It's a false narrative. We're supporting a lie by the state of Kansas. By the way, if you add that up, it's well over $300 million they've collected in this fund that has been swept for alternate purposes. They misnamed the fee. It's over $300 million they've collected since that fee was started. And I think it's wrong. They could end the fee or they could rename it, but leaving it alone as it is right now is a false narrative at least. Regarding the printers, again, I know you're suggesting that if you said two printers, which means two models of printers.

There's two models of printers we're allowed to use.

And you can't buy one of them, but can you buy the other one today?

The other one we can, but it's hard to find it, and we're on back order. And then to get the toner that we need for that particular printer, it takes months for it to come in. So it's a matter of time before that printer goes where we can't get anything. Because the one that's obsolete now, we can't even get parts for it.

Does KDOR have the rules and regulations over this that they can change this if they want to? They do.

And that's part of that modernization task force that's included in the Senate Bill 325. That's part of the conversation that needs to be had when that committee meets.

And if and when they would approve some other more modern model of printer, we'll have to re-outfit all of our printers. How many printers are we talking about?

Right now, we're talking about $100,000 in the tag office. And right now, the cost for each printer that we currently are allowed to have is anywhere between $1,000 and $1,500, depending on the vendor that we can find it from.

So it could be $150,000 potentially as a one-time hit.

And that's a charge to the counties.

HR, you agree that $487,000 is the right number for this? You've done the full analysis. That's what we need to do this change in how we pay.

Good morning, Commissioner. Sheena Schmutz, Chief Human Resources Officer. So we have been working with Brandi and her staff on creating a tier system. It's still rough, but we have a good idea of what it is moving forward. And based on her staffing now and where we would slot those folks into tier one, two, and three, it would be a very good estimate.

How much of that 487 is going to the administration side of this?

These are for the clerks and the supervisors. Only for the clerks. Yes, and supervisors of those clerks.

Okay, and I'm looking at the budget book. There's like 41 of one type, and there's 11 and a half of another type, but I don't know. I asked a question, I think, when we spoke the other day. You said there was like 51 or 52, 53 clerks, and you want to add 10. So I'm just trying to understand how this 487 breaks down amongst that number of staff.

So what we have broken out, there would be six supervisors, 10 tier 1s, 40 tier 2s, and 23 tier 3s.

Tier 3 is higher pay or lower pay?

It would be a higher pay. It's kind of a more advanced clerk. And again, we're working through those details with the department right now on what the matrix and qualifications for each of those would look like. Again, we're kind of guesstimating right now what that would be.

First of all, I want to thank you, Gina. I appreciate that. I want to state I'm generally supportive trying to fix the stated and known problems of this office. I think it's going to take some funding to address a lot of these things. I'm not against everything on this list. I'm against a few things on this list. I'm a little concerned. We have a meeting next week. I'll just throw this out there to my colleagues. We have a meeting next week. I feel like we're just, again, this came at us kind of quick, and I think Commissioner Meister kind of mentioned that. I feel the same way. I don't feel like I understand completely. I am concerned about one thing, and the state legislature will come back and they'll say, what did we do with the authority to raise this up to $10? And although it's not $10, it's pretty close. And I think that we're going to give them an incentive to say, we've got to control local government. That's their narrative. And I'm concerned if we pick a number that's right up against $10, they're going to come back and say, see what they did. They just went clear to the top. And I know even though you say the extra income might come back to the county, that's not an incentive for me to do this. I would argue that we need to stretch ourselves as thin as we can to make these dollars go as far as they can go, which means I want to make it challenging for ourselves. I don't know that 950 is the right number. I'd like to see something that's more in the middle. And that would give us a challenge to say, we're going to use the precious dollars we have to do the very best we can. We're always going to be stretched thin. We'll be no money left over. I think at the end of the day, my goal would be to make this number as small as possible to do what we absolutely have to do. Go ahead.

I was going to say, we can absolutely do that. However, the employee pay would not be included in that. And then the key management system, both of those options would be completely off the table just because of the dollar amounts of those options.

So here's what I'm saying right now. I don't know which one of these to support. You know, you recommend a 950. I don't feel great about that number. I don't know if that's the right number. And, again, some of the things on this list, I'm not going to go through the long list here. I have a lot of notes here. I don't know that I support everything. You know, some of this stuff I think is more important than other things, and I want to be very careful. So for me personally, I would rather not vote on this at the moment. I think we have a week to chew on it and figure out a better number, be a little bit more precise in exactly what we're doing. By the way, let's make one more thing here. The resolution that's in here, let me just tell you, resolution says we're going to raise the fee to $950. That doesn't say $450. It says $950. That concerns me. Second of all, It doesn't say what we use the money for. That's not in the resolution at all. There's no specificity in the resolution as to what this money will be used for specifically. So I want some details in the resolution as to what this is going to do. I'd like to have some accountability to make sure that in a year from now we come back and say, we solved this problem substantially with whatever the fee is going to be or we haven't. Because I guarantee we're going to get judged by the legislature and the public. I want to have some accountability built into this resolution. Go ahead. I'm sorry. You had a comment? I'm sorry.

No, I guess my question back to you is, can you read me exactly what it says where you said 950? I don't have that right.

It says Section 1, the Board of County Commissioners, I'm sorry, the Board of Commissioners of Sedgwick County, Kansas, approves the recommendations of the Sedgwick County Treasurer and motor vehicle transaction fee authorized by KSA 8-145VA2B, thereby increased to $9.50, effective January 1.

Right. It's a $4.50 increase, because right now it's at $5. So it's a $4.50 increase. So I have to tell, in the resolution, it has to specifically state what that fee is going to be, so that way KDOT can program it into their system correctly.

As I've heard from lots of people, if you're explaining, you're losing. We need this to say to the public, it's $4.50. By the way, I'm not sure that's the right number. I wish it was $3 or some other number, $2.50, or something else that's a little more conservative, perhaps. But I would like the public to say it's $2.50, not $9.50. And to me, the way this is worded, we're just creating the news headlines that we just raised the fee. By the way, in $9.50s, almost, let me just say this, that it is... If I can get my math right, $5 fee increase is right at a third of a mil equivalent in property tax. And if you go to $9.50, it's two-thirds of a mil property tax. So again, I'm not saying this is the right answer, but if we were not to do this at all, if you had to do this with property taxes, just to raise to the $9.50 would be a two-thirds of a mil increase in property taxes, which I'm adamantly against. So the question is, if we're going to have a headline on what we did here today, I wanted to say we were very careful. We were as judicious as we could be, and the fee had to go up by $2 or whatever it had to be, not $9.50.

So we need to write it in there that, let's say if we did go up to the $9.50, that we increase it by $4.50 to the total of $9.50.

The Board of County Commissioners approved a fee increase of blank. That's what it needs to say.

The $450 to make the transaction fee come $950.

It might be less. But whatever that's going to be, we want to state it specifically. And the total fee under this authority of your office is going to be some other number. All right. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Okay. Commissioner Meister.

Just listening to everything, I know we're under a lot of pressure. If we do have a meeting next week, I would like to delay it until next week. I'd like to see, is it possible to have a staff meeting and we get buyout or get an agreement? Commissioner House pointed out great stuff. I mean, $5 times 500,000 transactions is already $2.5 million into the system. But for me, and the other commissioners might have even more, but I would like to make sure that, because even Sheena was up here explaining, HR director was explaining, but... I wrote it down. It's one of your last sentences. It said it's still a little bit of a guesstimate. So that questions me on your final staffing that we could at least get out of the gate with whatever this first staffing would be. We didn't call Scott up and charge VIT. I'd like to know the pressure on this Q list improvement. And then the final would be I'd really like to know that finance agrees with your numbers that have been presented. And if we could do that in a staff meeting, that puts a lot of pressure on HR, IT, and finance to come up with a staff deal on Tuesday so we can vote. So I'm getting a nod from HR that they could and a nod from it they could and finance they could so i'll be more comfortable we could staff it and then bring it back but you all can weigh in how you feel okay what other ideas

I'm fine with staffing it and getting everybody more comfortable. I think that it's good practice for us to honor that if we have two commissioners here that would request that. So I would support their desire to study it a little bit more and bring it back next week.

I think you guys have some prior commitments.

We're actually in New Orleans next week for our tax conference. But if I need to stay back, I'll stay back.

OK. OK. That's a required motion. So I guess we're just looking at making a motion to delay this one week?

Yes. I'm sorry, Chairman. Commissioner, I thought I addressed his question. He was just asking, I think, if it would require a motion. I think it just could be a motion to defer this until, if the will of the board is to defer it to next week, to just defer it to the 23rd. Okay.

I'll make a motion to defer this item until the 23rd.

Okay. And I'll second that motion. Motion to second. Any questions? Madam Clerk, please call the roll.

Commissioner Meitzner. Aye. Commissioner Beatty.

Aye.

Commissioner Howe.

Aye.

Commissioner Weiss. Aye. Chairman Bluwa.

Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Thank you, Brandi. Thank you, Shani. Next item, please.

Item E, Adult and Juvenile Comprehensive Plan, Fiscal Year 2026, Year-End Reports.

Good afternoon, and thank you for your patience.

Absolutely. I feel a bit like the teacher in the class before recess. Stay with us. Well, I can officially say good afternoon now. I'm Lori Gibbs, Deputy Director of Department of Corrections Adult Programs. Mario and I are here to brief you on the state fiscal year end report that we submit to KDOC, recapping our progress towards goals. We've had the opportunity last week to go over this report in detail with you. So we will, in the interest of time, be as efficient as possible in presenting. I'm presenting on the adult program. Mario will present on juvenile. There are two primary areas of focus. Sorry, let me advance that. Two primary areas of focus in the adult program, one being the responsive client supervision. As you guys are aware, we are assigned by the district court the highest risk felony offenders in the corrections continuum, and so it's our mandate to supervise that population responsibly within our community as an alternative to a prison sanction. The second area of focus is staff development. We know that it's very important to ensure that our staff are adequately trained in all of the variety of tools that are available to maximize opportunity for clients under community supervision. So we want to always be at the forefront of staff development. The three goals that we had for state fiscal year 26 were tied to assessing clients. We use two risk assessment tools, and it's important that we ensure timely assessment of the clients, that we are ensuring inter-rater reliability to how these tools are scored. The second goal is tied to, from that assessment, Risk assessment, building a plan, a roadmap, so to speak, of what the client's supervision is going to look like in the community. And the third goal is tied to providing quality assurance around the cognitive skills groups that we provide to clients in-house. So our strategy there was to really build a stronger infrastructure in supporting these goals. We felt it was important to ensure that we were completing audits on the assessments that staff are administering to clients. We were doing that by auditing those assessments and also ensuring that every rater had some measure of inter-rater reliability. In other words, that regardless of who was administering the assessment, that they were adhering to scoring rules appropriately. We also spent a lot of time expanding training around effective case planning. Again, this is sort of the roadmap that leads the supervision strategy for offenders. And then quality assurance, we spent a lot of time building a continuous quality improvement team who has worked with our supervisors to ensure that they are sort of the front line quality assurance piece to these tools and these strategies. And we've spent a lot of time reinforcing supervision tools that are recommended and required of us by KDOC. And then finally, we've updated and are implementing some observation tools to ensure that the individuals facilitating our cognitive skills groups are adhering to the curriculum and administering those groups in an effective way. We are mandated. There is a state mandate from KDOC that one measure that we capture in our comprehensive plan is our success rate. We've spent a lot of time talking to the Commission about the success rate. and how this has historically been an enormous challenge for us to meet a 75% successful completion rate. We've never met it. The closest that we've ever came was during, we call it a COVID year, where supervision strategies were much different, and even then, our success rate that year was about 62%. So from state fiscal year 25 to 26, we did meet the alternative mandate, and that was that we had a 3%, we demonstrated a 3% improvement from state fiscal year 25 to 26. I've spent a lot of time in the context of the conversations around the funding formula talking about why we really have an issue with that particular measure for supervision of this population. And although this slide is in no way representative of anything that I included in our comprehensive plan, I really wanted to share this with you because I think it speaks to the work that goes into working with this high-risk population and that despite that work, And despite that outcome, there is still a lot of staff effort that goes into affecting behavior change. So I asked staff to come up with examples of successful completion as defined by KDOC, successful completion Unsuccessful completion as defined by KDOC. And I just wanted to share anecdotally kind of what that looks like. So these are two different clients. On the left is a client who actually completed successfully. I'm sorry. I'm on the wrong slide. Let me go here. On the left is a client who completed successfully. So over the course of their supervision with us, they had lots of violations, okay? That's typical of individuals who are considered high risk and high needs in our community. We expect to see violations. This individual had 108 violations over the course of their supervision. There were a variety of strategies, graduated responses that were put into play as a response to those violations, treatment recommendations, GPS, which is an electronic monitoring device, jail sanctions, work release sanctions, prison sanctions, employment support, completion of inpatient treatment, and drug court. And this individual happened to be a drug court graduate. So when they completed, they had had nine months of sober time. So you guys are very aware of the work that the drug court does and how by the time they get to drug court, it's well established that they are extremely challenging cases to work with in the community. So the case on the left demonstrates a success for us. And the case on the right demonstrates a revocation or an unsuccessful closure. And again, lots of violations. This was a drug court individual. Same types of services provided. Lots of issues around absconding. And ultimately, despite all that work, they were deemed inappropriate for supervision in the community. So they were remanded to the custody of the Department of Corrections. And the thing that I... I hope to impress in this slide is just the fact that we are working with an extremely challenging population. We know that behavior change is a process, not an event that happens overnight. Staff have to employ lots of different strategies in an effort to get somebody to a point of truly demonstrating long-term behavior change. So I share that with you for that reason. I shared also with you guys last week that one of the measures that we hope to see in a future funding formula is recidivism. So we did bring some information to you to share what that looks like in Sedgwick County. And for the calendar year 22 outcomes, recidivism for us is defined as no new convictions at a one-year, three-year, five-year check. And so at the one-year mark, we had only a 3% recidivism rate which we think is pretty good. And then at the three-year mark, it's 15%. Obviously, it's not surprising to see that go up over time. And so that particular cohort had an 85% conviction-free rate at the three-year mark. Then what I wanted to share, because it ties back to those two examples I shared with you, the clients who went through the drug court program. So we took a deep dive and looked at our recidivism for our drug court. And this is a program that the county's been generous enough to support for decades. lots of years. The graduates from our drug court program, we looked at that 2022 cohort at the one-year mark, they had an 8% recidivism rate. They maintained that recidivism rate at the three-year mark, so that is markedly better than the recidivism rate for individuals who didn't go through the drug court program. I think also very notable is the fact that when we looked at the national average for individuals who go through drug court programs, that three-year mark for other drug court programs across the country is between 20 and 35 percent, ours is 8 percent. I think that's, you know, really worth celebrating and something that we're very, very proud of here in Sedgwick County is the work that that drug court program does. So that concludes the information that I had prepared to present to you for a comprehensive plan. I stand for questions.

Okay. Commissioner, what questions do we have? Commissioner Brady. Just thank you. There's so much work. This is something you do every year, and you come, and Mario will be next. Mario's next. I have questions for Mario, too. But I just profound thank you to you and your staff. You are right. You supervise a lot. a very challenged and complex population. But if it wasn't for corrections, many of these individuals are presumptive prison. And we're supervising in this community because there's better outcomes when we're able to rehabilitate people with supportive services. So we are believers in community corrections and corrections programming. And we know this is very difficult work. So we just want to thank you publicly for that. But I also acknowledge that I want to thank the cooperation from the Department of Corrections, Kansas Department of Corrections, in regards to this funding formula conversation. Yes. I think most people know a couple years ago we threw a very loud and public fit at Sedgwick County's proposed allocation.

We appreciated that.

Yeah, we got a lot of people involved, governor's office, everyone, and the Department of Corrections, and the secretary himself brought staff down, and they heard our concerns. And we presented and asked them to appoint a third party to actually do a study, and they said, you know what, good idea, let's do it. So I just want to publicly thank your support and supporting us in those asks, but also I want to publicly acknowledge the Kansas Department of Corrections and that we're in the midst of that. Commissioner Meister and I have met with them a couple times even and had this conversation of proposals, but they listened, and we are appreciative of that. We've got to modernize the Kansas Corrections programming and department funding. So I just want to thank you publicly. This is good. You guys do a lot of great work, so we're grateful.

And just a brief update. We had a retreat yesterday in Emporia with council, state government, and KDOC, and directors from across the state. And conversations were productive for the most part. There are several models that CSG presented and asked for feedback around. And we are encouraged by the direction that the conversations are going. Certainly a long way to go, but it felt like we were moving in the right direction.

Thank you so much. That's good Or I think your recidivism rates say a lot and Really appreciate what you guys are doing there and making a difference.

Thank you very much Yeah, thank you in that thank you for the presentation and sitting through this to get to get to this but Part of this funding conversation we've had also was eye-opening to us is that You guys are working on outcomes based on recidivism, and recidivism really isn't even much part of the calculation.

Well, actually, the success rate is something that... We want KDOC to consider recidivism in a future funding formula. It's not currently considered. That's what I was saying. We presented that at the retreat yesterday, and they appear very interested in including that as part of a funding formula discussion. So we're hopeful that... We will get to have additional conversations around recidivism and coming up with the one definition that works for the entire state.

Yeah. I would think recidivism is in line with outcomes.

Absolutely. We think it's a better predictor of the effectiveness of the programming that we're doing than simply a success rate that gets somebody to an end date.

Yeah, good. Well, I think, unless I missed it, you have 1,500... clients, so to speak.

About 1,300 right now.

1,300. So Sheriff Easter's jail population is about, any given day, 1,200-ish. And any one of these 1,300 could be... and should be in a way in the county jail, but the judges in our efforts locally is to give them a chance to get help, keep their job, maybe keep their family and their spouses and everything else. So I think the citizens need to understand that there's another 1,300 people that have committed a crime and have been convicted, and the judge chose to send them to you for help versus sending them to prison. And, of course, the elephant in the room is of those 1,300, how many are from outside Cedric County?

About 300 on any given day.

So we've got 300 people from outside Sedgwick County that are in our streets and under your programs to work and get better. So once again, the Wichita area or Sedgwick County, we're taking a large... responsibility for actions throughout the state. And we accept that responsibility, and that's why things like funding and performance and everything else, we need to speak loudly and strongly on that. And so probably a similar percentage will get to hear the juvenile report shortly. Thanks for helping educate us on what you all do and your staff and the outcomes. I think they're helping turn the corner, and we stand beside you and support you. Thank you.

We appreciate that.

Commissioner Howell. Thank you, Chairman. A couple of questions. How long is the program for the adult population that's out on supervision? How long does that usually last?

It depends on the individual case. So 18 to 24 months is pretty typical. And for the drug courts, is it also about the same? Drug court is an 18-month program.

Okay.

voluntary 18-month program. So an individual may have been on regular supervision for 12 months, get referred to drug court. They have to voluntarily agree to be extended another 18 months to participate in the program.

I'm a pretty big fan of the drug court, but it's interesting on the two numbers here, the one year and three years, same data. It says two of 24. I'm just curious, is that correct?

It's correct because we're looking at the 24 individuals who completed the program in 2022. So that same group is looked at at the one-year mark, the three-year mark, and the five-year mark. So that cohort was 22 individuals. It says two of 24 is the same number in one year. Same number. That's accurate.

One thing I would like to, typically, and this is probably another really giant variable, but what's our average adjudication time period to go from a charge to a judge's decision or a jury's decision on that charge? I don't know that. I couldn't speak to that. Well, one of the challenges I see with this definition here is it talks about convictions within one year. That's not really... Fair, because I would think that the adjudication process probably takes most of the year in many cases. It can. So if you were to add that to that and say they were charged and ultimately convicted, that charging might happen within that first year, but because they're not convicted, they're not included in that number. So I'm a little concerned about the definitions. I don't want to miss the understanding of what that actually means. The three-year makes more sense to me. And I think that on this, the 3% versus 15%, I'm going to guess the 15% is pretty accurate because it includes what happened probably for two, two and a half years. Right. That number probably means more. That 3% may be missing something because it doesn't include someone who's in the process of being adjudicated. Okay.

I think in the context of incorporating it into a funding formula, there will be a statewide discussion about a definition for recidivism that makes sense to everybody.

I think that does need a little bit of discussion, perhaps some cleanup there, only because I think it's a little bit misleading not to understand. I mean, it's a great number, but we should track it. I just think it doesn't really present the entire picture there. But again, thank you for all you do. Appreciate the presentation. Thank you very much again, Laura.

Good afternoon, Mario. Good afternoon, Mario Salinas, Deputy Director of Juvenile Programs. Thanks for having us. Sorry to keep you so late, but I'm covering the juvenile piece of this. And just as a reminder, the Juvenile Comprehensive Plan covers juvenile field services as well as the Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center. For this plan, we review the outcomes every end of the state fiscal year, and we share these outcomes with our Juvenile Community Corrections Advisory Board as well as with you guys at the end of the state fiscal year. Team Justice approved this or reviewed and approved these outcomes August 7th of 2026. So Juvenile Field Services covers three programs. The first one is the Juvenile Intensive Supervision Program. This is intensive probation for youth out in the community. It also covers the juvenile population once they've been sentenced to the juvenile correctional facility or the JCF. And then lastly, it covers youth on conditional release, which is what they refer to as parole on the adult side. Similar to the adult side, we also wanted to focus on staff development, making sure our staff were utilizing best practices while they work with youth and families, as well as their client responsiveness during their supervision. For the GFS Goal 1, it was to strengthen core correctional skills, ensure fidelity to the model, and improve outcomes. So for SFY 26, all staff completed the effective practices in community supervision annual training, as well as quality assurance reviews with Community Solutions, Inc. This is a QI contract that KDOC has, and that was for us to improve quality assurance across the state with intensive probation officers. And so they actually submit risk assessment interviews with youth and families as well as office visits, and then they provide feedback to those ISOs. And then ISOs also meet with their supervisors one-on-one as needed if they need to improve in any certain areas as well. And so for goal one, we met that. All staff completed the required training, coaching reviews, and supervisory support activities. Goal two was to reduce recidivism by addressing criminogenic needs and maintaining a 10% recidivism rate. We did this by conducting wireless risk assessments within 14 days, developing individual case plans for each client that we serve, Referring youth to evidence-based programming to address risk factors. And then a big push last year in our case plan was collaboration with community providers and service providers, so making sure we're staying in constant contact with them, addressing the needs of the clients as we meet with them. And then supervisors conducted monthly check-ins with the ISOs as well. And so for this goal, we met it. We exceeded the goal to maintain the 10%. So 8% of youth were adjudicated or convicted of future crimes. So that was an improvement over last year's numbers. This breaks it down by type. So ISP, we had 7% of youth commit future crimes for conditional release. So that's the adult parole and the JCF, 10% reoffended. So overall with those numbers combined, we had the 8% of youth reoffend. So 92% of youth did not commit future crimes after that 12-month period. For goal three was to strengthen youth motivation and pro-social skills to help them complete supervision successfully with the goal to maintain a 75% closure rate for all JFS closed cases. We did this by ensuring staff completed motivational interviewing training. using those MI techniques during office visits, and then utilizing our incentive systems to provide positive reinforcements to the youth that we serve. Unfortunately, this goal was not met. For SFY 26, we had a 61% successful completion, and we'll go over that a little bit more in detail here in a second. So for SFY 26, we had 68% successful completions on ISP. And then for those for CR and the JCF population, we only had a 43% successful completion rate. We'll talk a little bit about that a little bit more in detail. But all the clients combined was 61% successful. In looking at the numbers, we really wanted to pinpoint why we had such an increase in unsuccessful completions compared to last year. Out of the 60-some numbers that were, 60 out of 66 unsuccessful closures fell into one of three of these categories. So we only had six that did not fall under these, and that is they picked up a new JV or adult charge while they were on supervision. They picked up a technical violation and or a PV violation. Or when AWOL and then the judge or the court decided to just go ahead and sanction and close their case, and then they reached a case-linked limit. So 60 out of the 66 fell into these three categories. In looking at the three categories, we worked with the JFS administrator to identify some areas that we could improve in response to the lower success rate. And right here, to address the new JV or adult charge or extended juvenile jurisdiction sentence imposed, we want to increase the contacts for the 30 to 60 days when youth behavior is starting to escalate. And so we have, typically we go off the KDOC standards regarding contact standards and so we wanted to increase those contact standards 30 to 60 days when use is starting to escalate or starting to show signs that they're going to act out or violate their probation. To address sanction and close due to AWOL, we want to utilize our graduated sanctions and incentives before closure when appropriate. You know, try to show them that positive outcomes have rewards and try to get them on track so they don't continue to have serious violations or technical violations. And then case closure length limit reached. We want to begin case closure planning 60 days before the case limit length. Prioritize goals such as treatment, school, restitution, placement stability, and transition supports. And then we have some of those limitations on the right side there to show, you know, we can put a lot of things in place, but, you know, sometimes we have limits to what we can do on supervision. I did want to touch a little bit on GIAC. This year, for SFY 26 and SFY 27, KDOC did not require us to do a case plan for GIAC. But GIAC is a huge piece of our juvenile programs. They serve youth that are 10 to 17 years of age that are arrested by any law enforcement agency across Central County. or that receive a notice to appear or agreement to appear. And so we average this state fiscal year 170 intakes per month in that 24-7 facility. But ultimately, their goal is to connect youth and families with services to address any high-risk needs that they may have so they don't come back to the Juvenile Intake and Assessment Facility or to the Juvenile Detention Facility. I wanted to point out that since 2022, we've continued to see an increase in not only juvenile intakes, but also we're continuing to see an uptick in juvenile detention admins as well. And so with House Bill 2329, we anticipate that we're going to continue to see those numbers increase. And just as a refresher, House Bill 2329, a part of that House Bill requires that any youth, regardless of their Kansas Detention Assessment Instrument or their KDAI, which has historically been the trigger to determine if a youth is going to be detained or not, that any youth with two or more arrests within a three-month period would be required to be detained. And so that law just went into effect this past July 1st. And so since that time that that's been enacted with that new required detention for youth with two or more arrests, we're starting to see an uptick not only at GIAC but also with our detention intakes as well. So just in July alone, we had 19 youth that were detained due to the House Bill 2329 that seven of them were two intakes within three months and ten of them were due to firearms. As you recall, Cedric County had an override protocol that required detention regardless of of the KDI assessment due to firearms charges because we were seeing youth go back out in the community and utilize those firearms. So 10 of those, 19 or actually 12 of the 19 would have been detained anyways due to the firearm charge, but then we saw the seven that were detained due to the two or more arrests within that three-month period. Of those 19, 13 of those were released without prosecution from the district attorney's office and subsequently released. Three of those charges were dropped but held on a warrant, and then two of them are pending with an average length of stay of 1.6 days. For August, we had a total of 18 intakes due to the House Bill 2329. Twelve of those were two intakes within a three-month timeframe, and six of those were due to firearm charges. With these continued increase, we anticipate the GIAC intakes to increase this calendar year up to 2,200 with the JDF intakes going up to 700. And then for the following year, we anticipate the JDF intakes going up to about 880 for the 2027 calendar year. In conclusion, we want to continue to implement strategies of graduated sanctions, addressing client needs as they're completing their probation term, and encouraging them to ultimately stay on track while they're on probation. We still have to balance, obviously, public safety with the needs of the clients as well. So we want to make sure that we're holding youth accountable and making sure that they are detained ultimately if they're not meeting those needs for public safety in the long run. We also want to make sure that we're bringing to your guys' attention that we're continuing to see the uptick in GIAC intakes as well as the JDF intakes. And that ultimately falls on the county due to the House bill. And so... as we see the numbers uptick, we will need to address those through staffing and client costs, ultimately. And so, I think alone, last week, JDF's population was at 71, and we have a license capacity for 81, and so we're staffed by county funding for ultimately a capacity of 81 clients in that detention facility. And so we're utilizing our alternatives to detention, which is the home-based supervision or pretrial for juveniles, as well as our juvenile residential facility, which currently has a capacity of 16. And so trying to coordinate contingency plans with the judicial system and our alternatives to make sure that we're utilizing any alternative that we can. Obviously, with public safety in mind, we're not releasing... youth with high severity charges, but making sure that we're keeping that in the forefront because we don't want to get to an overcrowding situation in the long run. With that, I'll answer any questions. Commissioner Brady.

Laura, I want to extend a thank you to you publicly and your staff. Thank you so much for what you do, particularly with our kids. This is hard sometimes when we start talking about juvenile and juvenile detention and juvenile corrections. This is very difficult for a lot of different reasons, but you guys do a fantastic job. Thank you. You care deeply about outcomes. HB, the houseboat that we helped champion, and we really cared a lot about the gun charges and things of that sort. Obviously, there's some effect and some impact, so keep us posted on that, please. I talked to you two weeks ago, and the number was 40 that you thought kids that had come in because of 2329. So there will be an uptick, and we've got to have... capacity to manage these. So we need to know that. Just keep this posted, please. The other thing, too, is I plan to personally and hopefully collectively talk more with the state on these crisis stabilization beds that are desperately needed. The legislature has appropriated a significant amount of money to do this. But no, from the KDOC budget, nobody in the state has been able to implement one of these crisis stabilization standards because it's too restrictive. Johnson County had to go through the KDADS route because these dollars are just sitting there and they're getting swept. But we need to be able to utilize some of these dollars because we desperately need to provide services, some of this preventative services, but we need judges to have opportunities to with our SYNC kids and our crossover kids so that we can make sure that we're meeting these needs so they don't end up in detention long-term and they don't escalate in their charges. So this is a desperate need here. We need this. We have partners that are wanting to do this here. And I also want to thank you publicly for, particularly with our SYNC kids and our foster care system, for the involvement you do have with DCF and Ember Hope. and some of our providers to where you guys are doing the best that you can to help take some pressure off of what they are having, especially with our failure to places that are happening on a nightly basis. I got the numbers last week. There's over 40 kids that are failure to place every single night in Sedgwick County right now. And I know you guys do the best you can to support. Really excited about the renovations coming with JRF. I think we're going to enable us to get some more individuals and more organizations into your facility that traditionally can't come into your facility. I think there's going to be opportunity with some of that. I was with the One Heart group just last week, earlier this week, and talking about mentorship and some of the things, some of the organizations that want to come in. and have more capacity to mentor your kids so we need that we need to provide an environment where that's happening so yeah different basis some of that too thank you guys I appreciate what you do thank you Commissioner how thank you chairman just a couple quick questions Mario thank you for the presentation

Just again, just to clarify, you said JDF has 81 beds total?

No, correction. JDF has a capacity for 108 beds. We're licensed and funded for 81 beds. Okay, what's going to take to change that if we need to? We would need to up our staffing level and funding for those staff, and then we would need to get with DCF to up the capacity. Okay.

It reminds me of Second Light when they say they don't have beds, but they have beds right there. They just don't have the staff to manage what's going on in Second Light. At the end of the day, those beds are available. We need to provide the appropriate staff if we need those beds. So let's have that conversation. I know things are bad right now in terms of we're seeing an uptick in... and these placements and these facilities. But again, I think over time, this might get better. At the end of the day, having better standards for youth behavior, I think it'll pay dividends down the road. These kids will make better decisions. We may not realize that dividend for a number of months or years, but eventually, when you have higher standards, things will get better. At the end of the day, one of the reasons things are as bad as they are is because we have not had good standards since Senate 367 passed in 2016. We've had less standards than we should have had. These kids have learned. They have no consequences for simply committing petty crimes with firearms, for example. There's no real consequences. This is changing where it needs to be. And I don't want to say this is too difficult for us to... This is a core function of government. And if we have to, you know, not... give up as much of these set values we did, for example, to fund this more appropriately, that's a conversation we need to have. This is a core function of government, and we have to do this and do it right. And you mentioned there were 19 that were brought in due to firearms. And you said, and you commented further that of those 19, you said 13 were not prosecuted by the DA. Is that what you said?

So for July, we had a total of 12 firearm-related charges that were detained because it's a mandatory override due to the House bill. And then we had seven of those that fell under the two intakes within three months. So of the total of 19, 13 were released without prosecution, correct? Correct.

And that is under the bill, House Bill 2329. That means they're committing some type of a chargeable crime with a firearm. Not just possession. But there's a crime being committed with a firearm. And we're simply letting these kids out. Am I understanding that correctly?

House Bill 2329 requires detention of youth in possession of a firearm while committing a crime, not necessarily utilizing the firearm.

Right, but they have possession of a firearm while they commit a crime. Correct. And these kids are not supposed to have guns. Correct. But that's what's going on is they're committing a crime in possession of a firearm. It doesn't mean they used a firearm in the commission of a crime, but they did have it on their person.

I think the biggest clarification or the biggest... reason to point out the increase in the number of intakes, because regardless of House Bill 2329, we already had the override protocol for firearms, was really just to point out the continued uptick that we're seeing for the two intakes within the three months. For July alone, we had seven, and then for August, we had 12. But those youth with the firearm charges, regardless, would have still been detained based on Cedric County override process. That was historical.

But of those 12, ultimately nothing happened to any of those 12. Those 12, the charges were dropped or released or not charged, whichever, but there was nothing that happened actually. So again, I hate to say this, but that's the problem. These kids need to have consequences for this type of behavior. People wonder why are we seeing these kids commit these violent crimes with guns. And a lot of these kids, some of the cultures there in this county, these kids feel like they have to have a firearm because what they perceive as their enemy also has firearms. It's gang activity. And these kids are making decisions to carry firearms, stolen guns. And you wonder why these crimes are happening. It hits the news so often. This is the reason why. And we have to do something to stop that. I'm not worried about the costs of doing what that bill requires. I think that's a core function of government. So, again, if we have to step up our support to have the proper number of staff, I think we have to have a conversation. I'm willing to fight for that. How many of the motions for adult prosecution, how has that changed in the last year? few years. Your kids end up, again, not being able to be charged in the juvenile system, so we move them to the adult system. Can you speak to the number of kids getting the MAP motion?

I don't have the numbers with me right now, so I would hate to say and be inaccurate. Okay.

Would you be willing to provide that data at some point soon? That would be great to have that. That's one of our concerns, I think, is the juvenile system, frankly, under Senate Bill 367, charging and adjudicating crimes under the juvenile system is nearly impossible. And I think that's what we're seeing right now is the juvenile population, frankly, doesn't have any behavior standards whatsoever. Unless they committed a violent crime when they're age 16 or 17 and they're charged under the adult system, nothing happens to these kids. One more thing. The Senate Bill 323-29 did require separation from synced kids versus criminogenic kids. I know there's some crossovers that do both. But are these criminogenically charged children that are not synced children, are they out of the DCF system now or are they still being handled by DCF? We were having kids who were criminally charged. Oh, I got you. They weren't sick children. You're talking about out-of-home placements? Hand them over to Ember Hope, for example.

You're talking about the out-of-home placements?

Yeah. Out-of-home placements being handled by foster care system rather than handled by the criminal system. They're handled by foster care.

So House Bill 2329. goes back to the previous out-of-home placements for the juvenile justice-involved youth. And that went into effect July 1, and there's no out-of-home placements to date. But it's our understanding KDOC is in process of doing an RFP for that.

What I'm saying, let me clarify my question further. The out-of-home placements actually has been, we didn't have a place to put these kids. They're not sick children. They're kids who've committed crimes. So rather than handling them in an out-of-home placement, they put them in foster care. That's been going on. And that creates havoc in the foster care system because you have a kid who, frankly, has parents. That's not the problem. They're just a kid that can't go home for some reason. They're a criminally charged child, if you will. They're under 18 years old. They have a criminal charge or criminal conviction, and they're being handled by DCF as if it's an out-of-home placement, but really it's foster care handling this as if it's a sick kid. And so we have families right now that are receiving a kid who they think is just a child in need of care, and in reality it's a kid that's been through the criminal justice system. So 2329 is supposed to require separation of those two populations so that if we have a kid that needs an out-of-home placement, he can't go to foster care unless he's, once you commit a crime, you're no longer eligible for foster care. You should no longer be allowed to be handled by TCF. It has to be handled through the criminal justice system of placing those children in appropriate places, but not foster care. Are we doing that now?

We have not received any youth in the out-of-home... We have not received any youth placed in KTOC custody for out-of-home placement.

Okay. I want to track that going forward because this is one of the problems in foster care. We've had... And I'm looking at Commissioner Beatty here. We've had a huge problem with this. And the foster care system is just reeling with challenges because we have kids who are so behavior challenged. And it's not these are just children that need parents. They're not just neglected and abused children. They're not four and five-year-olds. These are 16-year-olds that committed crimes. and they're being placed in D.C., and then they run away. We hear about their spending the night in offices. This is the population that has those behaviors, and they should have probably been retained in a criminal justice environment rather than a Department of Children and Families environment. They don't belong in that environment, but we put them there because they have no place else to put them. So this is the population. That bill was supposed to address this, and we were supposed to create out-of-home placements as needed to make sure we have a place to put these kids. And I fought vigorously to make sure that bill got that point made because that's one of the challenges we need to fix. So I want to track this going forward. If we have kids who need out-of-home placements and they can't go to DCF, we need to find a place to put these kids that actually make sense. And that bill does allow for that to happen. So we need to start the process. I don't think that what we've done in the past is working. So I appreciate your staff. You're doing a wonderful job. This is one of those things that's a work in progress. We've got to find a way to raise the standards for these kids and provide the right placements for them. And again, you're doing the very best you can. This is a very dynamic thing. July 1st was just not very long ago. A lot of this is just now getting started, but we've got to make sure we've got the right placements for these kids. But thank you, Mario, for all you do. Appreciate you. Thank you.

Is there any other questions? If not, I'd like to make a motion to approve the reports and authorize the chairman to sign.

Second.

Motion to second. Madam Clerk, please call the roll.