Board of County Commissioners - Regular Meeting

. . . . . ¶¶ ¦ ¦ ¶¶ ¶¶ So, ¶¶

Thank you. . . .

Thank you. Thank you. Amen. so so Thank you. Thank you. ¶¶ Thank you. ¦ ¦ Thank you. ¶¶

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is 9.30, so I will call the June 9th meeting to order. And as always, I will ask you to silence all of your electronic devices, mostly that applies to me. But we always start our meeting with the pledge and the prayer. And this morning, we are blessed to have Rabbi Yankee Majeski from the Shabbat of North Orlando here with us. Thank you, Rabbi, for being here.

Thank you for inviting me. It's an honor to be here representing the Jewish community of Seminole County. The history of prayer before sessions is almost as old as this country itself. And when I was invited to say the prayer this morning, I asked myself, This is not a synagogue, a church, or a mosque, so why a prayer? But the obvious answer to me, and it goes back to ancient Israel and in the Bible, the Torah, the Bible instructs us that a Jewish king must write for himself a Torah scroll that accompanies him at all times. Why does a political leader need a religious article near him? Every human being makes decisions every day that affects their lives and the lives of their families. But governments make decisions that affect not only themselves, but hundreds and thousands of people, and indeed, generations to come. Being human, it's almost impossible to always make the right decision, especially when we take account our own biases, egos, and agendas. This is why a Jewish king, according to the Torah, had to always have the scroll near him. Starting with a prayer helps us stay humble, helps us remember that Hashem, God, is watching and listening, and indeed we pray for the Almighty's assistance that we remain dedicated, honest, just, kind, and always put the interests of our citizens first. When it comes to prayer, there's no need for me to reinvent the wheel. I'll go back to the original, a prayer composed by God himself, written down in the Torah and the Bible through Moses in the book of Numbers, still said in synagogues today. Prayer is a prayer that Aaron, the brother of Moses, was instructed to say. And his children, his descendants in our communities, still recite this blessing to all of us today. And I'll say it first in Hebrew and then in English. May God bless you and guard you. May God shine his countenance upon you and be gracious to you. May God turn his countenance toward you and grant you peace. May God bless the United States. May God bless our commissioners. May God bless all those that serve this community, including law enforcement and the firefighters and first responders. And may God bless Seminole County. Thank you. Amen.

Thank you. Thank you.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic

Thank you, Rabbi.

Good job.

I'll ask County Manager any additions, deletions, or modifications to the agenda.

Thank you, Madam Chairman, Commissioners. On the county manager's consent agenda, I have three items I'd like to pull this morning. First is item number five. I will be bringing that back at the next meeting for a short presentation regarding our AI policy. Also, item number 13, which was our ISBA agreement commencing it with the City of Samford, I will be bringing that back. As well as item 16, I'd like to pull that as well. That one was regarding bear cans with the Wekiva Wild and Scenic River Advisory Committee. Initially, requests told us that they had funding. They're still looking at that. However, we have already received $25,000 from the Fish and Wildlife, so we're already moving forward with the $25,000 grant with them, and that will be coming forward as well to the board. Just those three items, Madam Chairman, and that's it.

Thank you, County Manager. Commissioners, any items to pull?

Madam Chair, I'd like to pull item number seven for a quick discussion.

Any others, commissioners?

I'm good.

All right. Do we have any public comments? Yes, ma'am. There are two speakers. On the consent agenda? Yes, ma'am. All right. I'll turn it over to our county attorney to read the rules of the day.

Thank you, Chairman. Florida law provides that members of the public shall be given a reasonable opportunity to be heard on propositions before the Board of County Commissioners except when the Board is acting in an emergency or ministerial capacity or conducting a meeting exempt from the requirements of the Sunshine Law. Individuals shall be permitted three minutes each for public comment or six minutes when the individual is an official representative of a formal association or group. The Chairman may modify the maximum time for public comment at her sole discretion when appropriate. Public comments on quasi-judicial or other public hearing items will occur during the board's consideration of those items. Public comments on pending procurement matters or on non-agenda items shall not be permitted at this time. Members of the public desiring to make public comment must fill out a speaker form and present the form to staff. Forms are available in the lobby. Chairman.

Thank you very much. Would you call the first speaker, please?

The first speaker is Bill Hyde in opposition to agenda item 14.

Dominique, would you mind calling the second speaker as well so they can be ready? Yes, ma'am. Second speaker is Winn Adams. Mr. Adams, if you would be on deck, that would be great.

Chairman, are you ready?

I am ready. Are you ready, Mr. Hyde?

I'm ready. Good morning, Commissioners. My name is Bill Hyde. I live at 2379 Audley Street in Oviedo, Florida. Just for a piece of trivia, it may not be relevant, but it may explain why I got interested in this. I hold a commercial radio telephone operator's license with a radar endorsement from the Federal Communications Commission. And I'm questioning the wisdom and the practicality of the use of WUCF for this purpose. I researched WUCF's coverage. And on the map that you see up here, and by the way, this came from the Federal Communications Commission. It's a public document. This is the 60 microvolt per meter radius. And it does not extend to Sanford. The reason why that's important is is because that radius, that 60 microvolts per meter line, delineates what the FCC considers to be local coverage. Anything outside of that is either some kind of a fringe coverage. Now, outside of that, they define that you may be able to hear the signal if you have an outside antenna. In other words, if you're driving around your car with an outside antenna, an FM radio would probably pick it up. But during an emergency, people aren't driving around, they're in their house, and an FM radio in your house is not going to have an outside antenna. So this is actually a fringe area that we're in right now. I would think that the EOC would prefer a station that is local to all of Seminole. One more thing is I tried to find the local ratings for WUCF. It would seem to be a good idea to partner with a station that actually has people that listen to it. And to be honest with you, I couldn't find WCF's ratings in the Nielsen rating. I did look for them. So the problem is not only do you not get the signal, but I don't think anybody's listening. I think maybe if you're going to partner with somebody for this, it would be a station that has more coverage and more listeners. I'll tell you something. I would be willing to bet that there are more ham radio operators listening to the repeater that you guys run from the EOAC during an emergency, then there are people actually listening to WCF. So why are we giving WCF $7,000 of our taxpayer dollars? I'll leave it to you. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Hyde. Mr. Adams.

Good morning, commissioners. My name is Wynn Adams. I'm a former county commissioner. I'm also treasurer of our homeowners, our condo association, Coach Light Estate Section 2. The item that I have concern about is item number seven. where we're talking about going out and spending close to $4 million on buying a new building based upon what is going on with potential tax cuts due to the governor's actions. I think that we should probably table that until we find out what we're going to do with our budget. And fortunately, you're going to be able to do hopefully that today. But I would highly recommend that you do not pass Item 7 until you have your budget discussion. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Adams. Mr. Harris, do you have something to share with us?

I was going to have Mr. Harris comment on item 14.

Sure. For the record, Alan Harris, Director of Emergency Management. So the WCF agreement is a renewal agreement. We started that agreement in 2011. We do test the system regularly before hurricane season. We have tested it in this building using a small FM portable radio system. No general fund tax dollars, no property taxes are paid for on this. It is totally paid for out of the emergency management preparedness and assistance trust fund. That is a trust fund that's given to each local emergency management office using insurance costs. So part of your insurance goes to local emergency management, very small amount, but it goes to it specifically for preparedness and awareness. During an emergency, we work with the Office of Communications. In fact, the entire process of renewing this agreement, we worked with the Office of Communications to make sure that they are poised and ready to push out when there's an emergency, this is the radio station to tune into that guarantees us Our information being broadcasted multiple times through the day and also at the top of the hour, it's actually in the agreement, at the top of the hour. So everyone in Seminole County can tune into that station during a hurricane. I'd love to do that with another radio station, but for that cost, it's just impossible. So just wanted to bring you up to date. Thanks.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, commissioners, I'm just going to throw it back to you all. Would you like to reconsider any of the items

after public comment i'm ready to make a motion so regarding the wcf uh contract i i don't have a problem with moving it forward today but would it be possible to show this contract to other local stations and see what their reaction would be if it's something that we could that they would even entertain i think we did actually you did yes and the cost point was considerably higher okay so you shopped it

sorry yes so you you have already we do shop it yes we do every time we knew the agreement just like we do with any procurement item we we seek multitudes of different uh proposals and quotes and this one was the most economical they could guarantee us this they also do they develop public service announcements for us that we can use personally inside of the county as well as they can use on the radio station. So there are a couple different components to this particular agreement. Okay.

All right. Thank you. All right. Commissioner Zinbauer?

I will move to approve constitutional officers item number one, county managers items 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 14, 15, 17 through 21. Second. Second.

I have a first and a second. Any discussion? All those in favor?

I think Commissioner Zumbauer missed eight, nine, and ten.

Yes. I did. How about that?

So how about one through 21 with the exception of five, 13, 16, and seven?

There you go.

Still second.

We still have a second. Okay.

All right. No further discussion. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Hearing none opposed, it passes unanimously. All right. I'll take it back to Item 7. Commissioner DeLauro, you pulled this.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'd just like to have a quick discussion. I know that I've been talking to staff about it, and I know we're... We need to put utility departments somewhere because of the rental and the condition of reflections. And it does make sense to move them into a different space. I was first under the impression that we'd be moving them into the new County Services building because we're trying to centralize everything. and i asked about why aren't we moving that into the county new county services building that we're putting in five points and they said it was cost prohibited and they said that the new building over by uh red bug and tuscawilla by spring villa point would run somewhere just above 300 per square foot and so then i asked what was the cost of the projected all-in cost of the new services building, and it said a little over $1,000 per square foot, $1,045 a square foot. That's what I received in an email. And I just think that that's excessive, because I thought that we were going after a Class B plus building, not a Class A building. And then I looked at it, and it said that it included the building, the parking garage, the site work, and the consultants. Well, I know the Class B building, brand new, runs anywhere between $300 to $500 a square foot. I know the parking garage raises it, but I can't see it raising it that amount of money. And I just would like to get more clarification because we are taking another piece of property off the tax rolls. And so I would hope that we'd have more discussion about this because we as a group have not had this discussion in any great detail. And so that's why I wanted to pull it so we can have that discussion and figure out are we going to move forward or do we need to have more information.

Commissioner Zimbala.

So I've gone through this quite a bit and been brief and asked a lot of questions of staff, and thank you, staff, for answering those. The one part, Commissioner Dilary, that I think is very pressing, and we can debate the cost for square foot differences and so forth, but the building they're currently in is not safe. There's black mold been discovered. The owner of that facility has not moved forward to remediate or correct that. So I think we have a safety issue for our facility. folks that are currently there that need to be moved out. This also puts them in close proximity to infrastructure which they would engage with. Instead of being at five points, they'd actually be closer to one of our water system plants, as well as remotely located to hit other parts of the county. The square footage number, I called several individuals, and I got prices less than $1,000 per square foot, but they were significantly twice as much or more than what this building cost was. It was my experience when I reached out.

I've also had briefings with staff and asked a lot of questions about this. And I think just for the record, the environmental services team has already moved out of that building and they're co-located right now with emergency management. So we've got, we did thankfully, you know, get the folks out of there as quickly as we could so they're not still currently operating in that building. We have rented that space for decades. And when we look at the amount of money that we have spent as a tenant in that building over the years, we could have bought this new building many times over. So I think it's time. I do think that the location makes good sense. I think that, you know, wanting to wait until we are ready to move forward with all of the five points movement is too long to wait for them to get into their own place. So we would wind up having to rent another temporary space in the meantime. It just, I think this is just, it makes the most sense. And so I'm happy to support the recommendation.

Do you have... I was just going to say I'm glad that Commissioner Delori brought this up because these are questions that we have to discuss each time. I also, over the last number of days, received information from the county manager and staff on this. I would also indicate that there will be no discussion built in, it's already completed, ready to go. So that is a plus that we would not have normally. And all the furniture is already there and we've gotten all of that and it all can be used.

Now if that is not correct, tell me.

So those things did add to the price, but it is reasonable within the request. And also in a highly desirable area that if As someone indicated, we may not want to do this in the situation. I believe it is also enterprise funds that's purchasing this, not tax dollars, and that we could probably sell it for a much better price than later on. So it's an investment.

And, Madam Chairman, if you don't mind, I'd just add, and I appreciate those were all good comments, and Commissioner DeLaurie and I have had many conversations about this as well. So... Tagging on to Commissioner Constantine's question, this is paid for out of our enterprise fund, the utilities fund. We already had a building already slated to a new building for utilities. As you know, they've been in leased space for quite a number of years. One of our main priorities is to move out of leased space into county-owned space. We had to fast track this this year. This wasn't until a couple of years down the road that we were looking at this because of the issues in the current facility that utilities is facing. And then we had to move them out within a couple of weeks and find them temporary space. So my recommendation is to move forward. And this building is centralized to our water plants as well. And it makes sense. It was never intended for utilities to move into our new county administration building. One, there's really no need for them to be in that building, and it is a Class B building. And we're going to be briefing all the commissioners on that. The design team is almost finished with the planning where we're recommending for folks to go, and so we'll be briefing the board on that soon. But as you know, we talked about this at the retreat a couple months ago. We listed all the facilities. occupants of the new building in there and we just know that utility staff was was never going to go into the the county administration building again we were looking at another facility to build them at some time and this just fast-tracked it again for a couple years so i would recommend that we move forward with it

Commissioners, I've already said everything that I would have said has already been said. I'll not repeat it. Commissioner DeLaurie?

Madam Chair, I just wanted to have open dialogue because we haven't had any real conversations about this. With that open dialogue, I feel confident that we're making the right decision, so I would make the motion to approve it. Second.

Any further discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Hearing none, motion passes unanimously. Thank you. Well, that takes us on to the big portion of today. It is that time of the year again, so I'll start by saying Happy New Year. It's budget season. And I'll turn it over to you, Mr. Gray, for opening comments for our budget work session number two.

Thank you, Madam Chairman and Commissioners. Yes, this is actually we have been preparing for this budget. We immediately started working on this budget after last year's budget was adopted. One thing that I had told our team is that this was going to be an easy year. Well, it turned out differently. But anyway, we do have, in my opinion, a great budget in front of you. And again, I will be making some opening comments. But first, I'd like to go over the agenda for the next two days that we'll be here. Starting out this morning, I thought with With the governor putting out the proposal with property tax reform and then the legislature approving a ballot initiative to go on the November ballot regarding property tax reform, I had asked Mr. Oscar Anderson to come from the southern group. hot off the presses. He's going to give us a rendition of what happened over the last couple weeks. Then followed by that, we'll have our property appraiser, Mr. David Johnson, who has been working tirelessly with our team on the impacts of what the property tax reform would look like. And remember, if this does go into effect, it does not affect the budget that we're reviewing now, that we're going to, that we have to adopt in September to be implemented in October. However, there's a plan, a strategy moving forward I'd like to discuss with the board. Following Mr. Johnson, Mr. Jecks, our budget director, will come to give a countywide budget overview. At that point, Madam Chairman, we'll bring it back to the board and for you all to, if there's any questions, concerns that we would like to discuss at that point. And then we'll turn it over to our constitutionals. We have all of our constitutionals here this morning. Sheriff Lima is here with the sheriff's office. We have J.R. Crowell with our tax collector. And then we'll round out this morning with Amy Pinnock, our supervisor of elections. This afternoon will be our court discussion, but first we'll lead off with the Department of Health with Dr. Johnson. Then we'll go to our state attorney, Guardian Ad Litem, public defender. And then Mr. Malloy will come with the clerk of court in the comptroller's budget. And then we will finish this afternoon with Link's discussion. Ms. Hawkins will be here for that discussion. Tomorrow we'll open up all the constitutions again will be done today and then tomorrow we'll open up to our internal departments so in the morning we'll have all of our operating departments from emergency management, fire, utilities, environmental services. Chief Judge Chase was supposed to be here today. She has a court issue, so she will actually be here tomorrow at 11. So wherever we are in the frame, I told her that, and I know, Chairman, she spoke with you too, that we'll accommodate her tomorrow morning. And then we'll round out tomorrow morning with our fleet department facilities, our information technology. We're calling our public works, we're calling it moving seminal. There's a lot of great information that Ms. O'Rourke will be talking about with us tomorrow morning. Our seminal moments and strategic planning, you know, seminal moments is our efficiency measures that we have done. This is our second year. We have some great information to share with the board. And then we'll round out tomorrow morning with the countywide department budget review. And then we'll just end with some closing comments tomorrow. Hopefully by 1, latest by 2, we can be out of here. And then any other follow-up items that the board wants us from today or in the morning, we can bring it back tomorrow afternoon for the board. So with that, good morning, Chairman, Commissioners, and everyone who has joined us today. As we continue this year's budget work sessions, I want to thank our constitutional officers, our department directors, budget office staff, and employees across the organization for their work in developing our proposed fiscal year 27 budget. Last year, the Board made difficult decisions to address the rising costs, growing service demands, and long-term financial challenges. The fiscal year 27 budget continues that work by focusing on essential services, operational efficiencies, and responsible financial planning. The proposed budget totals approximately $1.3 billion across all county operations and reflects a balanced approach to meeting the needs of the growing community while maintaining the county's strong financial position. This budget includes no new staffing requests and for the second consecutive year results in a net reduction in full-time positions. At the same time, it continues to support the services our residents and businesses rely on every day. Public safety remains our highest priority, while investments in transportation, emergency management, parks, libraries and infrastructure help maintain the quality of life that makes Seminole County a great place to live, work and do business. I have three themes to go over with you this morning. The first theme you'll see throughout this proposed budget is our continued commitment to maintaining essential services. As you all know, nearly three quarters of the county's operating and capital budget supports public safety, transportation, utilities, and solid waste services. These are core services residents depend on every day, and this budget ensures we can continue delivering them at a high level. The second theme is operational efficiency. Through our similar moments, which is our efficiency program, departments across the organizations have identified over 50 operational improvement projects projected to save approximately $60 million over the next five years. These initiatives focus on improving processes, leveraging technology, strengthening partnerships, and finding smarter ways to deliver services without reducing service levels. They represent our ongoing commitment to responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources. And the last and the third theme is investing in our future. This budget reflects the confidence voters placed in us through the approval of the four-generation infrastructure sales tax. The fiscal year 27 marks the first full year of collections, providing an important funding source for transportation improvements, public safety infrastructure, and other long-term capital needs throughout Seminole County. Overall, the proposed fiscal year 27 budget maintains our focus on delivering essential services, investing in critical infrastructure, preserving our long-term financial stability, and preparing for the future needs of a growing community. So before we move into our fiscal year 27 budget presentations, we will begin with a legislative update on property tax reform. While the proposal currently is under consideration, would not impact the budget before you today, it has the potential to significantly affect local government revenues beginning in fiscal year 28 and beyond. And with that, Madam Chairman, I'll turn it back to you.

Thank you, and I believe we have Mr. Oscar Anderson taking the microphone, and he will bring us all things of wisdom from Tallahassee.

There's wisdom in Tallahassee?

Good luck, guys. Is that a thing?

Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Chairman, commissioners, always great to see you. Glad to be back from Tallahassee after special session after special session. I know you've gotten lots of information about what was in the proposed property tax amendment that was passed by the legislature, but I put a little cheat sheet down that shows you what's in the current law and what the changes are. Do I need to get closer?

Or move it forward.

Sorry. So you have it. I don't know if, Madam Chair, if you want me to go through it or not, or I don't know what you want to spend, or you want to talk more color commentary, that's up to you.

think the facts would be welcome.

Okay, sure. Happy to. Can you correct me if I'm wrong? The facts as you know them today. Well, that's true.

It always changes.

Okay, so as you know, the legislature So the governor rolled out his proposal. It was pretty far-reaching, obviously. The legislature made a few changes to it. So I'm going to talk about the final product that incorporates the changes the legislature made. The first one on here is the homestead exemption related to school taxes. They were removed. They were in the original governor's proposal, but the legislature took them out. So that increased homestead exemption does not apply to the school millage rate. For counties, cities, and special districts, it increases to 150 in January 1st, 2027, and then to 250 in 2028. And then after that, there is an inflation adjustment that's in place for non-school homestead exemptions. They have created sort of two classes of residents, for lack of a better description. The existing homeowners are eligible for the increased homestead exemption right away. Anybody that shows up after this thing is implemented has to be here for five years before it applies to them. which is going to be challenging, I assume, for him to try to implement.

We'll see if that holds up in the court system also.

Equal protection.

I think that's equal protection clause.

Got a problem there.

It does give the counties...

some ability to shorten. It authorizes and gives you the ability to shorten that five-year period if you want to down the road. I'm not exactly sure why they put that in there, but I guess they wanted to give some flexibility to the local governments. They They changed the cap on non-homesteaded property, which was at 10% annually, to 5% starting January 1st, 2027. That's commercial, rental, anything non-homestead that applies to. And then the other thing they did was they put some constitutional restrictions on the use of that, of what they called essential core services. And that included public safety, public education, transportation, stormwater and flood control, natural resource protection projects, bond and debt service payments, and pension obligations. Those are not – you're going to have a lot of questions about what that means. It's a great question. I don't know. I mean, I assume that's a decision the courts will have to resolve at some point of what's included in transportation obligations. They did add, the legislature did add paragraph G, which I can print it out, I can read it to you. I've got lots of paper here. It was an important piece for the counties and cities specifically. And it's paragraph G. It says, one of the other new core essential services they added was to fund the operations and administration of county officers and commissioners established under Article 8 and municipalities and the expenditures approved by such county officers or county or municipal governing bodies except those expenditures prohibited by law. There was a lot of back and forth on the floor about what that meant. It was originally assumed it was put in there to deal with constitutional officers, like who's going to pay for elections. It was a big debate at the beginning. But it goes further than that. And from the colloquy on the floor, it was clear that that's basically anything you approve that's not prohibited by law is now considered an essential core service. So everything in your budget that you vote on would now be ineligible use. revenue reduction aside, from an expenditure side, you'd be allowed to use ad valorem taxes for that. Let's see, what else did I... They also gave some constitutional direction to the legislature to figure out a way to continue to try to get to full repeal of, put a mechanism in place where counties are allowed to try to increase the homestead exemption to 100%. It doesn't say that you have to. And it doesn't say the legislature has to. It just authorizes the legislature to put a system in place. So there will be a lot of discussion around that down the road if this passes, I'm sure, as well. And then, obviously, the effective date is January 1, 2027, assuming it passes. There were a couple other pieces that I think are relevant for y'all to know. When it started in the governor's proposal, there were a couple things that the legislature took out. One was there was funding for the Department of Revenue to create a website, which you guys may have seen, the Save Our Homes website. I think that was through the Department of Revenue. We're trying to figure that out. And there was $5 million worth of funding in the bill to pay for that. They took that out of the bill. They said, you can't do that. The governor can do it, obviously, if he wants to right now, so we don't need to fund it or pay for it. It's up to him if he wants to do that, was the back and forth on that. The other thing that the governor's proposal had that was taken out was a trust fund that was sort of described as a way to backfill some of the loss of revenue by the locals. There was a point of... big debate in the committee and on the floor. And the legislature's opinion was if the people vote to increase homestead and exemption that much and reduce the overall revenue to these local governments, then we'll have to figure out a way to make it work. And we're not going to be in the business of backfilling. There was a lot of back and forth between Republican and Democratic members, Republican members typically get more local projects approved than Democrats do, and it's not fair to our communities, and so they just took it out completely. So there is no trust fund to backfill any loss of revenue. So that's sort of an overview of what happened. So you want to talk about that, and then we can talk a little about next steps. Who has questions that I'll attempt to answer and rely on him to clarify?

Commissioners, any questions?

Wow, that's great.

I think the summary is that they've broadened the uses, assuming we have the revenue. Do we have it?

That's correct.

All right, back to you, Austin.

Okay. Next step. So there's already – I've been in constant contact with the Association of Counties and the League, too, actually. There's already a website created called SaveOurVoters.com that everybody kind of believes is going to be the – the mechanism for the legal challenge around it. There's actually some great interviews and information on that website about it. As Mr. Johnson said earlier, there are some deficiencies that probably are going to be legally challenged in the ballot language. Even the title itself, Save Our Homes from Excessive Property Taxes, doesn't feel that neutral, which is what ballot language is supposed to be. And there's a lot of other things in there. It talks about the benefits, doesn't talk about the costs. There's lots of ambiguous language in there. And then for the last issue, it does sort of create two classes of residents, and under the uniformity of taxation, is that a legal thing to do? It's way above my pay grade, but... there's clearly going to be a challenge, a legal challenge to it. That process is outlined in statute in Chapter 101. And essentially what it does is somebody challenges the courts. The courts have, I think, 30 days at that point. They have 30 days once it's filed with the Secretary of State to challenge. The courts have to obviously move it to the top of the docket. If a court says the ballot language needs to be, has deficiencies that need to be cured, then the Attorney General gets 10 days to rewrite the ballot language. And then that new improved language can then again be challenged. I don't know when that stops. I don't know when the end of that process is. But I mean, I fully expect, I expect. I presume there's going to be some changes to the language based on sort of just plain reading of it, but you never know. So that process is going to work itself out. Obviously, the Association of Counties, this will be the number one topic during the annual conference in a few weeks on the 24th to 26th. I'll be down there as well. And so they're, you know, obviously trying to figure out what they can and can't do. I don't expect the association to be a party to any lawsuit that moves forward. They've got to get board approval and there's a whole process and this has to happen pretty quick. And same with the league, but I assume individual local governments will join that conversation. That's sort of next steps. The polling I've seen, to add some color commentary, is about 70%. The original rumor around the Capitol was that the governor's office was going to wait as long as possible because they know that every day that it sits out there, it loses support. And then it kind of rushed out at the end of special session when he had some more I'm going to say leverage over because of vetoes and everything else. So he did it before the budget had been approved to sort of maximize his ability. So that's the color commentary and next steps. Questions?

Questions?

Not so much a question, but thank you very much. I know you all are very busy up there.

I'm glad to be home.

I bet you are. As we endeavor upon today's task of this budget, and I know my fellow commissioners are aware of this, but for the public, This is on our radar. Staff is going to be, at some point, bringing recommendations back to us as we move for next cycle's budget. But I would remind everyone, these type initiatives were on the ballot in 2018 and 2022, of which were not approved by the citizens of this state to increase that homestead exemption. So this is not a novel idea. But I do applaud the legislature for giving the citizens the availability and the capability to weigh in on this and make their own decisions on how they want to be taxed. It's our job to ensure that they're fully informed before they walk into that ballot box to understand what this ultimately means for them in the way of quality of life. And I trust that our people and our staff will endeavor upon doing such a good job that we'll be able to inform our constituents what this really means when they go in that ballot box polling place to decide which way they want to be taxed so to me this represents obviously the core values of our country and the way this this country was founded to give us citizens that ability and I think what we will find at least a citizen Seminole County if properly informed and educated on what these impacts will be have always proven to us to make good decisions I would just point out that this is a statewide vote

Yes.

And so we are a very small portion of that. The task in front of us is fairly significant. I think any further comments? If not, I would...

I may, but I'd like to hear the rest of the story.

Can I add one? There was a second bill that was passed, an implementing bill. This was all about the House joint resolution they both passed. The implementing bill deals with stuff that he can explain about rollback rates and things, and then also gave them the ability to go beyond the 75-word limit that's in the Constitution, or in the statute, I guess, for ballot language. So that passed as well. Sorry, I just wanted to be complete in my presentation.

Thank you, Oscar. So stand by. We'll hear from Mr. Johnson now.

Very good. So we're going to kind of dovetail into what Oscar is there. And I've got a little bit of graphics, you know, me and a PowerPoint. I cannot go anyplace without a PowerPoint. So here we go to graphically represent a lot of what Oscar just indicated. So here's a current snapshot. of your tax roll and what it looks like for 2026 and kind of moving forward. So 2026, breaking news, you probably already know this, your tax roll has now grown to about $20.3 billion in taxable value. Of that, about $24.5 billion is attributable to homestead property. So that gets back to the conversation we just had, which is about 40%. We've got about 181,000 parcels. 107,000 of those have a homestead. What this does from an estimated perspective of what you would be generating for tax revenue, about $444 million. I did not take Tim's 96% math that he did, but this is just a quick overview. You generate about $444 million in ad valorem tax revenue to your general fund. About $185 million of that is paid by homestead property owners, about 41%. As Oscar pointed out, this impact, if this does get passed by the voters in November, will not be affecting the budget we're supposed to be talking about today. I understand it's on our radar and we need to be conscious of it, but it does not impact anything we're going to be doing for the fiscal year 27.

All right, Tim.

So this is just kind of an outline about what this happens in the time frame. Currently, the homestead exemption is about $51,411. That is already factored up by the CPI, so that's why it's a weird number. If this were to pass, it goes to $150,000 on January 1, 2027, and to $250,000 on January the 1st, 2028. And then, as Oscar indicated, there's this nebulous language about someday maybe we try to get it to nothing. We're going to give the legislature that authority so we do not have to go back to the voters. They can decide to do it or not do it. It's just there. It gives them some authority to do that. So that's what that looks like, as Oscar indicated. This does not impact school taxes. The one thing that folks have got to understand, The bumper sticker that's out there that you're not going to pay property taxes on your homestead is just false because you're going to continue to pay property taxes for school taxes. So everybody that has a homestead, whether this passes or doesn't pass, is still going to get a tax bill from the tax collector with the school tax on there. And that's about 40% here in Seminole County. So that's fair disclosure on that. Here's how this HJR 1F impacts your three funds that you control, assuming this were to pass. You can see the numbers. For 2027, you would be seeing an initial, when the 150 kicked in, you would see about a $50 million reduction in your general fund revenue. about a $19 million reduction in your fire fund, and about $600,000 in your road fund. And it's about, it stays about 15 to 17%, even though Homestead makes up a larger percentage, paying the bill those non-homesteader property owners continue to pay the bill to this day so but the impact is real for sure if we get to 2028 2029 that number now grows to 80 almost 85 million dollars out of your general fund almost 26 percent 32 million out of your fire fund and about a million dollars out of your um road fund Again, fair disclosure, true transparency. We did not indicate any kind of growth in your tax roll going forward from 26 to 27 to 28. We all know that your tax roll grows at 4, 5, 6% a year. This is worst case scenario, but this is just math. It's bad either way. It's just math to give you an indication rather than doing some kind of... you know, mathematic calisthenics. So we'll deal with that if we need to, if this passes. But bottom line, across your three funds, about $188 million worth of reduction in your revenues across the three funds. So I call this my back to the future slide because this is what we're doing. If this were to pass, essentially what happens is, again, currently you've got about $60.3 billion taxable value tax roll. If this were to pass, the first year we basically take you back to 2023. so you erase any kind of growth that you've had in your tax roll in 23 24 25 or 26 with the 150 000 homestead applied we go all the way back to 2022 okay uh if uh when the second part of that kicks in at 250. um remember that one mill basically generates about $60 million in this upcoming budget that we're talking about. Put another way, one mill would generate about $45 million if this were to pass. So that's where those numbers impact you. Oscar touched on it, but I'm gonna elaborate a little bit more and this gets way, way in the weeds. One of the things in the implementing bill, that is not affected is your rollback rate. I mean, we always talk about there's two parts to this tax bill. We always are hyper-focused on the value and the assessments and exemptions and all that stuff, because that's, I guess, sexier. But there's another piece of that equation. The rate, the tax rate, gets multiplied against that value. Nothing, so far, affects that rollback rate. What will happen is if in fact this passes by the voters in November, it will no longer be called a rollback rate because the rollback rate by definition in the statutes is the rate necessary to generate the same revenue as the year before, less any kind of new construction. You will essentially have a rollup rate. So the tax rate will actually be advertised when you have all your public hearings as a tax increase on those non-homesteaded property owners because the rate necessary to generate the same dollars as the year before will have to go up because we have taken $15 billion worth of taxable value off. So that's the piece of the story that, again, educated voters will learn over the next number of months. We'll talk about pi ad nauseum. But that's how that particular part of the rollback, which we'll call roll-up rate, works. And with that, I am done. We'll talk about my budget later on. But we're here to answer questions on HJR 1F. And I know Tim's got some ideas also.

Just check, see if your mic is on, if they can check it on the back. Couldn't hear that.

I don't think your mic is even active.

Check that for us, please. And our little booth in the back.

Check support.

Keep testing it, Tim. Is the one next to you working? Yeah, just hand him that one.

No, come over here.

The shift.

I'm Timothy Jex with the Office of Management and Budget. No, it's Tim's.

It's Tim's.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Yours is low, too.

That's fine.

We can hear Commissioner Constantine.

This one here. So the total proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year 26-27 is $1,284,000,000 for all countywide funds and departments. This is an increase of 5% over the current FY26 adopted budget. County revenues are allocated into different funding buckets in order to maintain accountability, legal compliance, and fiscal management. Property taxes are the primary source of revenues for the general fund shown in orange, as well as the fire fund and transportation trust funds in green. Our enterprise funds in blue account for 18% of the county's revenues. These are considered business activities. The revenues in these funds are dedicated to provide drinking water to our customers, treat wastewater, and manage the county's landfill. 5% of our revenues fund the county's internal service self-insurance funds, shown in purple. These are workers' compensation, property liability, and health insurance activities. And finally, 37% of our revenues are generated from legally restricted special revenue sources, including state and federal grants, interlocal agreements, and tourism revenues. Now we're going to focus on the three funds that are supported by property taxes. First, the general fund, where ad valorem revenues make up 77% of the proposed budget. This is based on the total countywide taxable value of $60 billion as reported by the property appraiser. The proposed millage rate is 5.3751 mills. This is the same as the current fiscal 26 rate. After prepayment discounts, we expect to receive 96% of collection estimates. The proposed budget revenue for this source is 311.3 million, which is an increase of 15.3 million over the current year. The next largest revenue in the general fund are sales taxes generated from the state of Florida's 6% tax levy. This is a separate revenue from the county's one cent infrastructure sales tax. These taxes are collected by the state of Florida and allocated to the county through the half cent and state revenue sharing programs. Seminole is a donor county, which means that a portion of our taxes are paid by the residents and shared with fiscally constrained counties in the state. We are projecting this revenue flat at $41.5 million. This makes up 10% of our general fund. Next we have our public service tax, which is a 10% levy on electricity, water, natural gas, and propane sold in the unincorporated area of the county. The cities maintain their own levies and receive their revenues directly. The first 300 kilowatt hours of electricity is exempt from this tax. We're projecting 25.4 million in the proposed budget, an increase of 5.3 million. This revenue makes up 6% of the general fund. The final major revenue in the general fund is communication service taxes. This is a 5.1% tax on mobile, data, cable, and streaming service. It's controlled and administered by the state of Florida. These figures represent revenues collected in the unincorporated area. The cities receive their revenues directly, and this makes up 1.3% of the general fund. This chart shows the total revenues in the general fund from all sources of $403.7 million, which is an increase of 5% over 26. Now we'll move to general fund expenditures. This chart shows the total proposed expenditures of $400.9 million. We added the final column on the right to show the percentage of the total fund, which is a representation of where your tax dollars are allocated. 55% of the general fund proposed budget is allocated for public safety. The first line includes sheriff law enforcement as well as the county's correctional facility. The sheriff proposed budget is increasing 3.8% to 202.6 million. Other public safety functions in the general fund include 911 dispatch, public safety radio network, emergency management, animal services and code enforcement. We will go over these budgets in more detail during upcoming department presentations. 8.4% of the general fund revenues are dedicated to transportation services, including mass transit, which is Sunrail, Lynx buses, and Scout on-demand transit. The second line is a transfer from our general fund to support the county's public works department, who manage our road, bridges, and traffic control system. The proposed recreation budget for fiscal 27 is $28.8 million, which makes up 7% of our general fund. This budget is split almost evenly across county parks, libraries, and natural lands and trails. The proposed budget includes $6.5 million for human services, including community assistance, community health, and a transfer to the Attainable Housing Trust Fund. This chart does not include grant revenues, which are budgeted outside of the general fund, or unfunded mandates, which will be shown on an upcoming slide. The proposed budget includes $67.8 million for general government services. This includes $32.5 million for transfers to our constitutional officers, the tax collector, property appraiser, clerk of court, and supervisor of elections. County administration cost the general fund $12.3 million. This includes the board's budget, county manager's office, county attorney, the budget office, human resources, and our technology department. $16.9 million is allocated for the Fleet and Facilities Department to manage the county's 300 buildings, 2.4 million square feet, and 1,400 vehicles. Then we have $2.1 million for economic development and tourism activities, and $4 million for the Development Services Department, which includes planning and growth management. The final chart shows county unfunded mandates in the general fund. This includes our annual payment to the state for the local cost share of Medicaid. We have 1.9 million for the medical examiner, 1.2 million for the health department, 21.7 million in support of the courts, 500,000 for veteran support, 6.9 million for retirement contribution rates set by the state, and 3.1 million for water quality protection services. These unfunded mandates are defined by the Florida Association of Counties and are based on proclamations of law which require local governments to expend funds in a constitutional or statutorily dictated way. The FY27 total proposed budget includes $158 million for all unfunded mandates across all county funds. This chart shows the total proposed revenues and expenditures in the general fund. We are structurally balanced with a revenue estimate of $403.7 million and expenditures of $400.9 million. Moving to the county's fire fund, this chart shows both proposed revenues and expenditure budgets, which are 100% in support of providing fire and EMS rescue services to the county. Total proposed ad valorem property taxes are 112 million, which is an increase of 5.3 million over fiscal 26. This is based on maintaining the current 2.7649 millage rate, which makes up 86% of the total $130 million fund revenues. Moving to expenditures, we have base budgets of $112.2 million, which is nearly 90% to fund personnel, salaries, and benefits. In our $22 million capital line, we have budgets for fire station renovations and relocations that were presented by our fire chief last month. Moving to the Transportation Trust Fund, the final ad valorem fund. These revenues support operational costs for transportation in the county. This does not include our penny tax revenue, which funds transportation infrastructure. The proposed budget includes a $33.6 million transfer from the general fund needed to support expenditures. The county levies an unincorporated road millage of 0.1107 mills, which generates $3.1 million in ad valorem dedicated to road maintenance. Moving down to gas taxes, There is a combined $0.15 per gallon levied in the county, which is projected to generate $21 million. We have a $0.06 local option and the new $0.05 local option gas tax, which are projected to generate a combined $12.8 million. The next row shows contributions from the City of Sanford and Lake Mary from their $0.05 collections. This revenue will go towards the cost of the new 417 Seminole Connector Roadway. Moving down, we have a $0.01 per gallon levy dedicated towards mass transit, and the last two rows show a combined $0.03 per gallon that is set and administered by the state of Florida. Total revenues in the Transportation Trust Fund are estimated at $60 million, including the general fund transfer. This chart shows the proposed expenditure budgets in the fund. The transfer to links is projected to grow by 100,000. This includes a reduction for fixed route buses of 2.4 million and an increase in paratransit cost of 2.5 million. The reduction in fixed route is due to a service change which took place on January, 2026 to replace fixed route buses with an on-demand microtransit service. The current FY26 budget includes overlapping services, which are going away in fiscal 27. Note that the service change resulted in a reduction to links of 82,000 service hours, which would have cost the county an additional $9 million in fiscal 27. The proposed budget for microtransit is $7.1 million, which will fund 49 vehicles and an increase of 7 vehicles from fiscal 26. Moving down to the contribution for Sunrail, we have a reduction from $11,560,000 to $11,349,000. And finally, the cost of our Public Works Road and Bridge Department is $28.5 million, which is a $2.4 million reduction, including the five full-time personnel which are being reduced through attrition. This chart combines all three ad valorem funds to show where your property tax dollars are allocated. Combined 72% go towards public safety activities, including law enforcement, corrections, fire, EMS, and dispatch. 11% goes to fund transportation. 5% for county parks, libraries, and natural lands. 4% is for BCC general government activities. 3% funds our constitutional officers and 1% goes to community services, with the final 4% allocated to unfunded state mandates. This chart shows the potential revenue impact of the property tax reform toward three ad valorem funds. The first line shows the proposed ad valorem property tax revenues for each fund with the 96% discount totaling $426 million. The next two lines show the estimated impact of the additional 150 and then $250,000 exemptions. If we look at the $250,000 exemption, which will impact the FY29 revenues and beyond, the property appraiser estimates an $85 million reduction in the general fund, $33 million reduction in the fire fund, and $1 million reduction in transportation trust fund. This is approximately 26% of our total ad valorem revenues. Moving to the last row, we show the total impact to the total projected revenues for each fund in fiscal 29, resulting in approximately $20 million reduction in the combined revenues for all three funds. This slide is being presented for reference purposes. The top subtotal shows the services excluding mandates. FY27 budgets total $358 million in our general fund. The 29 revenue reduction represents 24% of services in the general fund. In the fire fund, the $33 million loss represents 23% of services. And my final chart shows the FY26 current approved full-time staffing positions of 1,685 being reduced by five to 1,680 in the proposed budget.

And that's it. Back to you, Madam Chairman.

Well, first of all, thank you, all three of you, for your presentations. Before we go into board discussion, I do have a few comments. Just when we thought Just when we thought we had it all figured out, the universe shifts. And while we have the reality of what we think we know today, there are so many unknowns that we're faced with. And I think Chairman Zembaugh, or Chairman.

Perhaps Chairman.

still occasionally acts like the chairman's in power. I'll just own that. I'll own the Freudian slip. As he mentioned earlier, I think we have a lot of things to contemplate and consider. And one of them is anything that we do this year does impact next year. And so while we can openly say that this year's budget is not impacted by this potential new law, we certainly need to be thinking about the future as we're preparing this year's budget. It is very clear that the proposal under consideration by the voters is significant in nature and is more than likely going to be rather difficult to understand given the language and given just the nature of elections. We all have daily lives that we live. And other than being involved in politics, most normal citizens are not that engaged because they can't be. And yes, I did just call us abnormal, because we are. And quite frankly, there will be factions, I won't say opposing factions, but factions with regard to this potential law that are stating it as the best thing since sliced bread and are stating it as though the sky is falling. And neither of those are probably true. In reality, somewhere in the middle is the truth. So I think for today's board discussion, what I hope that we will do as the reasonable and responsible adults in the room is make sure that we understand the facts, that we're asking all the right questions, that we're evaluating potential impacts for future budgets because they matter now. and that we are preparing for that range of possible outcomes. I think we owe it to our citizens to make sure that this discussion informs them well for those that are paying attention. So I also think it's important to keep everything in context. There is no right answer. I always say this. There are probably a thousand right answers out there. Just because it's our idea doesn't mean it is the right answer. There is no such thing on any topic. We do have two days' worth of discussion, so I will ask that we are all reasonable and responsible about the rabbit holes that we go down for potentially very small dollars that don't have significant impacts. That is not in my speaking notes, to be clear. Darren's probably flinching, but we do tend to do that every now and then, and it takes the focus away from the bigger issues. We will have another opportunity to discuss the proposed property tax reform in greater depth at our July 14th meeting. So we will celebrate 250 years of great governance in the United States of America, and happy birthday. And then we will come back to a July 14th discussion about what potentially is happening next. So let's focus on 2027 with an eye to the future and the reality that It will be seemingly difficult, from my perspective, to expect that our voters are going to say, why no? I don't want a tax break. Although they have done it two times before, the public relations campaign around this is much different than it was in the past. And we just need to be cognizant of that and prepare for the future. The property tax reform, from my perspective, is a fiscal issue. I realize that it's also a political issue. I believe if we keep it attached to the numbers and attached to the reality of what that pays for for our citizens today, that we will do our job in terms of informing them. I also think there's a presumption of guilt. and that is that to sweep 67 counties with the same brush is the presumption of guilt that we are all overspending. And I will tell you that I believe there are a lot of counties that are fiscally restricted. I think there are some of us that are donor counties, and I think there are others that do overspend. I don't think we are one of them. Which means, from my perspective, that this will have a more significant impact on the counties that were already fiscally responsible because there are less areas to cut. And that's just the reality of it. So that will be for future discussions, but that is the reality that our citizens will face if this passes. Thank you. So let's keep everything fact-based. Let's stay to the numbers. We all know I love the numbers. Round them when possible, Mr. Jecks. That would be awesome. And keep us focused. So let's work toward a really good outcome. So, Commissioners, I'll turn it over to you for any questions. For the three gentlemen who have done a wonderful job at explaining the potential future and the reality of today. Yes, Commissioner Lockhart.

I'm hoping that one of you can help explain to me and to any other folks who have identified this. I'm hearing two different narratives about non-homesteaded properties and what the impact to those will be, particularly around residential non-homesteaded properties that have renters in them and the potential impact to renters in the community. When I see the cap or the limit being taken down from the 10% assessment annual growth down to the 5%, when I've talked to commercial property owners in the community, they love that. That looks really good to them. How could this not be fantastic? Can you explain how both statements can be true at the same time, or are they?

Absolutely, and I will tell you the major impact is the increasing of the homestead exemption from the 50 to 250. That is where 90% of the impact occurs. To your point, taking the cap on non-homesteaded properties, those commercial property owners, from 10 to 5 affects that number, that $180-something million number, by about $3 or $4 million. So it's a relatively small piece of the impact. Certainly, from a property owner, property landlord's perspective, predictability is always very important when you're trying to come up with fairly tight margins sometimes, especially in this market that's relatively flat on the commercial side. So certainly anything that you can do to shave off an expense, and certainly property taxes, insurance are certainly an expense of owning a piece of property, that predictability is very much there. But I will tell you that is the least of the impact. from this proposal. And certainly it creates some level of fairness moving forward. Every year I give you an idea about how much we have under the cap from the Saver Homes cap, which is eight or nine times the size of what we call the 10% cap, which is what they are. Just because commercial properties do not grow or non-homesteaded properties really do not really pierce that bubble of more than 10% a year anyway. So 5% is a relatively stable amount of growth. And again, it's not going to be a huge impact as far as the total dollars coming into the county. That's the least of the equation.

So, follow up, if I could. So, how do we predict this negatively impacting renters, or does it?

So, there's commentary around the concept that if this does go into effect, you will maybe see an increase in demand for housing in Florida. That's one issue. So, that could raise total prices a little bit. That's one particular impact. The other piece I touched on, which is... let's call it a tax shift potentially, if you have a roll-up rate rather than a rollback rate and you change your general fund millage rate or your fire fund millage rate or your road fund millage rate to something higher to maybe not account for all the loss but some of it, those folks that don't have a homestead exemption are going to pay that. That millage is going to be increasing. So, yes, their cap went from 10 to 5, but the other part of that equation, the rate that we're multiplying that by, has now gone up. So that's where it could negatively impact not only renters, but I would think your business owners. Again, I just had a two-minute speech about predictability. That's an expense. They love that, knowing what the predictability is. But if their millage rate goes from a 5.37 mills to six or seven, then the homesteaded folks are happy because they're not going to really see that, but the non-homesteaded people are. So that's where the shift could be.

Thank you for that explanation.

Any further comments?

Madam Chair, I just want to – let's go beyond that, David. The fact of the matter is, in this scenario, we're cutting taxes. I mean, there is less money. Services will be affected. Property values, therefore, will go down.

Potentially.

It depends on what demand is. It's all going to be dependent on what the demand is. But demand will go down, and then the interest, I mean, people will raise rent because they're going to be taxed more because they're going to have things. So it's going to make it less affordable, and property values will likely go down.

It's unpredictable at this point. I think the narrative I've heard more is that this is going to increase demand. This is why that five-year piece was put into this particular amendment that you had to be a resident of Florida for five years before you could get this. additional exemption because there was some level of concern that there would be this huge inflow of folks from across the country buying up property. We already have a housing crisis in this state. Again, median sales price in this county is $450,000. Let's round it to $500,000. That's unsustainable. That's a huge number. It's sustainable. It's a huge number. So does that go from 500 to 600 because you're giving someone an additional exemption? Potentially, but then that creates more affordability issues. But Commissioner Custody, I totally understand quality of life issues. People live in this county for the quality of life, and they have a certain expectation. They have voted themselves tax increases four times. to create an additional quality of life, to tax themselves to increase their quality of life issues. So certainly that's there. As Chairman Herb pointed out, this is a statewide initiative, so we can be doing everything. And remember, on the school exemption, this gets really complicated, and we're going to go down a rabbit hole just for a second, Chairman Herb. It's not a $150,000 or even a $50,000 homestead. Your school homestead exemption is $25,000. There is no 10% cap on the school portion of the value. If the value goes up 20%, it goes up 20%. That's almost half of your bill. So the half out there in the public domain OK, that says I'm going to punch in my address, shows my taxable value is 250. It shows 0. That's just not right. It's not wrong. It's just totally inappropriate. That was what was the governor's initial ideas. assumes all of his ideas were incorporated into that calculator. The calculator is still up. We checked it out this morning. And so how you take it down, if it's in the basement of the governor's mansion or what. But anyway, it's just not there. It's not right. Because it needs to add back in the school taxes to be at least a little bit legitimate. Good to know.

And I'll just say that while that went down a little bit of a rabbit hole on school taxes, this is at least one commissioner that says, please educate the kids of the state of Florida so that they can grow up, get good jobs, and pay Social Security for the rest of us that are going to rely on it. So let's not cut school taxes short. Commissioner Delary.

Thank you, Madam Chair. David Oscar, can you also expound a little bit? This new question on the ballot, does it address any guarantees to renters if they rent an apartment complex and the property taxes goes down on the person that owns the complex, does that get transferred down to the renter and or does that calculator discuss any of that? Absolutely not.

There's no guarantee. There's no contemplation whatsoever of any kind of tax savings from non-homestead property owners whether commercial move back down to a tenant. That would be huge overreach, obviously. But the focus is definitely on homesteaded property owners specifically.

There is some confusion relating to that that people have actually asked me about. Yeah.

I don't have an answer for them. The answer is no. It does not guarantee any kind of pass-through back down. It's kind of just like the Live Local Act. There's no guarantee that that savings gets moved down to the renters either. Thank you, David.

Commissioners, are we ready to move on?

Please.

All right.

Thank you.

Hearing no further questions, we'll bring it back to David Johnson as the first up. to talk about his specific budget. And we don't let anybody talk without Tim Jacks standing next to them. So we've got you covered, David.

Well, this is something a little bit less exciting, and thankfully so. This is our annual budget for funding the office. I always put this slide in there. As you are well aware, my budget and the tax collector's budget are approved by the Department of Revenue on an annual basis. We certainly do fund it, obviously. And we certainly want to be here and be courteous and respectful to your comments and your questions. But this just gives you a little bit of an idea of the timeline that we have to follow moving forward. So June 1st, we submit our proposed budget to the Department of Revenue for their approval. They have until July 15th to come up with a tentative approval. And then they send that back. information back to you as the board of county commissioners and say hey we're going to tentatively improve the property appraiser's budget you have until august the 15th to make any additional comments if you so desire so that's just kind of the time frame we go through with the budget here's our our assumptions for this year's upcoming budget for the property appraiser's office uh we're projecting a 3.28 percent or 265 000 increase in the budget uh These are the assumptions that were built into that. A 4% salary increase, which mirrors what you are doing for your staff and your budget. 7% insurance increase. As you know, we're on your insurance. We funded ourselves. We paid for it out of our budget. And these are the best estimates that we have at this point, about a 7% increase in those premiums. Obviously, FRS, the Florida Retirement System, rates increase on an annual basis, and we have to follow that in the statutes. And our 48 positions, our FTEs, have remained at 48, they have for a number of years. So you control three funds. We've talked about that several times already this morning. You will get a bill for each one of those funds for funding of the office. And generally, that's how it looks. So $7.1 million, of course, comes out of the general fund, buyer funds just over $1 million, and about $30,000 out of the transportation fund. This is just a transmittal letter to the Department of Revenue. We submitted the budget on the 28th of May. We submit all of the budget, all the budget information, all the schedules, all the audits on the website. trying to be as transparent as we possibly can. So that's certainly there. Anybody that cannot go to sleep at night, this is a great way of helping you go to sleep, looking at the Schedule 3 of capital outlay for the property appraiser's budget. Nothing better than to get you to go to sleep with that. And again, these are the categories that we have to report to the Department of Revenue and the schedules that they require. And the tax roll obviously has increased significantly over the last number of years, while our total employee count has decreased by over 10%. Again, we leverage technology and try to be as innovative as we possibly can to deliver a good quality product at a very efficient rate. This gives you an idea about what has happened with your three funds over the last number of years. You can see the glide path. The rate of increase over the last number of years is coming down for all of your funds. That is not atypical of what's happening across the county or across the state. A lot of this is a function of... You know, we've talked about demand a minute ago. Certainly demand is there, but because of interest rates, that certainly suppresses that a little bit. And the cost of almost a half a million dollars of median sales price, affordability becomes an issue. So we have certainly seen a trending down in the growth of the tax rolls. I think I've told you this before. If you go back in time over the last 30, 35 years and kind of average out what the county's growth rate has been, We've been about 4%, 4.25%. That's great times and great recessions. So average all that out. So at a 5, 5.5% growth rate, that's still very healthy. That's much higher than inflation, obviously. And certainly that's something that's somewhat sustainable and predictable. Those 10, 11, 12% rate increases are not necessarily the best thing long term from a growth perspective. And with that, I'm done with the questions about, I'm ready to take questions about the budget.

Commissioners, any questions for Mr. Johnson?

I don't have a question. I'll just say thank you again for being so responsive and responsible with the work that you do. It's great to be able to count on you.

It's great working with your folks. Absolutely. Thank you.

David, I think we all appreciate you. The wisdom, the information, the history lessons, and certainly the occasional snark. Because it keeps us laughing. We may come back to you with questions at some point as we go through this process. Absolutely. I will point out that I, so this has now been pulled out of my binder as the measurement that we should measure every one of us by. This is a great slide, and I love it. Thank you, David, for your time this morning.

Thank you very much, and I will commit to you, as we always have, we'll continue to work through this. We will deal with whatever we are dealt. We have a great relationship with your folks, and I'm looking forward to continuing working with them. Thank you very much. All right.

Thank you. All right. Next on the agenda is Sheriff Lima, who has committed that he can do this in 15 minutes or less.

15. She's harder than I was. I only gave you 20. That's the majority of our budget.

It doesn't matter what we give him. 30 is the number.

Well, good morning, everyone, and thank you so much, Chairman and Commissioners, for the opportunity to present the Seminole County Sheriff's Office proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 to 2027. Joining me, as we usually have, is Chief Lisa Spriggs, Chief of Administrative Services and Administrative Mary Hope, who's the director of finance. Both have played a significant role in the development and preparing this budget and will be available with me for questions at the end of our presentation. Before discussing the numbers, I want to just take a moment to express my sincere appreciation for the partnership that we've enjoyed over the years. I've had the privilege of working with a number of county commissions throughout my tenure as sheriff and before. And I've had the opportunity to serve alongside all of you for a significant amount of time. One thing that has remained remarkably consistent is this board's commitment to responsible governance, fiscal discipline, and protecting the quality of life that makes Seminole County such a special place for all of us to call home. The success that we have today did not happen by accident. Seminole County is consistently recognized as one of the safest communities in the entire state and one of the most desirable places to live, work, and raise a family. Those outcomes are the direct result of elected leaders making thoughtful decisions, balancing priorities, and having the courage to make difficult choices whenever necessary. And I know firsthand that budgeting is never easy. Every single department has their needs, every agency has their priorities, yet this board has consistently demonstrated the ability to balance those competing interests while remaining focused on the long-term financial health of this county and the people we serve. I also want to recognize County Manager Darren Gray and his entire team. Over the years, we've built such a tremendous working relationship, built on trust, transparency, and collaboration. We meet regularly. communicate often, and work through challenges collectively and together. And that partnership between the Seminole County Sheriff's Office, the County Manager's Office, and the Budget and Planning staff has allowed us to anticipate challenges rather than simply react to them. In recent months, we've spent a considerable amount of time collaborating and evaluating a variety of fiscal scenarios and planning for potential impacts associated with discussions that are taking place at the state level. And while no one can predict exactly what the future will hold, I am confident that Seminole County is well positioned because we have always approached these issues thoughtfully, collaboratively, and with a focus on long-term sustainability. Pursuant to Chapter 30.49 of the Florida State Statutes, I have the responsibility to submit a budget that I certify as reasonable and necessary for the proper and efficient operation of the Seminole County Sheriff's Office. I take that responsibility very seriously. The budget before you today reflects not only our operational needs, but also our commitment to fiscal stewardship, transparency, and accountability to the taxpayers we collectively serve. At its core, the budget today is a maintenance and sustainability budget. The proposed fiscal year 2026-2027 certified budget totals $202.6 million approximately. representing a 3.8% increase over the current fiscal year. This is not an expansion budget. It is designed to preserve operational readiness, maintain competitive compensation, and ensure that we continue delivering the services our residents expect and deserve. Like most public safety organizations, we are a people-driven business. Approximately 85% of our business is personnel related. Our budget reflects that. The men and women who are answering 911 calls, they are patrolling our neighborhoods, investigating crimes, operating within our correctional facilities, supporting our courts, and providing countless other essential services, that remains our most valuable asset. The majority of this year's increase is associated with personnel costs, benefits, insurance, and the realities of operating in a competitive labor market. These investments are about maintaining staffing levels, preserving experience, and assuring Seminole County remains an employer of choice within public safety. One area that we continue to monitor very closely involves recent changes to the Florida retirement system. As many of you know, retirement costs represent a significant component of public safety budgets across the state. We are currently evaluating the impact of those legislative changes and working closely with county staff to ensure the appropriate adjustments are reflected moving forward. As part of that hearing process, we will provide updated information and revised projections as necessary. And at the conclusion of our presentation today, we'll talk more specifically about some of those numbers. Like many of the issues we face, this is something that is very much on all of our radar, and I appreciate the partnership of county leadership as we work through those impacts together. I'm particularly proud of the progress we've also made through our in-house law enforcement and corrections academies. Because of the support of this board, we have strengthened our recruitment pipeline, reduced vacancies, and improved our ability to plan for our future. This budget also continues targeted investments in technology that improve operational efficiency and service delivery. These are practical tools that help deputies communicate better, access information faster, and reduce administrative burdens. That all allows our members to spend more time in the field serving our community. We continue to participate in collaborative efforts that address the root causes of crime, including behavioral health partnerships, youth intervention programs, opioid response initiatives, and evidence-based strategies that improve long-term outcomes for our community. Those successes are only possible because of strong partnerships. One example of that partnership is the AdventHealth Hope and Healing Center, which has become an important component of our community's response to substance use disorder and behavioral health challenges. While the center is not funded through the Sheriff's Office budget, it has benefited from the continued support of the Florida Legislature since its inception, as well as grant funding and opioid settlement resources, including funding distributed from the Florida Department of Children and Families and other partners. The center represents the type of collaboration, multi-agency approach that has helped Seminole County continue to reduce overdoses, poisonings, and the devastating impact associated with substance use and disorders. Throughout the budget development process, we have remained committed to fiscally conservative approach, needs based. We understand that every single dollar we receive represents the hard-earned tax dollars of Seminole County residents, and we have worked diligently to align resources with operational priorities while maintaining long-term sustainability. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that Floridians will be faced with some important decisions in the months ahead regarding the future of government funding and taxation. Those conversations will ultimately be decided by the voters. As public servants, our responsibility is not only to provide services, but to also ensure that people understand the relationship between the services that they value and the resources required to deliver them. Whatever decision is made, I have tremendous faith in the people that we serve. I've always believed that government works best when it reflects the will of the people. Here in Seminole County, we have a long history of coming together, working through challenges, and finding practical solutions regardless of the issue before us. And I am confident that that spirit will continue moving us forward. Regardless of what decision is ultimately made, the Sheriff's Office will continue working closely with this board, county leadership, and our community to ensure we remain focused on what matters most. Protecting our residents, preserving the high quality of life, and maintaining the level of service that our citizens have come to expect and deserve. At the end of the day, this budget reflects responsible stewardship, operational discipline, and a commitment to maintaining the exceptional quality of life that residents enjoy throughout Seminole County. So rather than spending the next several minutes walking through the charts and tables and statistics like we've done in the past, I'd like to take a few moments actually to show you what your investment in public safety looks like in action. The charts, graphs, and supporting documents are indeed available, have already been shared with all the board members and discussed with you as a part of our budget process, and are also available on the Seminole County Sheriff's Office website under fiscal reporting. Those materials are indeed important because they provide a measurement and accountability behind the work that we do. But numbers only tell part of the story. The true impact of this investment is found in the lives that are touched, the partnerships that are built, and the problems that are solved. Ultimately, the outcomes that we achieve for our community. The video you're about to see highlights the men and women of the Seminole County Sheriff's Office. our community partnerships, and the outcomes that are possible because of the continued support of this board, county leadership, and the taxpayers that we proudly serve. It provides an overview of our organization and showcases both the services our community knows well and many of the efforts that occur behind the scenes. As a modern policing organization, we take pride not only in responding to problems, but in collaborating with others to prevent them before they arise. More importantly, it reflects the values that make Seminole County so incredibly special. Service, professionalism, innovation, compassion, and partnership. Chairman and commissioners, thank you so much again for your leadership. your partnership and your continued commitment to the people of Seminole County. At this time, we'll show the video and tell the story. The video is seven minutes and then we will be prepared to answer any questions at the conclusion of that.

Year in and year out, in times of crisis, our Seminole neighborhood policing deputies run towards the emergency. Guys, we need to get out. I know it's your house. We got to get out of here. Our service to citizens is anchored by these three principles. People first, safety and well-being, and community partnership. 24 hours a day, deputies patrol neighborhoods and find solutions for safety issues. After this fatal accident involving a speeding reckless driver along State Road 46, Our deputies initiated saturated speed enforcement and proactive safety messaging in neighboring communities. Our House Watch program alerts deputies to make sure that citizens' homes are secure when they're away for long periods of time. In addition to our significant declines in previous years, in 2025, Seminole County saw an 18.4% decrease in the most serious crimes. Those cases are handled by our Criminal Investigations Division, which includes crimes against children, major crimes, domestic violence and elder services, and Seminole Financial Crimes Task Force. Three of our digital forensics investigators were recognized by the U.S. Secret Service as among the best in the nation. Our electronics detection canine, Storm, helps locate key evidence hidden in devices like mobile phones and digital storage devices. 911, do you need police, fire, medical? When citizens called for help, our communications center handled 182,000 911 calls. Responding deputies employ new Axon AI technology to quickly reference laws and agency policies, translate up to 50 languages. What did you forget to take?

¿Qué olvidaste llevar?

Axon transcription technology assists with report writing via body-worn cameras. Deputies then finalize the reports before submitting.

It allows them to handle that back end of paperwork and those calls for service with foreign languages much quicker to get back to our core of providing community-centric services to Seminole County.

In more than 5,800 cases, our Victim Services Unit responded to provide follow-up assistance to citizens in need.

Somebody's having the worst day of their life. And when I arrive on scene, I can't change what's already happened. But it isn't hard to be kind and compassionate and take the time to listen, to hear what they're saying.

Our Special Services Division consists of highly trained teams that provide specialized capabilities for critical incidents and complex operations. Our SWAT team deployed on 55 missions. Underwater Search and Rescue conducted 27 deployments. K-9 units deployed nearly 260 times. Our aviation section, operating two alert helicopters, provided critical support on just under 1,400 calls, supporting more than 100 arrests, locating 30 missing persons, even helping extinguish fires from the air. Our Department of School Safety and Security takes a proactive approach to protecting our children. The team includes 96 school resource deputies and police officers and two contraband detection canines providing a safe and secure learning environment. Our team of more than 130 crossing guards man nearly 200 neighborhood posts and perform 11,000 safe crossings to and from school for our children every single day. They serve as safety ambassadors, helping children develop safe habits. We offer innovative services to protect vulnerable residents. For families of autistic children and seniors with dementia, our ScentJar program provides safe storage of a fresh scent article to track and bring them back as quickly as possible should they wander. Our lockbox program gives first responders door key access to vulnerable residents who live alone, enabling them to bring help without forcing open doors or windows. Throughout 2025, we took pride in graduating 38 certified deputy sheriffs and 21 detention deputies from our Law Enforcement and Corrections Academy. Our Juvenile Justice Division plays a vital role in youth accountability and intervention. The Prosecution Alternatives for Youth, or PAY, program processed more than 500 cases, giving non-violent youthful offenders the opportunity for positive long-term outcomes via the Juvenile Alternative Service Program and Teen Court. For adult offenders, our Department of Corrections offers workforce reentry training. Our Apprentice Construction Trades Program delivered more than 1,400 hours of hands-on training funded via our Inmate Welfare Fund. Our innovative programs for opioid-dependent men and women helped nearly 200 incarcerated individuals have a better chance to break that cycle of dependency upon release. Thanks to our holistic approach to fighting opioid dependency, countywide in 2025, opioid poisoning and overdose deaths fell 19%. Our 501c3 nonprofit Seminole County Sheriff's Office Community Foundation funds numerous programs through charitable contributions from community partners. Our Shop with the Sheriff program provided 275 children with new clothing and school supplies. The Halloween Safety Spooktacular brought hundreds of children and families trick-or-treating in a safe environment, elaborate trunk-or-treating displays, and free snow cones to top off the fun. Our Christmas Village program brought holiday joy to more than 500 children and their families with gifts from Santa's Toy Shop, fun and games, and of course, a visit from Santa himself. In 2025, our Honor Guard participated in 64 details and ceremonies honoring fallen heroes and families whose courage and sacrifices will never be forgotten.

You know, that video concluded with Deputy Sheriff Robert Moore, who died on this date today in 1975, rescuing inmates from a burning correctional facility. So we honor that. It's just a coincidence that it happened to finish up our video with his photograph and this budget presentation to be occurring on this day. But I think it's our responsibility as a community to never forget our heroes. We've had Six that were ultimately killed in the line of duty dating back from 1922, 1975, 1977, 1989, 1998, and 2011. So again, it's an important part of it. Eighteen and a half minutes in, I do want to talk about something that wasn't mentioned by our friends at Southern when Oscar was giving the report. There was also a first special session that occurred. And the first special session does have a fiscal impact both on our county, both on the sheriff's office side, and your side as well. And that is the reinstating of the 1.5% COLA that was eliminated with the legislative efforts in 2011. So if you served in a special risk classification prior to 2011, you earned a 3% COLA per year. The legislature eliminated the COLA in 2011, so then it was zero. So any years that you had prior to 2011 were calculated at a 3%. Everything post-2011 was at 0%. So if you were one of the more senior members, you still probably have a COLA that's above 1.5%. The legislative efforts in the special session reinstated a COLA to take effect after 60 months for special risk classification at 1.5%. Again, they would have to wait the five years in order to collect it. So a person on your side or our side in special risk classification is now going to be entitled to a 1% annual increase on that retirement fund after 60 months. And the fiscal impact of the sheriff's office alone, I suspect, is in the neighborhood of $2 million. I can ask Lisa or Mary to speak more specifically on that. But I did want to lay that out. The county manager and I had a telephone conversation as soon as the legislature made this decision. And this also is hot off the press. This is two weeks or three weeks old now. So I wanted to kind of just speak to that and make sure that that was on your radar in the interest of transparency. So with that, unless Lisa or Mary has something that we want to add.

Not unless there's any questions. So before we turn it over to questions, I'll just say thank you for your partnership, for everything that you do for the community, for the good work of all of the men and women that serve in your organization. I'll also point out, because you did it you did it more subtly, and that is that the jail is typically a county responsibility. And in our county, the sheriff has graciously because of the skills in the sheriff's office taken over the management of the jail. And so when we look at our percentages, they are slightly different or maybe largely different than other surrounding counties. So I do want to put that on the record. We appreciate your submission of a budget request that is under the amount of the increase this year. We were all delighted to hear that. We've had a rough few years. all for good reason, and we appreciate the work. We also appreciate your role in Tallahassee this year, and we are hopeful that you can bring some reasonable and responsible interactions. So with that, I'll ask my commissioners, do we have any specific questions with regard to the sheriff's budget?

Commissioner Lockhart. So near and dear to my heart is our school resource deputy program. When I was chairman of the county commission, it was something that Sheriff Esslinger and I worked on together to make sure that long before Parkland occurred, we had a qualified, certified law enforcement agent in every single one of our Seminole County public schools. Can you give us an update on that funding and where that stands today? And for the record, for those who don't know, we share the county commission through the sheriff's budget shares in that fiscal responsibility with the school board currently.

Yeah, first and foremost, thank you for your leadership very early on. It was before many of the major disasters occurred across the country, and it was leaders like you and Sheriff Esslinger and so many others, our Board of County Commission at the time as well, that really forecasted the benefit of engaging with policing professionals with our youth. And I think that when we talk about policing on campuses, I think what rises immediately to our mind, and probably justifiably so, is protection and safety. But I think what we recognize is police officers do a lot more than that. They're able to connect the dots, whether they're a deputy sheriff or a municipal police officer, with something that may be happening at home. Abuse, neglect, or abandonment occurs. nearly 4,000 times in Seminole County alone. It's a horrific statistic, but it's the reality. And most of those cases are actually initially discovered on the school campus. And those officers and deputies can connect the dots. They also are doing educational training and components and all of these different things that we know are so relevant today. Once upon a time, we believed Nancy Reagan said, just say no to drugs and it would work. But we know now that sexting, texting, cyberbullying, all of these things are incredibly important. And our deputies and police officers have those curriculum to an age-appropriate environment. I think that just yesterday we had some conversations with our folks that are working in the school space. I believe that the state legislature has properly funded the schools, that there has not been any reduction in that. And I think that we will have ongoing conversations with the school board and the superintendent to ensure that there is no adjustment in the amount of school resource deputies that we have on the campuses. the leadership that we have with Chief Rick Francis overseeing school safety and security. That's something that we're incredibly grateful of. It is also rare. There's not another county that I'm aware of that has a member of the sheriff's office that is overseeing school safety and security even for the municipalities. And I think that we all share the same passion that you have for our kids and our youth.

Thank you. Please keep me updated.

Will.

Any other questions? Commissioner Zimbao.

Just a statement. I think it was covered by Oscar about the 1.5% COLA for the FRS when he said, we're not sure there's a lot of wisdom in Tallahassee. On one hand, they're sending down more mandates. On another hand, they want to take the money away that's supposed to pay for those mandates. As we all know, that doesn't work, but I want to thank the sheriff and your staff, your financial staff, all the men and women of law enforcement. You make our jobs so much easier in this community with your professionalism, your passion for what you do, and the compassion of the citizens out there and all the work you do with the faith-based leaders in this community, your neighborhood policing, it makes a difference, a huge difference on how we all interact as citizens in this community. And it starts with the men and women of law enforcement because it's you all that are on the streets each and every day interacting with our citizens. So thank you very much, and we appreciate this budget this year. Thank you.

I'll close it out with a shout out to Chief Spriggs and Director Hope for doing all of the work that got us to under 30 minutes today. And I'm your five. So thank you, all three of you, for everything you've done.

I thank you all. I mean, they're the best in the business. It's very rare to have CPAs that are going through the books and digging in and doing that. And I'm grateful for them. I'm also – I meant every word that I said. You are true leaders in our community. It is an honor to stand with you and work on behalf of the citizens that we serve each and every day. And look, that does not happen in every one of the counties. You just have to turn on the television and watch what's happening out there. And I know you all professionally and personally, and I know how deeply you care about this community. And for that, I am incredibly grateful. So thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. Next on the list is our tax collector, J.R. Kroll.

Good morning everyone.

Good morning.

Well, as you all know, there's a lot obviously going on in Tallahassee. Our office is, I'm hoping, not going to be as affected by it with what we currently take in with our excess fees every year. We should still be able to pay our bills, keep our employees, and keep the level of service that we wanted to for Seminole County. That's still a big unknown for us still. But we know this year we're coming up with what we've already got in the works. And I'll go over that a little bit here. But once you go through the introduction of how my office is a little different than the remainder of the constitutional offices. So in Florida, the tax collector budget is determined through a multi-step process, and we in Seminole County are a fee office model. Not every tax collector office in the county and the state is that way. There's a lot of fiscal restrained counties that don't have the funds. Like we said, we're a donor county. We end up giving money to help those counties out too. But we do make money in Seminole County due to the revenue that we make from the DMV side plus the commissions on the collection of taxes. said our operations are funded by fees and commissions earned by services rendered and those fees are outlined in the statutes and established by the florida legislature and we're required by florida statute to submit our annual budget to the department of revenue the same as the property appraiser the budget is due on august 1st of every year and that's when we also provide our final copy to the board of county commissioners so we are a little obviously every year i'm the odd duck out that's a little premature on my budget every year because we're not ready yet, we still have quite a bit of another quarter left until we finish our budget. The Department of Revenue will review the budget to ensure it's adequate Let me get through a couple of these. I'm actually messing up here. To ensure it's adequate for the tax collector's operations and the department finds my budget inadequate or excessive, they'll return it to me and tell me what needs to be corrected. I haven't had that happen yet, thank God. And then once it's approved by the department, the budget can't be reduced or increased without their approval. And then any fees that we do collect, which is where we're going to come to the next couple years, like David said, it shouldn't be affected this year, but we're looking for the following year, would be for excess fees in the budget. That's excess revenue, and that's what my office has to zero out every year. I'm preaching to the choir here. I know you guys know this, but I want to make sure everyone else understands that we do zero out every year and return any excess fees that we did not spend within our budget. We return those back to the county. Now, here's what's going to get a little difficult because of the new ruling. So we had purchased a piece of land that we were looking to because of the new county services building that we'd be moving to. It's not really conducive for having a DMV office there. Between the security access and the parking and how many people I have running through my offices, it just would be a... logistic nightmare to try to make that happen at the county service area. Plus, I figured I can build a cheaper DMV office still in Sanford for a lot less per square foot. We were talking like the 250 per square foot type of building to put in there. So that would be significantly less expense for us and still keep our regular administrative services, tax collection, everything would still be at the county services building. Just the DMV part that's now here in Sanford, we would have to find a new location for. So we did make a purchase of this property here in Sanford off MLK Boulevard and 46, kind of by the wing dench in that area, but it's on the MLK Boulevard. And that's where we intend to build a new office that we'd be using for a DMV office there. That one, I don't have that one. So I'm going to have to wing it. I don't have that one written down. Yes, we plan on doing a 12,000 square foot building on that corner. It's going to be a replacement for the Sanford DMV office. But like I said, the other services we would be bringing back to the county service building. It says here we approximate cost. We're estimating it at $4 million. So I am still trying to fund this myself, which I should be able to because next year we typically have $2 million to $3 million at least a year in excess fees. So I have to put that budgetary and see what I can actually budget through the DOR in order to be able to fund this myself and get this building built in a race that I'm having to try to beat you guys from building the building in five points. because i don't know where i'll house my dmv if we have to have a shutdown in between there um you know a typical budget is under you know under budget about two million every year so being with that plus the excess fees that we do create from doing the dmv work that usually gives us uh you know a few three usually a typical around three million is what we're what we're averaging is what we what we return so i'm planning this year I'm a little lighter than that because I am starting and already started on this building, trying to prep the land. I'm trying to get out this money, especially because I'm on a time crunch, to try to see what I can get out of this year in order to start the process of building this building. Part of that's going to be the plans, the site work and stuff like that. If I can get that done as soon as possible for this year, maybe I can squeeze out a little bit more between the next two years to get this project completely finished. But that's pretty much what I had for, you know, right now, my, my budget going forward. Like I said, we don't have that finished yet, but we, you know, that's not due to August 1st, but we do plan on just thinking what's going to be coming ahead and what we're looking at for this year to try to, to try to finish this project, which became a lot more stressful after, after this whole proposal went through the house. And was there any other questions or.

So I do have a question. What has been the return to the county over the last few years for either of you, Tim or JR?

Repeat that again, I'm sorry?

Your excess fees.

Oh, the excess fees. Well, I mean, typically we're at $3 million is what we're averaging. You know, it's been a little higher on some and a little less on others. It depends on usually it's our staffing of how much we go through that. Seventy percent of our budget is staffing just because we have to, you know, maintain that for the DMV side is really where all that work comes in. And that's the unfortunate part with the state. I mean, we take such a small piece of the fees that come in. An example would be a registration renewal, $75. The state takes the majority of it, and we get $4.50 to do all the work. So that becomes where we're subsidizing our DMV with our tax dollars is typically how it works every year. And that's why we tried all the tax collectors in Florida now after COVID started having, when they realized they could say, well, that works a lot better, is to not take out-of-county residents. You only take your in-county because it is being subsidized by the county residents with their taxes.

And so what's the anticipated return? Do we have that in here somewhere?

No, I don't have any anticipated return this year. Like I said, I mean, I don't have, I got to get some numbers still that I'm working on with, you know, to find out expenses of what this building and what I could get finished this year. So that's why I didn't have any numbers yet. It's coming soon. I have a meeting with them with another builder on just trying to get quotes and trying to get the best pricing. It's so hard with getting from a piece of dirt and say, how much is that going to cost to go from start to finish, you know?

Is it fair to say it's going to be close to zero?

I would say not, never zero. Are you trying not to say that? It's never been zero. Yeah, yeah. I would never do zero.

I hear Commissioner Lockhart saying, I think it's going to be zero. But I think what we need you to say out loud is that it's zero. So that we're not delivering that message.

I just, you know, like I said, it might be a couple hundred thousands as a return as opposed to being three million, you know, because I'm trying to see what I can get done this year.

All right. Thank you. Commissioners, any other questions? Commissioner Zimbauer?

Thank you. Some of the state stuff can now be done online, correct? Yes. How is that impacting your workload on some of the services that can now be done online versus having to come into your office?

Well, I mean, none of the driver's license services besides a renewal can be done online because just for security, you've got to make sure you're dealing with who's getting what coming to them. And then surprisingly, a lot of people still like to just come to the office. I mean, we do everything to try to make it as convenient as possible. We even changed it where we have, you know, if you just do an EFS – not the EFS – the e-check, that if you do an e-check on your taxes, you don't have to come in. You can pay online and there's no fee for an e-check. So even then, they still want to come in and write me a check.

So I have to tell you, a lot of the folks in my district have been a little perplexed about the closing of the OVITO program. office and moving to winter springs and of course since my district is in both my winter springs constituents are very happy now it's closer to them any plans for a veto moving forward just for the public knowledge yeah yeah for the record we do

We do have some plans there. We've been holding off on it a little bit because we were waiting on the state to approve. So what we did instead, Ovino was always a problem for us because it was only four people could be in that office. We couldn't do any driver's license services. So we were trying to make a decision. Do we expand that one or do we close that one? That was our two choices. Being that when the Winter Springs office was open before I got there, I think the intention was to close Oviedo and have a bigger Winter Springs office that can do all services. But then they didn't close them, so they both stayed open within six miles of each other. So now in light of deciding what we had to do, I said, well, I don't have the funds to open two offices. The Sanford office is more important to get open because we're going to have to shut this one down and there's a larger office. So that's why we had to pivot and say, well, let's try to get this. In the future, if we ever opened another Oviedo office, that's always a possibility, but we'll see what happens growth-wise. Currently, we have a private tag agency we engaged with that will be opening in that location. Okay. So it is an additional fee if you wanted to use that location for all your driver services. They don't do driver's license once again, but it was the same as it was. So they can do your tag renewals and license plates and everything that you could do there prior. It can still be done. Plus, we had them open a virtual kiosk in the Oviedo City Hall that they have there. And that one's come up there like a Zoom meeting. Press the button, they answer, and they can do all your services and have it mailed to you. So that takes people, you know, gets them out of there. Once again, added additional service because this is a private tag agency. And then we also have another kiosk we just opened in the Alafea Woods Publix. We had always intended to open it there, but it was under construction, so they wouldn't do it while it was under construction. So now that it's completed, we said, hey, we've got a lot of options in Oviedo that we've just expanded. So actually, even though we're closing the office, it's only for a short period. We're trying to get it open by the end of this month to have that reopen again.

And although we don't know, and since we're already talking about something that has not happened yet, which is this ballot initiative that's coming in November, Since you're going to have, if approved, since you'll have a lot less money to collect, how's that going to impact your workload, if at all?

Well, then I would say we might be looking at zero for returning of any excess fees at the end of the year, and I might have to make cuts, too. I mean, that would be, we just don't know. Our objective as the Tax Collector Association is what we would like to do is get our fair share of the fees for the DMV because of that unfair amount that they take and we do all the work from. So this gives us kind of – we've tried for years to try to get a push on that, and they just keep telling us no, no, no. So now being that if we're short on it, our options are going to be, well, then let the state take it back and see if they want to handle it, which I don't think they will. So they might give us a little more bite on that apple to be able to –

seems to be a familiar narrative as as we're the ones that have to run the county we have other people telling us how to do it exactly um great thank you very much thank you so i'm i am likely misapplying and appropriating my memory on something so bear with me for a minute while i ask the county attorney a question where are we with constitutional officers and purchasing buildings and are they deeded? We have some history with this. Again, not reflecting on you, but it's PTSD.

No, you're right. But the statutes were amended not that long ago to authorize tax collectors to own their own property. Okay. The only constitutional officer that can own their own property is a tax collector.

Okay. And so... It's easy to armchair quarterback someone else's decision. It's done to me all the time. So I feel bad that I'm doing to you what has been done to me and I don't like it. Was the idea of buying a piece of property and building your own building, was there something else not available for you to repurpose? It seems like you've taken on what a lot of people try not to do because it is so cumbersome. And is it too late to pivot? Have you thought about that?

Yeah, we've looked at other properties. I mean, there's nothing that we could find size-wise with the amount of parking. I mean, everyone knows the Lake Mary parking situation is atrocious. You know, we're hoping to alleviate that with an office that has a lot more parking. And the land itself, which is the most difficult part to find, something that large that we did purchase, it would be for... I, what we want to do in the future here is have another driving course on this side of Seminole County. Since the only, the only driving course we have is in Castleberry. So our plan, we first build the building, get it open to make sure we, you know, we're not, we're not without the services there or just blasting my other offices. If we, if we close down Sanford, it would be a nightmare. Um, And then we'd have to wait until the new one is completed. But we want to eventually then in the future years be able to say we can build a driving course out there. For now, it would be just left grassland, but we would want to make that into a future that we would be able to have that. That was the whole point behind that.

And is that property in the city of Sanford or is it in Seminole County?

Yep, in the city of Sanford.

Bless you, my friend.

So I've heard. I got Altamont done. Altamont was not easy either.

So I guess a follow-up question to that is then, Justin, for the record category, the ongoing maintenance of that building is not our responsibility, nor insurance.

Insurance? Tim, do you know about that question?

I'm not sure.

Let's check into that one.

Yes, Commissioner.

To be clear... It does impact the bottom line, what's returned to the taxpayers.

Oh, it absolutely does.

That's where the impact is to us.

We understand that. I think the question is separation of tax collector and county. Sure. My church and state analogy is that if you're building your own, we're out.

Right.

We're not calling our teams, et cetera, and –

Yeah, I've had one of my colleagues in Columbia County. He just built one. He had his fiscally constrained county. He had to go through an absolute nightmare with them to get bonds and everything with his county to pay it back. And now, of course, he just got this all done. And now he's definitely not going to have any money. He returns, I think, $1,500 is what he returns at the end of the year. So he's really not going to have the funds there just by a slight difference change for him.

Well, I appreciate the level set on it could be worse.

Yeah, true.

With that, I think seeing no further questions, thank you, J.R., for your presentation. I appreciate you and the work your team does.

Thank you very much.

And I see our supervisor of elections is anticipating the next call up to the podium, so she is on her way up.

Thank you.

She and her team.

If we still had phone books, we'd give you one.

Right.

Sorry, that's maybe not as professional, but thank you. I will be quick. I want to introduce Jason Tiemann, Assistant Supervisor of Elections, and Rebecca Tu, who is my Administrative Services Manager. You've all met, but when it's all on the record, I'm very grateful to them for helping us get to this point. Thank you, Tim, and your team. Thank you, Darren, and your team, and everyone for meeting with us to move through the questions. Before we get into the presentation, I do want to brag a lot on my team and what we have accomplished over this last year. A lot of people say, oh, you're just an elections office. You only work every two years when you have an election. And that cannot be further from the truth. So here are some fun stats, because you know I like stats. This past year, we processed 62,000 constitutional amendment petitions through our office. That's a requirement we'll reset, and we look at every single signature on every piece of document to verify if it is a valid petition or not. And if a constitutional amendment, we'll make it to the ballot. Fun fact, zero made it to the ballot this year. We processed 33,594 vote-by-mail requests. We processed 763,164 changes to voter records. That is address changes, party changes, name changes, deceased records, address, that is anything that you could have changed on your voter records, we process that. It is not a bot system that handles that. It is a person handling every single one of those. We went through two system conversions. We migrated from Google to Microsoft and we, of course, as you know, brought accounting in-house and within warp speed implemented a new accounting system. We have a new website that we feel is extremely user-friendly, provides a lot more information. If you go out there, you can now see some historical reports on voter registrations, and turnout for elections. We have done 27 office tours over this past year. And for the first time in Jason's memory, we had 100% of our high schools participate in voter registration events. We had a couple of schools in the past that had never participated in this manner. We changed it up a bit as well and have shared with you that we do a mock election in these voter registration events. And we put a constitutional amendment question on every single ballot. And it is quite fun. The constitutional amendment, as you all have discussed today, are very confusing. And for the record, for those of you who don't know, authors are generally the people who want that constitutional amendment passed, whether it be the sponsor of the marijuana initiative or the legislation. So we put a constitutional amendment on these ballots that is very confusing, that is just the norm, where we let the students vote on if you vote yes, you're voting for more homework. If you vote no, you're voting for no more homework. And of about the 80 groups that have gone through, we have gotten seven groups that have gotten it right. It has turned into a really great civics lesson. In those seven groups, one student figured it out and started advocating to the students next to them and in front of them, and it spread like wildfire. And it was a great civics lesson on being an informed voter and advocating for what's on the ballot. So a lot of fun there. Another win, as you may have seen in the news, we partnered with Lake Mary High School to do a 3D printing job that replaced a piece in a printer tray for us. Not a big deal, you think, but the vendor said, we can't give you the part. We have to sell you the whole tray at $125 per tray. Then we'd turn around and throw the old tray into the landfill. Rather than replacing a two-inch piece of plastic, it saved our office $16,000 from replacing. It gave a student some hands-on experience. It gave a teacher some hands-on experience. And it was a really great partnership, and we look forward to doing a lot more of that. We did our first I voted sticker contest. You will see your I voted stickers that you get this year when you come in to vote. Miss Arwen Yon from Tuscawilla Middle School did a fabulous design and we had a wonderful time presenting it to her. We have done some really great operational efficiency changes in our office through reorganization and some equipment upgrades. And you'll see that experience when we go through the elections this year. And for the first time ever, our entire team 100% of our office is election center trained. We send them through training that's a national program. It is free, and we have them do that within their first two weeks of coming into the office. We had all of our existing employees do it, and it has been a really great experience to have our staff get this additional training. Some important dates, as we have all talked about it, there are 10 Tuesdays before Election Day. 10 Tuesdays. July 20th is the deadline to register to vote or change your party. August 6th is your deadline to register for vote by mail. For the record, I said we have 33,594 vote by mail registrations. On average, we have about 60,000 people that register to vote by mail. It has been a concerted effort of ours to get the word out to make sure people know that their vote-by-mails have expired. So we anticipate some heavy load in the next couple of months to get them re-registered. August 8th through 15th is early voting, and August 18th is election day. Currently, this is a qualifying week, so all the candidates throughout the state are being qualified. By the end of this week, you will know who's gonna be on your ballot, and so stay tuned. We are in the starting process of hiring an estimated 750 election workers because it takes about that many to help us run an election. And one of the things our office did not get impacted by was a special session, thank goodness, because it would affect the voters. Congressional redistricting happened throughout the state. New maps were designed. Congressional district number seven did not change. What that meant for Seminole County is we didn't have to come ask you for $350,000 to do a mailing to notify everybody that they're voting, that their congressional district changed either by number or by lines. And so that was a really good thing for us. So presentation-wise for the budget, I will... Start off with, as I mentioned, we've done a lot of list maintenance this past year. When I came into office, we had 350,490 voters. We are at 337,157. You can see some of the changes here. You can see the history. This is kind of average over the last couple years. You see us go up and down based on moves in, moves out. There's a big concerted effort right now with the state to make sure that citizenship is... The state of Florida passed the Florida version of the SAVE Act, and so the state of Florida, along with us, are having to do extended list maintenance to make sure that our voter rolls are 100% clean so that we have no problems at the polls. So you can kind of just see the activity that we've gone through over this past year. We're still working on a bit more. We have identified in our voter registration system, we have about 4,500 voters that have no identifiers, the required identifiers of your last four digits of your social or your driver's license. And we are getting ready to do a mail-out first. So if you see any negative mail, any social media, send it our way. We're happy to address it. It's just something that we have to do to prevent any issues at the polls. As I mentioned, we went into the high schools. That netted 968 new voter registrations in Seminole County, which is pretty awesome. All right. The legislation session, there's three pieces of legislation that have impacted our office. Yes, please. Thank you. That you need to be aware of. And, of course, there are no funding allocations that come with any of these. House Bill 1205 was passed in the 25 legislative session. How it impacts us is this is a citizen or a sponsor petition drive to get something on the ballot to change the Constitution. In this past year, there were 21 initiatives out there where groups were trying to get the Constitution changed. Again, I said none of them passed, but the legislation has decided to make it a little bit meatier, stronger, and a little bit harder for these amendments to make it to the ballot. Petitions changed from one page to five pages. We have to touch every single one of those pages. We have to process every single one of those pages. We also have a requirement now. Any petition that is accepted in our office related to these constitutional amendments we have to mail a notice to that voter so that they have an opportunity to say, yes, that is true, or no, that's not true, it's fraud, and they have to send a notice paid for by us, not by the state, to the state to let them know that their petition was submitted fraudulently, unfunded mandate. Again, so in 2025-26, we processed 62,000 petition initiatives. The fail rate was about 54%. So we sent 30,000 pieces of mail out to voters to let them know we accepted their petition and they had the opportunity then to turn around and mail the state if they agreed or didn't agree that they signed that petition. This is all part of House Bill 1205. Again, a cost that we have to pay. We have to absorb the mailing, the printing, and the postage. The nice part, I guess if you wanna say that, of this bill is it allowed us to change the charge that we charge for signature verification for petition initiatives only. So we did a cost calculation and our cost to do one of these petitions, validate one of these petitions from beginning to end rose from 94% to $4.99. So if a petitioner wants to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot, they must pay our office $4.99 to validate each signature petition that comes in. Wow. In 2026... It's going to be quite amazing. Again, no funding available for that. House Bill 991, which is the Florida version of the SAVE Act, passed this year. Lots of changes that actually affects the tax collector's office and our office. We now are the stopgap for citizenship programs. verification. If a citizen cannot be verified through DHSMV, they have to come to the supervisor of elections office if they want to vote and we have to be the ones to determine if they are a valid citizen or not. What that means for us, is people who don't have driver's licenses, maybe people who surrender their driver's licenses at retirement facilities or shut-ins, homeless, and want to vote, they will be coming to our office to prove citizenship. This is going to require additional training for us. We've also allocated just a little bit more in litigation because we've already seen three litigation cases related to this. And I could see litigation coming to us if we have issues with a citizenship from the voter. The Department of State right now estimates that about 5% of the voters statewide are going to have issues. If citizenship is not identified, if they are not marked identified as a citizen in our system and they come to vote, those voters have to vote provisional ballots, and we have to work them through the canvassing board process. For us, that means if we go by state, that's about 16,000 voters that we would have provisional ballots for, and Commissioner Zimbauer, I know you... Can you imagine processing 16,000 ballots, Commissioner Lockhart, through a canvassing board? I did have a conversation with J.R. Kroll. We both don't think that in Seminole County that number is going to be that high. We're estimating half a percent. Over the past year, we've removed 15 people from our rolls for citizenship issues, so don't anticipate it being an issue, but... It is something that we have to work on. Additionally, part of that bill removes identification that is allowed to be presented at time of voting starting next year. Not this year. This year is status quo. But starting next year, you will not be able to use your student ID, your HOA ID, your community ID, or your debit or credit card. And so every piece of document that we have in our office that lists ID as acceptable use has to be updated and therefore another expense in our office. The last piece of legislation that passed that is going to have a little bit of an effect on us is House Bill 967, which requires all government agencies to accept online payment options, online payment options only. We don't have to do it in-house. We don't have to have a credit card system at the desk. And it's only for statutorily – I'm going to say it the backwards way – You can only use it for things not already in statute requiring other payment methods. For candidate qualifying, you still have to write a check. You cannot do a debit card online. The nice thing about this is it does allow us to pass along the fees to anyone who decides to use that. However, it does not give us funding for the compliance component that you have to have when you do online payments. Just wanted to make you aware that there's some two sides to these that are good and bad that are going to hit our office. So our budget for this next year, we are requesting a budget of $5.75 million. It is an 8.59% increase. However, I want to give you some clarification on that. 60% of that increase is related to the election that is in this budget. So 40% is related to the operations, the staffing, the paper increases, you know, the benefit increases, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We are, my office, is .44% of the entire county's budget. So we are talking tiny, tiny money here for you guys. And we're 18% of the 3% of the constitutional amendment budget that is shown. What is different in your budget that you have never seen before is revenue. And I'm gonna come back to that in a little bit. In this 26-27 budget, we have a general election for the gubernatorial race that is here in November. We will have two weeks of early voting, and we have the actual election day. That is where the increased costs are, that 60% increased cost is related to this. I wanted to give you some turnout numbers so that you can understand and anticipate what you might see at the polls this year. Generally, in a primary turnout, you see, well, generally, last year, last election, in the primary turnout, there was 25.46, or 2022, I'm sorry. was 25.46% return and last year 17.66% return. I went back to 22 because I wanted to kind of see apples to apples gubernatorial turnout. In the general, which is where you're going to see everything on the ballot, we can anticipate about a 73% turnout. In our budget, what we did is we do have a net increase of 2.5 FTEs. This is two voter services clerk and a half of a warehouse tech where we have increased him from part-time to full-time. The volume that we have presented to you previously where I was bragging on my team, that was with six voter services clerks. With the increase in the legislation, we can't continue at the capacity or I'm going to have burnout. I'm going to have overtime that's going to take us into ridiculous rates. And so we've got to increase our staff to avoid big challenges in our office. I did put a 10% budget increase and a 3% COLA increase. Operationally, Rebecca wanted me to remind, because this is a very good point, in fourth quarter alone, the CPI increased by 3.61%. A lot of our operational stuff is ballot paper, it's printing, it's toner. People is a big part of it, but when it comes to elections, our expendables are pretty large, and so that's really where all of our money is going towards. Again, our increased costs are related to the legislation that was passed. We have increased in printing requirements. The postage, you may or may not be aware, but the USPS has increased their postage rates. Once again, they have also changed in recent years how they charge us back for return mail. And so we are getting hit at higher rates than we used to be where they used to just return it for free or at a bulk rate. We now get full charge for return mail that comes to us, which we're legislatively required to send it the way we send it so that we can do list maintenance based on how the post office sends it back to us. Because we thought we were gonna have to do congressional redistricting, we moved faster than we anticipated and brought the GIS mapping back into our office. That leads to rely on the county's system for probably the past four or six years. Previous to that, we had it in-house. We brought it back in-house so that we can have some better maps for our constituents and for our candidates when it comes to getting out there and doing your electioneering. And then we have seen some significant costs on the security prices that we have gotten from our vendors when it comes to tracking our equipment and the license fees for all of the equipment that we have to have to run our business. What you have not seen ever on your budget from the SOE office is revenue. And this office always has revenue that comes in. And so what you see in front of you is a different, it's challenging to compare from past because revenue has never been budgeted. And we have to expend it. So when we have candidates come in, every candidate, 95% of the candidates write a check, very few qualify by petition. That's revenue that comes into our office. It's also 100% expense because the state gets that money and the political parties get that money. We don't get to keep it, but we have an expense that we've recorded on your budget that previously didn't have a revenue on the budget. We also collect a grant for some security measures. We get a federal grant. That's very rarely been recorded on here. We also get the petition verification fees for signature verification. We also get public records requests. And we get a couple other little things here and there that have never been budgeted. And so you will see on your budget revenue because... a good accountant budgets revenue when you have expenses. And so here we are. And so most of that revenue is passed through. We did budget for the potential of two petition initiatives to come through our office, which is the biggest bulk of the number on there. If we don't have those come through, you're not going to have the expenses that come through. And so it's a wash. We do have a couple of federal grants pending that I want to make you aware of that could affect us in the future. We have submitted a budget to a federal grant to do 100% refresh on our tabulation equipment. These are the tabulation machines that go out to the elections, the polling locations. We are at 10 years of a life cycle of these election machines, these tabulation machines, and we need to start doing a refresh. The vendor has expressed that they are no longer going to replace the existing ones. They are going to have limited support for them, and so we are going to have to in the near future replace them so we have gone out and we've requested a grant for those and Then we are applying for a new grant a new Federal grant for the replacement of our secure ballot intake stations that have some additional security measures over the past several years and several elections, there's been an increased attack on ballot intake stations. Ours are physically monitored. There has to be a person stationed at 100% of the time. However, there are people that still try to stuff the ballots, or there are people that have put bombs in or set fire to ballot intake stations. And so we are looking at some that have some expanded security measures in them. And if we can get them through the grant, we will. If not, we'll stay status quo with what we have. We just won't upgrade or spend them. Couple of things that are gonna impact us over this next year, we did get notification from the vendor that our vote by mail ballot, vote by mail verifier machine will be null and void as of January. And so we have built that into our budget to replace our initial quotes that we're getting start at $200,000. And we need to start looking at replacing our vehicles which are showing some wear and tear and some challenges With some other just minor equipments that we need to do in our office You guys have we've had many many discussions. You've seen our building I just want to thank Darren and his team for continuing to look at what's best for the county and what's best for our office we are We are on an 18,000 square foot building with 7,000 of that as our warehouse, which is the challenge. It's a safety challenge. If we have an issue and have to get that equipment out fast or if we have any kind of a personnel issue, we could lose equipment. And so I appreciate your efforts in trying to help us look for something that can better accommodate all of the equipment that we have to have. and hopefully we'll get there in the next couple years, pending whatever's going on with legislation next year. And then the last slide, just wanted, you know, this is... we'll go back to supervisor of elections where he used to like to brag. I'm the lowest cost per voter in the state of Florida. Um, we were at our state association last week and it was the joke, honestly. Yeah, he used to brag about it and not sure that that's something to brag about, which it's great to be the lowest cost, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you get the greatest quality or the greatest return on, uh, information out to your voters. And so this just shows you the trend of where we are. We're still, when it comes to Central Florida, we're still at the bottom. And so we're still being as frugal as possible. We're still at the bottom. We're not anticipating trying to beat and be above our counterparts in the cost per voter, but You know, I think our office has kind of been underfunded for quite some time and we've really worked frugally and respectfully with your team to get us up to par and it's really kind of shown with the culture in the office. We've got some very happy staff. When the voters come in, We've gotten a lot of feedback. The 27 tours have been very well received. They couldn't believe once they got in the back, oh my gosh, this is what you're dealing with. With that, your question, I'm going to just anticipate it with the several past members, is what are your anticipation in giving back? My belief is I don't like to fluff my budget, so I'm going to try to build my budget as close to where I think I'm going to land, hoping that I don't have to come back for an ask, but also hoping that I'm not going to be sitting here giving you back hundreds or a million dollars every year. If I could just put that on record to please anticipate that you're going to get a pretty zero-based budget from me where we're just trying to make sure that my ask is really what my anticipated ask and spend is going to be.

Well, thank you for that. I will tell you that I think we all appreciate a zero-based budget. We appreciate when revenue that's coming in is actually put in the books. i've never thought i'd be saying that indeed from here but uh but that is is greatly appreciated and all of the transparency throughout the entire couple of years has been it's been significant so we we appreciate you we appreciate the team and all the work that you've done to get here uh commissioner delary's chomping at the bit over here well no i'm not chomping at the bit but i wanted to thank you manager

say thank you for your hard work. I mean, throughout the year, I know you've contacted all of us on a regular basis, and you've been keeping us very informed, and it's very refreshing. I mean, your professionalism, your team is truly amazing. You've done a phenomenal job, and you're doing everything right, and I'm glad that you are the supervisor of election. Thank you.

Well, thank you.

Any other comments?

Well, that was so great. All I have to say is ditto. There we go. Yeah. No, thank you. Appreciate everything Commissioner DeLaurie said. I second. Thank you.

Thank you for putting the revenue source in there. It's something I questioned in this budget the whole time. Not to mention observing when canvassing that citizens would put a dollar bill or 60 cents in the envelope with the ballot because there was no postage stamp on it. And my question was, what do you do with that money? And it was like crickets. But I will tell you that I've been to your office four times now since you started making your changes. And it's a totally different atmosphere. Very professional. It seems like everybody's happy to be there. Seems like there's some structure as to what's actually taking place. Good work. Bravo. I think our citizens are going to be well served and they're going to be very appreciative. So thank you very much.

Thank you. Well, thank you for being here. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you. You too. County Manager, anything else to say before we break for lunch?

No, ma'am. And so we will adjourn until 1.30.

All right. We are adjourned until 1.30. And Dr. Johnson, you owe this to me. We're going to start with you today because we always put you as the finish batter on this. And Darren and I spoke. I said, can we please move him to the front of the list this year?

I told you that earlier.

So welcome.

Thank you so much. I appreciate being moved up a little bit. Of course, I don't have a problem waiting, but it's nice to start first.

Well done.

Well, thank you for the opportunity to present to you all this afternoon. Today I'll briefly outline our annual operating budget projections and how the county's contribution continues to support public health here in Seminole County. So this is our projected revenue for our 25-26 fiscal year ending in a couple weeks on June 30. We're ending the year in a slightly better predicament than what was projected this time last year actually. That is primarily due to a, it's a private grant that was due to us the fiscal year prior to this that didn't come. And to be honest, we didn't really budget to receive it because of some changes that happened and we did receive it, which is always good. So we ended the year, like I said, or are ending the year in a slightly better predicament. This here is our projected revenue for our 26-27 budget year. There are a few line items that are going down, others that are going up, but we still project to be around the same in terms of revenue by the end of next fiscal year. And then this is just a graphic visualization of our 26-27 projected revenue broken down by category. The county's core contract contribution and the integrated health services contract account for 9% of our overall annual operating budget. This is a three-year budget trend. As you can see, we've kept expenses as flat as possible over the last few years. Also, even a couple years prior to that, we've tried to keep expenses the same. But to remain above that 5% cash balance threshold, which for us, we try to keep it between 5% and 10%, we are going to have to do some work to reduce expenses this coming year. So we are currently working on that diligently. Of course, this is acknowledging some of the changes happening at the federal and state level, and then possibly even the local level as well. Some of the things that we're already doing, we recently were delegated a private well program from the St. Johns River Water Management District. So that is a slight increase in revenue to the local county health department. But then there's some other things we're doing to reduce expenses. Our medical director is retiring in the early spring of 2027. And we're looking at a shared model with the Osceola Health Department. We may end up needing to hire a part-time, lower-level provider to fill in some of the gaps to the direct services she provides. But our medical director is really there to provide nursing protocols and clinical oversight, which would be able to be done over multiple CHDs. So we hope to save some money there and reduce expenses there. And then we are also really working diligently to combine positions wherever possible and identify staff that have expertise and skills that cross over multiple programs to reduce some FTEs possible this coming year. So this is, and I apologize for the error on this slide, the bottom, it should say 2526 budget request. This is our request for this current fiscal year. The Seminole County government's contribution to the Seminole County Health Department for the current fiscal year. So over the next few slides, I'll just kind of outline what we've been doing with your funding, how we've been making an impact with the funding here. For starters, communicable disease control, environmental public health, public health preparedness, and community health are the four core functions and statutory requirements that county health departments exist to perform in the state of Florida. So Seminole County, the cash and the in-kind contributions support the provision of these services significantly. Seminole County's in-kind support, such as the three of the four sites that we operate out of here, as well as the vehicle and facility maintenance, support all of our programmatic operations. We've listed a few here. Injury prevention for us primarily consists of programming that prevents childhood injuries. We've given away 190 swim lesson vouchers to families, focusing on families with children on the spectrum. We've given about 30 pack and plays away since July, focusing on families, of course, that don't have safe sleep environments. We've also done water safety lessons for 80 children and 430 parents and grandparents through our injury prevention program. I also participate, and we help lead the Child Abuse Death Review here in Seminole County. Our Women, Infants, and Children program, or the WIC program, has about 6,500 clients every month or approximately. appointments every month between the Sanford and the Castleberry locations. A few of those appointments are also virtual. On average, those clients redeem around $580,000 at certified WIC vendors here in Seminole County each month. Our vital statistics program is one of the few programs that we have that generates revenue. It brings in about $35,000 a month. It helps support the staff that administer that program as well as other direct services provided by the health department. And our fixed dental clinic, which is separate, of course, from the school-based program that you all support. We saw, since July, 1,770 patients in that clinic. That clinic is primarily supported through Medicaid reimbursements. However, that doesn't cover the full cost of it, so there are some non-local dollars that we're able to put towards that. And the only reason we do that, because we still see it as a critical need in our community. So that's mostly children and young adults ages 3 to 20 years old that go there. And we do, there are some circumstances where we will see adults. We hosted the veteran stand down at the health department. Our dentist did see some of the veterans that were there. So that was nice that we were able to do that. Also, as you know, the Environmental Public Health Program is responsible for permitting a number of different types of facilities across the county, tattoo, body art, public swimming pools, mobile home parks, tanning salons, school cafeterias, septic systems. That is something that I've stood before you all and I've mentioned the transition of the septic program from the Department of Environmental Protection to the Department of Health. But at the end of last year, we did get a message basically saying that that has been halted indefinitely, the transition. So there are counties in the panhandle, uh, as well as a couple on the Northwest, um, side of the state who have transitioned the program to DEP. And then there are other counties in central Florida like ours, uh, that have not, but we're in the process of doing so. Uh, so, uh, we are in the middle of making sure that we're able to still provide those services to, uh, residents, uh, Also, just being honest, to make matters a little more complicated here, one of our long-term employees who is known by all the septic contractors in Central Florida, I think she might be our longest employee at the health department. She actually passed away last month, and she was well-known, well-liked by our contractors, so it's a heavy hit to the community, I feel like. but also to programmatic operations. So we are getting assistance with our septic program from Charlotte County Health Department, actually. They're helping virtually write some of our permits while we train some of our new staff to be able to do that. And then I'm always very open with anyone that has issues to be able to contact me directly if it's to a specific permit. And I know I hear from you all sometimes around that. So we're continuing to work on that, continuing to move forward with environmental health. Our breast and cervical cancer prevention program provided 270 screenings, mammograms, and pap smears since October. Something great about that program, we're able to drop the age down from 50 to 40 since people are being diagnosed much earlier. So that's been helpful. And then our public health preparedness grants allow us to do a lot, not the least of which is to continue to partner with emergency management and sheltering during a hurricane, staffing special needs shelters. And actually yesterday, we were able to participate with emergency management and Laird Elementary, the full-scale exercise for special needs sheltering, which was great, given we have so many new staff. Of course, there's a lot of other programs not listed on this slide that through your in-kind support, you do support our childhood immunization clinic, our school health screening and education, HIV treatment and case management, family planning, several other programs. So Seminole County's government's direct services contribution or that core contract amount, it goes to supporting some of our most critical services. These are areas that are mandated for us to perform, but they would function quite differently if Seminole County government did not support these programs in the way that you all do. Those programs include epidemiology, rabies prevention, tuberculosis or TB control, STD prevention, and clinical services. Our epidemiology team conducted 3,300 investigations of reportable diseases over the past year, well, since July. Of those 3,300 or so, 1,300 of them were related to rabies, which accounts for about 40% of all of the reportable diseases here that we are working with. And Seminole County is... number three for rabies exposures actually right now. So that is something we're working diligently with animal services, with...

He just said it's his... Did you have something to do with it? Yeah, it's all my district. Oh, yeah. Great outdoors.

Yeah. And it's some nontraditional exposures as well, school, after school. So we're working with some nontraditional partners as well just to do some more education, emergency departments. And, I mean, it sounds scary. It is Florida. A lot of times people forget we have bats. It does. You know, maybe leave the raccoons alone, that kind of thing. But that is a heavy workload for our disease control staff. Thank you. Also, in terms of TB, so infectious TB, a lot of times people think TB was eradicated or something. It still exists. We actually had six infectious cases, which seems like, oh, six isn't a lot. It is a very heavy caseload. We have two nurse case managers, and they're responsible for overseeing their treatment over the course of nine months, which is difficult when these patients, Individuals may be transient, may have comorbidities, other difficulties. And then in addition to the infectious cases, we actually also have latent TB cases that we provide treatment for. There's about 35 of those. And then there's another 106 latent TB cases that fall under EDN. It's electronic disease notification. So they're still latent cases, but they're associated with immigration. So we report those that they've been treated for that. Moving on, STD prevention. Our staff investigated over 1,700 cases since July. One of our critical public health benchmarks for the STD prevention programming is within 14 days to get 90% of those individuals and their partners into treatment. And we are at 90%, so we're happy that we're keeping up with that. And again, this funding really helps us keep up with that because that's a critical indicator of being able to control the spread of infections like that. And then our clinical services that are mentioned here that are supported in part by this funding include physical exams, lab screenings for like high cholesterol, kidney and liver dysfunction, even prostate cancer screening. So over 2,500 services to about 920 clients since October were provided these services with the support of the county dollars. These special projects are supported by the health services grant, so the special grant from the county. These include the diabetes prevention education, dental sealant program, our integrated system of care, which is really like our mobile unit, and then nutrition education. Since October, we hosted 20 diabetes empowerment programs representing five full cohorts that averaged about 40 participants each cohort. We also did 26 one-on-one diabetes counseling sessions for clients needing individualized support or ones that were like unable to attend the actual program. In terms of the dental sealant program, we're able to see since October, 711 students at 15 schools. Altogether, we provided 3,100 services to them and that included sealants, dental screenings, fluoride treatments, and cleanings. Since we did get a slight increase in funding to put towards that, one of the things that we're able to do is provide these services over the summer. So we're excited to be able to start that and reach some of the kids that for one reason or another weren't able to get the parent consent in and things like that during the school year. So we hope to reach... More students this summer. And then something else that we did just to measure impact, we did look at our fifth graders who we saw in second grade. The second graders who received dental services from us, we saw those services were 95% effective at preventing dental caries or cavities. So we're happy to see the impact that that program is continuing to have because of your support. Let's see here. The county grant funding supported 30% of all of our mobile clinic services through that integrated system of care. This includes services such as similar to what we do in our fixed clinic, the labs, physical exams, and medical screenings. There are certain things we can't do on the mobile unit just because of the size in terms of procedures, but the grant supported 136 adult physical exams, 336 medical services, which are blood pressure, BMI, immunizations, 255 blood draws, and 25 mobile health service outreach events. Something also with that program we'd like to note is about 60% of the adults we do physicals on, we end up being able to link them to care, whether it's with us, Shepherd's Hope or True Health, which is also great because we don't just want to screen them or diagnose them, we want them to be linked to care be able to stay healthy or become healthy. So that's been helpful. Also with the blood pressure screenings, in some cases we found it to be life-saving, because only about 30% of the screenings that we do for Seminole County residents were within normal range. Over half of them were at hypertension stage one or higher. And 3% of them, which was about 31 residents, were in hypertensive crisis at the time of screening. So either our nurse that was there or a family member that was already there had to kind of get them into care immediately, which is great that we're able to do that. Also, well, with that said, we've transitioned the nutrition program, one, to focus a little bit more on adults, but then to also focus on heart health and chronic disease prevention. And we haven't totally pivoted away from children. Through our school health program, we've been able to hire a registered dietician. who actually does one-on-one counseling with some of the students, the children. So we're able to use this funding for nutrition education for adults. We've had 153 Seminole County residents receive individualized nutrition education and then 16 group nutrition classes that included 153 residents. And that we offer the On the Move to Better Heart Health program. Let's see, and then one other thing to note here, 90% of the class participants showed an increase in knowledge by the end of participating in that. So we're requesting to continue receiving that $807,970 contribution that supports our core public health services. And we're requesting $60,000 less than what we did last year for the integrated health services contract. We just identified some internal efficiencies that would allow us to reduce the requests but still not reduce the number of services provided. That's a part of us. Combining positions and looking to see how we can just continue to do efficiently But with that that's all I had for in terms of my presentation. Thank you Thank you.

Thank you for a great presentation I do want to turn back to I think it was page 82 in the document and just get on the record what year that was I think that's 2627 and Do you all agree?

No, this is fiscal year 26. And then if you go ahead, the next budget is fiscal year 27. This is fiscal year 27. I'm sorry. This is fiscal year 27. I apologize. Thank you.

Okay. All right. As long as we're good for the record, I just want to say a couple things. Number one, I just love the outcome-based measurements that you're doing. that report back the results, the kids in second grade versus fifth grade and the success rate with that. It really does make us feel like we're making an investment in the people in our community that need an investment. And so I do appreciate that you bring all of that to the table, do it in such a short amount of time, and that you requested less money than last year based on building efficiencies and delivering the same amount of services. So I'm looking at the team behind you and saying thank you to you, to the entire team, to you as well. And we are very sorry for the loss of a long-term employee for you.

Thank you.

Commissioners, anything further? Yes.

You mentioned that the health department is responsible for investigating, was it infant deaths? Or did I mishear you?

So no, the health department manages the child abuse death review. Death review.

Yes. The Child Abuse Death Review.

Yes.

Can you explain that, what that is?

Yes, so that is actually chaired at Kids House, and the employee there is actually the chair of it. It is a Department of Health program that's within every judicial circuit across the state. I'm not sure the history of it, but for some reason our judicial circuit is split, and Seminole County has its own CADR. Thankfully, we don't have to meet as frequently because we don't have the number of deaths that some of these other judicial circuits do. But what we do is we meet and we review all of the deaths that are potentially related to child abuse. We, as a group, decide or determine whether or not we think the death could be prevented. And then the partners that are around the table usually create programs that help address some of those things. And that's why I sort of mentioned some childhood injury and death prevention activities that the health department is working on.

So I heard that statement through the lens of my role on the medical examiner committee and wondered, so are you getting those cases to review from law enforcement, from the medical examiner? How are they presented to you?

So they come in through DOH and DCF, but they have already been through these cases. Usually the deaths have occurred months prior. So they have already been through the medical examiner. The nurse practitioner that was associated with the case is usually there and part of the review. If law enforcement was involved, which most of the time they are, they are usually there, part of the review as well. So it's a... Pretty diverse group of folks reviewing the case and those that were actually involved in this specific case Usually call in as well.

Okay, and I'm assuming that I Shouldn't assume anything are the state attorney and public defender or do they have a seat at the table? Okay. All right. I'd love to learn more about that sometime. Okay. Absolutely.

Thank you Yes, mr. Zendower

Dr. Johnson, thank you for your great work. You had big shoes to fill from the last individual that was in your post. Bravo. Good job to you and your staff in moving that forward. Question. On the fluoride treatments, as you know, fluoride has been taken out of the drinking water. Have you seen any kind of significant uptick in any necessary treatments compared to what it was before, if you're tracking such?

We're not really tracking that. And that would be hard to determine because we only have contact with the patients that come in through our fixed clinic or that we see in the school-based program. What possibly be... That could be something we look at in this coming year. Are the students our fifth or second? Well, probably our fifth graders who we did not see in second grade and what some of their outcomes are. What's the difference in their outcomes compared to students who we have seen? Or maybe even students who have seen other private providers. So that's something we could try to figure out.

Great. If you do, if you could forward that over to my office, I'd be very thankful for that. Yes, sir. Share with everyone, of course, or give it to Mr. Gray, and he'll make sure that we all get a copy of it. That'd be very helpful.

Can I piggyback on that, Commissioner Zandauer, for just a moment? Sure. So I was actually curious about the same thing. I was going to ask it, because there you go again, right? Here we go. But it's really important because one of the dynamics, and I know we talked about this a couple of years ago, is that For years, many of our water utilities in Seminole County never had fluoride in the water to begin with. So that really only impacted certain water utilities. So that is another complication of you teasing out that data, I know. But I think I would love seconding the if it's possible to track it, would love it.

Absolutely. And I'll do my best to cut back on the rabies increases. It's what I call where two worlds collide. The great outdoors and folks that have recently migrated to my district that maybe don't have a lot of history with interacting with wildlife. Raccoons and possums are not pets, and they quickly let you know they're not pets, and that's unfortunate. Yes, sir. And, of course, rabies treatment, as you probably well know, is a very painful treatment for human beings. So thank you very much. Very painful and very expensive. Yes. We appreciate you all's work. Thank you.

Hearing nothing else, I'll just let you know there's a little red fox running around on the Heathrow golf course that I'm pretty sure is. somehow impacted by something. It's not behaving normally, so I'll just report that for public service. We appreciate you. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Dr. Johnson. All right. State Attorney William Shiner. Beat the rabies discussion.

Good afternoon, everybody. Good afternoon. Good afternoon.

So I'm going to cover a couple of financial slides before we get to the question. The state attorney's proposed budget request is $763,000. This is paid out of the Article V fund. However, dedicated Article V revenues do not support the total cost of services, so a transfer from the general fund is required. The true state attorney's funding is 36% from Article V fees and 63% from a general fund transfer. There's no county positions in the budget. However, these funds support the cost of 1.5 state FTEs. The total proposed budget is increasing 3% from $741,000 to $763,000. That concludes the presentation.

Good afternoon, everybody. As I said, thank you for being here. I was here last year before you all, and I asked for a rather significant increase relative to what has been previously asked for. I'd like to provide an update on that. We have been what I call affectionately moving into the 21st century as an office with digital media and computer services and computer equipment and case tracking systems. We are fast moving forward to being one of the cutting-edge offices within the state of Florida, having one of the better case tracking systems and evidence tracking systems that will allow us to share our information efficiently and quickly and accurately, not only with our law enforcement partners, but with the people who engage in discovery, so the public defender's office and the private bar who practice criminal law here in Seminole County and Brevard County. For that, I thank you all for your efforts in helping us champion that project. And as promised, I'm not asking for anything more this year than COLA for my staff, the 1.5 staff members that we have. Thank you. Great. Good presentation. That was easy.

What are the 1.5 employees?

They work on digital media and digital evidence, and it's split between the circuit. So Brevard County carries half of them, and then you guys carry the other half. And so they are either digital media specialists, IT positions, or support. But the vast majority of them and the significant increase that we've seen has been our efforts to import. You saw this presentation probably two, three years ago from the Sheriff's Department, the axon and digital evidence and body camera growth. And so for every officer that has that, I need someone that can import that information. And so we've increased those positions as a result, both under Mr. Archer and myself.

Thank you.

Any questions? I have a thank you related to our ongoing work on the medical examiner facility. I cannot be more grateful for your support and your team's support in helping us to tease out. I've used that phrase now twice. Start a game. How many times will I use the phrase tease out today? Helping us really drill down into the areas that are most important for us and for your part in that piece of the medical examiner. Thank you for your continued support and your candor as we move forward with that project. We'll continue to need your input. And I'll say the same thing as when Mr. Trettis comes up, including all of our stakeholders in this process.

And I would echo that back to you. I appreciate a seat at that table and the open conversation and the collaboration that is present not only here in this room, but across this county as it relates to both public safety and moving things forward in the right direction. So I appreciate that.

Thank you very much. Have a wonderful day. You guys have a great day. We appreciate the work you do. Ms. Amber Patrick, Guardian Ad Litem Program.

Hello and welcome. Hi, thank you.

The guardian ad litem budget is $182,000. This is paid from our general fund. The department has two county positions with no requests for changes in the future budget. The total proposed budget is projected to grow from $165,000 to $182,000. This increase is fully attributable to salaries, benefits, and health insurance costs for existing employees. There is no change to the operating budget request.

Thank you. We continue our efforts in recruitment of the community so that we do not have to have any increase in our budget. We have been successful in that we have 76% of our children in the county dependency system who are being represented by a volunteer from our community. fully support, train, and supervise them in this process. We are proud to say that Seminole County's dependency system numbers of children in the system continue to decline, and we continue to support our community-based care in the diversion efforts that they have in the community. I just wanted to come and say thank you for your continued support of our agency.

Great. We appreciate you. I say this every year. We are adoptive parents. And for anyone who may be listening who has never considered being a guardian ad litem, I will share with you this. The only person that was consistent in my son's life from the beginning of foster till the end of foster was his guardian ad litem, the volunteer. Paid employees rotated. All of the rest rotated. And it was a game changer in terms of getting him to the right place. Thank you. You're welcome. Commissioner Zinbauer.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I would argue that it's probably per capita some of the best money we spend. This sets the future for those children, saves the taxpayers a great deal of money that otherwise would need to be spent should these children not find their way to a good place. So thank you very much for all the work you and your volunteers do. Appreciate that, sir. Thank you.

All right. Hearing nothing further, you're out of the barrel. Thank you very much. Keep doing the great work you're doing. Thank you, ma'am.

Take care, Amber.

All right. We are at the public defender portion of our program. We'll have Mr. Blaise Tredis.

Good afternoon, Chairman Herr and Sentinel County Board of County Commissioners.

The public defender's total budget request is $275,000. Funding is 36% from Article V fees and 63% from general fund transfer. There are no county positions in the public defender's budget. The proposed budget is increasing 2.8% from $267,000 to $275,000 over the current year.

Thank you. This slide is a slide that I presented. And what it shows is the funding from Seminole County for the last nine years. And the actual funding is the green color. And as you can see, there was a steep drop off in 2023, 2024, in which I was able to reduce my budget by a very large amount. The blue part of the graph shows what my budget would have been had it increased by the statutorily required amount of 1.5% per year. And that is in the Florida statutes, and there is a pretty hard enforcement mechanism within that statute. Fortunately, I've not come close to raising my budget by that much. And as you can see from the graph, my budget now is less than it was nine years ago. Um, so I'm, I enjoy working with Timothy Jack's budget director. I'd like to thank him for his great work that he does. And I also like to thank financial administrator, Wendy Villis. Uh, they do, they both do a wonderful job coordinating with my office and I appreciate the work that you do. Uh, that would conclude my presentation unless there are any questions.

So I do have a question. What do you attribute your, uh, miraculous budgeting to? I would attribute it to we've had a decrease in crime.

Actually, I think more so what it is is I shop around for vendors and do, I think, a very good job at that. And when some vendors think they can just increase, increase, increase, and you know what? You're free to look around and go to different vendors. And secondly, I think a major part of it is storage of data. I think you have to look at it like on a triage basis. I don't need data from 10 years ago. I need data now. stored on cases that are current and maybe a year or two closed. But I don't need years and years of data at expensive storage rates, so I've also focused on that. And I attribute it to those two things, Commissioner. Interesting.

Can you teach a class on that?

Yes, that's what I was going to ask you.

That might be helpful.

I've got a question.

Yes, Commissioner Zimbali.

With your old case files, going back 10 years, 8 years, whatever it is, have you deployed technology to preserve those? Yeah, they're preserved.

It's just less expensive than having instantaneous access. Got it. Okay. I wanted to make sure I understood the mechanism. Great. Good work. Thank you.

Thank you.

Well, thank you. Have a great day.

Have a good rest of your day as well. That brings us to Clerk of the Court and Comptroller Grant Malloy.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

It's good to be here this afternoon. Appreciate your time. Happy to present our budget. I think you'll be pleased with it. I'm handing out there the Citizens Financial Report. These are available for public distribution. They're also on our county website, the clerk website, simulaclirk.org. And we've been doing this each year. It gives you a snapshot of the financial pictures of Seminole County. It has information on the county in there as well. And I'm proud to say that this year, like past years, we've won the Excellence in Financial Reporting Award for that document, as well as, you know, we do that with the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. And this, I think it's the last six years, the county has also won the same award for the budget presentations. So we're one of the few counties. that could claim the triple crown of financial excellence and financial reporting awards. So I want to thank Tim Jackson, his crew, county crew, and my crew as well. I think it represents our county well. I do have in our audience, I have my IT director, Tony Landry here. There's some specific questions on that. I've got recording director. and General Counsel John Newton here, as well as the Inspector General and Ginny Spencer as well from the Comptroller Office and our Inspector General's Randy Nunley. So we're going to go through the presentation I have here. Before I get started, I know early in the budget cycle, there was a request to keep increases below 3%, I believe. And we worked very hard. And I'm pleased to say that we're coming in with a budget that's actually smaller than last year. And I noticed some of the other presenters were showing comparisons to other counties. And you had fancy maps and everything. I didn't have a chance to put all that together. But I do have a spreadsheet here, if you're able to zoom in a little bit. What's that?

Oh, zoom in.

Yeah, zoom in to that. And I'm proud to say that our comptroller office is the most efficient of any similar-sized county, with half the staff and often half the budget as other comptroller offices. We have a very professional staff doing a great job. I mentioned these awards. And we're providing a great value to the public. So I'm happy to say that we've come in today. And there's a presentation here.

OK.

I'll go over this. Our budget is a decrease of 3.4%. A large portion of that is the decrease of the record center lease. That is off our books. I was listening to some of the earlier conversations, and I'm totally in agreement that the clerk's office shouldn't be in control of property. I think the county has sufficient staff and expertise to manage that, and I've been working with Darren to figure out plans for the future of that building. You have an excellent property team with Chad Wilski. We've been very pleased with how they've been helpful in maintaining the building, helping us out. And proud to say, too, that over the course of the last few years, due to efficiencies, and reducing our footprint, we've turned over 3,000 square foot of that building to other constitutional offices and other entities. The sheriff has a presence in it there. Supervisor of elections does as well. And a very small portion of the soil and water board, we have their files in there as well. And there can be more space in the future. I heard there was a conversation earlier about more space for the supervisor of elections. After the remodel is done at the CJC, our plan is on January 4th to move our recording department over into the courthouse. There's a footprint for that that we're going to include into it. We will keep the records management team there at the building, but it will be another reduction in space that we could repurpose for other county purposes. So I'm happy to say we're happy to work with you on that. And on the other side, too, with the efficiencies on the court side that we've done, going paperless, getting rid of paper files, That has reduced our footprint by 24%. So when you add it up, it's about 17,000, I'm calculating, 687 square foot of a smaller footprint due to efficiencies in our office. So our budget goes down by 3.4% per year. This gives you a snapshot of where the percentages are. And it's important to note this mainly funds our constitutional responsibilities of clerk to the board. As you know, my team's here. every meeting, keeping track of the votes and the documentation. We also have the comptroller and the independent auditor, and there's a small portion of recording services in there too. This gives you a breakdown of where those expenses go. I think I need better glasses. Let me look at mine. which you see the corresponding 3.4% reduction. This is a breakdown on the FTEs. We have about the same FTE headcount of 37. Again, that is about half of comparable counties that have 70 to 100 different employees in their comptroller team. We're providing great services. And again, I'll cover some of these efficiencies. I mentioned the efficiencies that have occurred through paper records. Everything is fully electronic now, which has led to a lot of the reduction in space, which really came in handy during this remodel process. If those paper files had been full and we had the same system, it would have been a nightmare to move all that out. But we had to clear out every square foot from CJC. We have a temporary workspace over in the old jury room. And that, thank goodness, we were paperless. Ironically, some of those rolling file companies scrolling files there, were repurposed by the new District Court of Florida. So we were also able to recycle some of these. They were happy to get them. I was happy to get rid of them. But a lot of those were repurposed for the new District Court of Appeals that the state of Florida created a couple of years ago. A little bit about behind the scenes. We have most cases come in electronically, as you're aware. Our case maintenance system provides paperless workflows. We keep adding that to reduce the amount of employees needed to handle documentation. And this has worked very well with the judges. We put in place a judicial viewer where they can access all documents, FDLE and other sources of information right from their desktops, signed electronically from their home, from their workplace. It creates a good, efficient workflow. More services are available online. We've recently implemented a new eviction intuitive filing system where folks can file without even having to come into the courthouse, which also reduces the footprint. It's interesting, the more of this we get online, we talked about space needed. Nobody comes into our office anymore to look up files. They just go right online and look it up. So whereas courthouses used to have viewing rooms and you'd have maps pulled out and attorneys and real estate people sitting around, it just doesn't occur anymore. We're also working on our website to make it compliant to the new ADA laws that have recently come out. Always want to make it as easy to collect fines and fees as possible. I was looking at our statistics the other day since we've put our new financial system in, keeping track of what's owed. Last I checked, it was $123 million of outstanding court fines and fees. I don't think we're going to collect that, but we want to make it as easy as possible through our compliance department to collect that. So making that available to the public in person. We also can put in place, if we're talking to somebody, we can send you an email with a link to the invoice. I mentioned about our paperless court system. This is a real money saver as well. We now register in certain court case types people's email. Traffic court is a classic one. You can register your email. At the end of your case, we will electronically mail you the minutes of what the verdict was, and you'll get it delivered right to your phone or to your house. Attorneys love this as well. They get their documentation. I had one attorney tell me how wonderful Seminole County was because by the time he left the courthouse and got back to his office, he had all the documentation emailed to him. He didn't have to call and wait or try to hunt things down. We sent it to him. So in the new courthouse design, we've worked with the architects to include a kiosk on the outside of the courtroom for people to register their emails. We've done that also in the juvenile building, and it's been working very well. Working with law enforcement for paperless transfer of information. Electronic case initiation. At the jail, they create the case, which then flows through the work processes. In the future, that could also use some enhancements to incorporate the documentation images. Jury management is one of my favorite things. We've got the system going so well, we reduced the show-up time by 30 minutes. We were able to shrink it down to give people 30 minutes longer to sleep before they had to come to the courthouse. And I heard talking about the guardian ad litem here. One of the things we were doing... was collecting information from jurors if they'd like to donate their jury funds to Guardian Ad Litem and Safe House of Seminole. That's a law by state statute. And I think over the two or three years, we collected about $20,000 in contributions for those two charities. Not huge, but it adds up. We went to be efficient. And this is an example. Sometimes efficiency doesn't always work. But we went to an electronic payment card from a vendor that was to reduce our cost of postage. And what we found out is it was not a very user-friendly system, and literally nobody was donating to the two charities. So we switched back to checks for now, but one of the things we're going to do is we're working on this now with a local bank is to create a Zelle payment system with a web interface. where the first question asked is, do you want to donate your jury funds to the Guardian Ad Litem or Safe House of Seminole? So we really believe that we're going to generate a lot more donations from the public. We have, I mentioned the do-it-yourself evictions earlier, the public access to records. I kind of jumped ahead of myself there. But we're one of the few that created our own electronic certified document system. We have two other counties that have used it as well. And that creates a great service for people, and they're widely accepted now. To get electronic certified, they actually are more certified than the traditional certified document you get at the courthouse. The way it has a walk on the PDF plus a seal on every page. That is something we'd be able to do and save money because we don't use a vendor for that. It also allows state attorney and other offices to come directly into a queue to grab their documents and not have to walk into the courthouse and stand by our counters and request it, such as the old days. Traffic hearings, I've been working on that a lot. That's put a big strain on courthouses. We have our calendar was getting booked out several months in advance. We ran into some issues with judges with the speedy trial. So a couple of things we did is one is we created a no contest plea where people can file a no contest, which goes directly to the traffic hearing officer. And they'll make a determination without you having to visit the courthouse. So that was something we put in about a year and a half ago. It's helped reduce about 1,000 people a year coming into the courthouse. And we're also switching to a two-step process like Volusia in Orange County has, where you would come in first for an arraignment to plead no contest and then move on to a trial. This also helps reduce the cost to law enforcement, who generally don't like showing up sitting around all afternoon just to... testify in a traffic case. This kind of helps streamline the system, make more efficient use of law enforcement, court clerks, hearing officers. That is a new efficiency as well. Let's see here. Online foreclosures. We switched to online tax deed auctions and foreclosure sales. Online creates more transparency. It allows more people to bid on it, and it reduces the workload on our team because it's all automated. We also recently, in the last year, have been getting electronic documents Since the tax collector updated his system, it talks directly to ours and sends that tax deed information directly to us. In the past, we had to scan things, enter it manually. That's been a huge deficiency. Online recording, we've worked in the past with your building department where most of the commencements can be filed from the building department. We also just recently created a direct e-recording system where you can go right to our website and record simple one-page documents. That's really been catching on. And the easier you can make it on contractors to do business, I think the better it is for Seminole County. expanded on. We're one of the few counties that has a fully integrated online marriage license system, which has been very popular. I always like to tell a story. There was a couple from England that bought a marriage license right here in Seminole County, and they were going to go get married at Disney. So they bought the marriage license online, and then they flew into Sanford, or I guess Orlando, Sanford. I think it was Sanford. And they found out how much it cost to get married at Disney. So they came over to the courthouse to get married, and then they drove down to Disney for a vacation. We also had a local official in another county I won't name, but he called me up and says, hey, my daughter lives in Germany. She wants to get married, but she's coming on a Friday, leaving on a Monday. How is she getting a marriage license? And I told him, I said, well, she can buy it online, have it available, get married, and just record it with us. You don't have to go into the clerk's office. He was totally thrilled and did not buy it from his county. He bought it from Seminole, so I was happy with that. So anyhow, I try to make this office work like Chick-fil-A. What can we do to serve people and make it easier? So most of our recordings we do same day. Same with court documents. We have a very good team, one of the fastest in processing things. We're also looking at AI for auto-docuting and auto-redaction. That will help efficiencies in the future as well.

And let's see.

I think I'm about at the end. I jumped ahead here. But... In essence, always looking at how we can do things more efficiently. That's how we've been able to deliver these services at half the prices of other counties. It's all about security redundancy in our systems. We take it very seriously. We get over 3 million pages of documents a year. We have been working closely with the county staff, and I've gotten some documents from the chairman of the new electronic signature workflow for attestation. I think that's a really unique thing to do. And our new system where we're working with the county staff, we had several training sessions where folks involved with purchasing stopped by for training on this new paperless workflow. We've had it for a few years, but this is a new improvement to it where documents can be sent back and forth from county teams to the comptroller office for verification and payment. Everything is revolutionary change. Just a few years ago, I remember being in the comptroller office opening up the invoices from the power companies. You wouldn't believe how many invoice, like every traffic light has an invoice. And then you timestamp it, put it in a stack, and everything's paperless now. It automatically timestamps it. We can go, this new system will be able to go into documents and pull out invoice numbers and auto-populate systems. So those are the type of things we're doing. I think it's why our budget has come in flat, and we continue to do a good job. I could go on and on, but the Value Adjustment Board, we put a new software there as well where people can electronically submit the documentation. We've been doing online VAB hearings. I know Commissioner DeLaurie was highly involved with VAB, and so was Commissioner Lockhart. That worked out really well this year. Commission records, you can find those online. We have this new system. I appreciate working with the county on it. People can see how folks voted, what the backup was, go to the video connection of that. And again, we used to have folks come to us for commission records. They don't come now because, well, it's rare, but they go online to get these top documentations. I covered some of these things earlier about the new workflows in the comptroller office. We're always working for accuracy and efficiency. On our data, this goes way over my head, but as you go through the system, in the old days, J.D. Edwards was on a server in the civil courthouse without generator backup in a room on the first floor with a window. and a building that flooded. So today, it's totally . In fact, when we get a hurricane, we'd have to shut the thing down and cover everything up with plastic in case the roof would occasionally leak over there. Everything is great now. Working with the county, and we have a great IT team in the clerk's office. We have redundancies. We have a backup server here. Of course, we have the ones down at the courthouse. We have nine redundancies in secret locations. We can restore systems. It's backed up automatically throughout the day. We can literally go to the second to a previous screenshot of what had happened, just in the event that something was haywire.

Kind of covered it there.

So anyhow, that's a little snapshot of what we're doing. You're always invited to come by, take a look. It's a little messy right now with the remodeling going on. But come November, I sure hope you'll all come take a look at the whole new setup there, smaller footprint, and more services. That's my presentation. Take any questions?

Any questions for our clerk?

So when you mentioned donating the equipment to the newly created circuit, two different things flashed through my mind. One was a tuba. And the reason why, I'm going to explain. When I was on the school board, we had very, very detailed records of every piece of equipment that we had. And every year, we would do a report, go through, and everyone would have to audit everything that we owned. And by the end of the year, was it still on our property? Year after year, for some reason, somehow someone would lose a tuba. And I don't know how you lose a tuba, but they seemed to walk out of the school district. And it's a large item.

And they ask for a new one.

And they would ask for a new tuba every year. But truly. So I started, and then same thing at the college, and it comes to us in a stack. this thick of, these are all of the items that you have disposed of. So whether it's a desk or a whatever, a minute item. So do you have a report that shows all of the things that you've disposed of, your capital items?

We keep track of the inventory. When it comes to those items, that was the rolling filing cabinets, and that was coordinated by the county's architect and building team that coordinated that movement of the material.

But you had to declare where they would go in the report?

Well, on those, I think they were depreciated. The county just tore the rest of them out, threw them away, so...

But they're yours. Like you're responsible for the tracking of them.

I think they got recycled. No, they were abandoned there for several years. You're talking about the filing cabinets.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was... So you weren't responsible for those items?

Well, the county took over the building, and I'm not sure exactly what happened to those, but it's a hardhat area. Everything was taken out. Actually, there were some things we said, please leave it there, and they got taken out, like our IT room with those workstations were only eight years old, and the carpeting was new. And I clearly communicated to the county, There's no need to take care of that and rip it out, but it was taken out. Duly noted. What's that?

I said duly noted. So you have abdicated the responsibility of those items. I get it. I got it. I've asked for them to be saved. It's the county's fault.

When it comes to furniture. Mr. Zimbauer, did you have your hand up?

I didn't, but I do now. Just to weigh in on that. I just want to be clear, Grant. Was it you or... The county that facilitated those going to the new district court. It would have been the county. Okay. We had no use for them. Right.

All right. And by the way, if you'd like some more, there's more at the civil courthouse. There's a whole slew of them. You're welcome to. You can't have it both ways. I turn those over to the county. You're welcome to do whatever you want with the rolling filing cabinets that have not been used in several years.

And maybe I wouldn't. I wasn't following. You made the comment that. The attorneys are very pleased that by the time they get back to their office after being in the courtroom, they can receive documents and the documents will already be there. Tell me what those documents are.

Well, it depends. If they're an attorney of record, it would be the documents that relate to their case. So it could be anything that relates to their case, if you're an attorney of record. We have about 1,400 attorney of record accounts, and we follow the court rules on confidentiality. So if you're an attorney and you're not an attorney of record.

I know how the courtroom works. I'm good there. The more pointed question is, is it a full transcript of the proceedings that they just left?

It would be, for instance, the minutes. If there was an order, they would get copies of that. It's the things that happened in the courtroom that day. All the rest would be available in their case file. Maybe exhibits, those types of things?

I don't know if exhibits are in there. I would have to check on that. What about a verbatim transcript of the proceedings?

We don't do verbatim transcripts. Okay. That answers my question. That would be up to the individual parties to hire a court reporter.

Sure. I think the courts take care of that part of it. But anyway, I wanted to make sure what I was hearing. So in other words. I was a little confused if they were getting a verbatim transcript, which is the job of.

So it would be whatever action happened in the courtroom as far as an action. So the most typical use is a civil traffic citation. You come in. You say, hey, you know, I wasn't. speeding, and then they say you were, and you get your ticket for $166, and you have so many days to pay. So instead of waiting around us printing on the triplicate NCR paper, which is pretty expensive, we send you, if you registered, if you didn't, then we'll give you paper, but we'll send you the court minutes directly to your email account that you registered with. So now you have a documentation of what happened, what the fine was, or if it was not guilty, or whatever, dismissed, that sort of thing, you get it, you got it.

great during our meeting you had shared with me that some of your trust funds, the expectation are you intend to use those maybe in the next few years because you have some technology and software things that are going to be necessary. Is that correct? We use them all the time.

We're constantly tapping into them. They've been decreasing since I've been there from a historical point. But, yes, we have uses for them. And I would point out, and we've had this discussion before, every – Clerk of court in the state of Florida has balances in their trust fund. Nobody spends them to zero.

OK. And I appreciate, during our meeting, Jenny pointing out certain things that were online, your financials from your office. So I spent some time, and it would be helpful to me if you could show me or have Jenny, whoever from your office, reach out to my office and show me where in your finances it's posted online, those funds, and the balances of those funds, because I can't find it.

They're in the Annual Comprehensive Finance Report in the back pages there under the clerk of court reporting. Okay.

Great. Well, I sincerely appreciate your reduction in funding. the budget this year of your 3.4%, which is a stark change since 2019, just so we're clear, it was a 14.8% increase in 2019, 2020 was a 7.8% increase, 21 was a 20.8, 22 was a 12.6, 23 was a 10.1, 24 is a 10.4, 8.4 and 25 and 6.1 and 26. So with that history, How do you believe we've arrived at 3.4? And I understand what you said earlier. So is this an accumulation of all the increases funding technologies and efficiencies since 2019 to arrive at where we're at today?

Well, I think much like the supervisor of elections that spoke earlier, that there was a historical underfunding of the office. And when you look at the expertise we had in the office, the level of technology, it was very low. So there has been an investment in those type of things which have put us where we're at today. And in spite of The price tag on it today, as I demonstrated in comparison, it's a very good value to the people of Seminole County. So I think the other thing that's happened, which I've shared with you, is the previous clerk funded a lot of county responsibilities out of non-court revenue. That's not money we get from you. That's money we collect by the business practices of recording, which is $10 to record. same price as 20 years ago. So we were doged before anybody was doged, the clerk's offices, and our non-court revenue since 2006 has dropped from nearly $7 million to about $3.8 million. And you factor in inflation, it just becomes impossible for the clerk's office to carry the county's bills, so things like there were many things that were not charged to the county that she paid for through non-court revenue. But if you add up our three funding sources, it's remained flat for the most part, and I think it's grown 10% in 19 years. If you factor inflation, it's about a 40% cut. So I recognize this is higher than it was a few years ago, but it went down this year. I think we have a great team going. I don't see a need to have 75 employees like Lake County does. I think we'll continue to operate on the same footprint, which is smaller than it was square footage-wise.

And I appreciate it. So summarizing, correct me if I'm wrong, What you're indicating is there was a lack of funding for technology for an extended period of time. And from 2019 to almost today, there's been over a 50% increase in the budget, which has gotten you to the point where that technology is now funded, which has allowed you to come in at the negative 3.4. So are we at a technology level now where you believe the efficiencies are, and they've been funded now, since 2019, so that moving forward, notwithstanding any changes at the legislature or any mandates, that this is something we should be seeing?

I'm not sure if I understand your question. When it comes to technology, there's a lot of moving parts to it. When you take a look at the financial software, which you asked about that, and you talked about the core technology, which are two entirely separate animals, which is different than recording technology, which is different than jury management. So there's different technology costs going on there. I can assure you we do everything to do it efficiently, reasonably. I think I showed you a lot of these improvements we've done. We've done virtually no charge to the judges.

And I'm not saying that that's the case.

I can't really predict what's going to happen tomorrow. Sure. But right now, the J.D. Edwards software support is continued out for the future. We pay comparatively to other counties. We have a good bargain going on right now, but if that were to change down the road, it could definitely change.

Of course, and I think that's what I just indicated. But let me just try to summarize it in a smaller, more direct point. You had indicated just a few moments ago that the lack of funding – is what resulted in why these increases have occurred since 2019 until now. And now you are efficient. I mean, you've said, well, 20 times you're very efficient and much more efficient than these other counties. and you're half the manpower, FTEs, and so forth, and you're coming in at a negative 3.4 this year. So my question directly is, since 2019 until now, have you and do you believe, because now you're a negative 3.4 in your budget, that we have funded at this point the technology necessary for the efficiencies that you desire and need to perform on behalf of the citizens?

Well, I don't think I can answer that question because it's, like I mentioned, it's complex. There's a lot of different technology things going on. And the cost increases that you see there are often related to board decisions, such as custodian fees have gone up substantial. We've put in place new softwares like the PaymentWorks for payment validation. That was verification validation. I think that was about $87,000 a year, which protects... You know, the transfer tax funds, because we run any type of payment through this vendor that checks several data points to make sure it's not a fraudulent transaction before we send it out. There are a lot of having more CPAs and more accountants on board to do the job. Sure. Because the county is much more complex as well. And have we funded that? Your budget is bigger. There's a lot more going on.

Have we funded that through these other budgets?

Yes, and that's, I think, what you're seeing in some of these increases. It wasn't all technology.

It was other types of services and personnel. If we funded it, that's fine. That's great. That's what you asked for. That's what you received since 2019. This year you're coming in a negative increase, which is great. I don't think anybody here on this board has a problem with that. My question is, since you said it's gone many years being underfunded, the numbers don't show that since 2019. So I'm going to assume those increases were to get you caught up on not being properly funded, and now we've got a drop. So it's a real simple question. Notwithstanding, something at the state level or some additional workload this board puts on your office, Do you feel you're caught up on technology for efficiencies, for the most part, moving forward?

On the comptroller side, we're in a good place. That could change if there's a change to the financial software picture down the road. We've made a huge investment. I mentioned PaymentWorks. We have Auto Audit, DebtBook. OPEB is in the budget this year, which occurs annually. every two years, so there's some expenses in there that are really beyond our control unless you want to go back to a rudimentary level of service, which I don't think the county does. I think we get great response from everybody about the technology improvements we've done, working with companies like Canon is a new vendor that we've done with the transmission of documentation. Which I applaud. I think we're in a good spot now. I can't foresee the future, but I feel very comfortable with the budget we presented that week on the comptroller, commission records, and auditing services. We can continue to do a good job, and we'll continue to even improve. Great. Thank you very much.

All right, Commissioners, does that conclude the questions for Mr. Malloy? Thank you.

Thank you, Chairman.

All right, that brings us to our final hearing, and this is LINCS CEO Tiffany Hawkins. The floor is yours.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair, Commissioners. Hello. Thank you for having us.

Hi.

I will not belabor the point. I recognize that I am the last person and stand between you and dinner.

Ms. Hawkins, I'm sorry. I can't hardly hear you.

Oh, I'm sorry. There you go. Okay. I stand between you and dinner, so I apologize.

No, actually, it's worse than that. On my break, I had to go take care of my dog, and I forgot that I didn't program the robot vacuum properly, so the robot vacuum is ripped apart all the way across the house. And the dog is having a great time.

As he should with a Roomba. All right. We'll just go through a little bit of a recap of what we've been doing, go through the operating capital budget, and our request to you all at Seminole County. Just a quick recap before we get into that. You all know that FY25 was the last year of historical fixed route service here in Seminole County prior to the micro transit transition in January of this year. That transition, we currently still have five local routes and these are our start and end times and peak and off-peak service. In FY25, our annual ridership was 2.8 million, and that will be the last year of full ridership that we will report to the National Transit Database for the Federal Transit Administration. And that equated to about 3,800 trips prior to January of 2026. Currently, we are, with the routes that are still providing service in Seminole County, about 1,600 boardings per day. And that is according to our automated passenger counts that are on the buses. Our ridership, we are stagnant at this point. We had some weather challenges. And this is across the board for the full system. Weather challenges early in the January, February timeframe. We are now in the summer seasonality. School is out, et cetera. So we are digging into that. beginning in january we started the shelter removal process and so i am happy to report that we will not be talking about a cost to exit this year and and i want to reiterate that seminole county is still very much a part of the link system and so there had been some some comments about the cost to exit and it really wasn't about a cost to exit, it was about removal of the shelters. So we removed 120 shelters, 124 trash cans, 31 bike racks and 84 benches. Just a note that you will still see some benches throughout Seminole County. Those are not links benches. Those are private advertising vendors, etc. So those are not ours. And I do want to thank the county manager and your public works department for assisting us in removing 400 bus stop poles and signs and helping us get that recycled. Currently, we are rehabbing the shelters at the three SunRail stations, Altamont, Sanford, and Lake Mary. Those had been previously scheduled for rehab prior to the microtransit transition. We are honoring that obligation and that is being completed and I think they are about 75% completed with that. Once the shelters are rehabbed, those will be transferred to FDOT, their asset management and then, as I understand, there will be an agreement between Seminole County and DOT for the maintenance of those shelters. Moving on to some highlights on access links. In FY25, the trip count was about 125,000 trips, and those are your ADA and TD paratransit trips, Americans with Disabilities Act, and transportation disadvantaged. Of those 125,000 trips, 94,000 of those were inside the three-quarter mile federally required mandate, and those were ADA trips. About 10% of those were outside of the three-quarter mile, and the remaining approximately 30,000 were transportation disadvantage program trips. So in general, we'll go to the budget overview. LINCS is maintaining the FY26 level of service in our assumptions, as well as the no fair increases pending a ongoing fair equity analysis that is being looked at system-wide. Funding partner contributions based on the recently amended funding model formula policy. Fleet replacement and passenger amenity programs and facility improvements. Moving on to the operating budget overview. The overall operating budget is increasing by 4.53% over the FY approved and amended budget. If it weren't for some of the Orange County projects that we are doing in the I-Drive area, that increase would be 3.46% overall. This does reflect a $2 million reduction in 10 positions that are currently frozen but not funded. So we will keep the headcount but not fund the positions. Our FY27 operating budget revenue proposal is customer fares increasing by about $914,000 and the majority of those customer fare increases are on the paratransit side. A significant change is interest in other income decreasing by $1.9 million on fixed route side and this is as a result of spending down the budget stabilization fund and The long-awaited anticipation that interest rates are going to drop, we just have not seen that in our experience yet. State revenue is decreasing by $600,000, and that is a direct result of the state reducing the state block grant. Local revenue is increasing by the $2 million that I previously mentioned with the Orange County I-Drive project. And just, you all know this from every year that we are here, the majority of the LINCS budget is funded with local dollars. 92% of that local funding does come from property tax. It is not lost on us on the conversations that are ongoing throughout this region and throughout the state. So we are all attuned to what will be going on and looking at what routes would have to be cut if that is in fact the case that happens in November. So our operating expenses are increasing about $197,000 for salaries and wages. That looks like a marginal cost. It is not. We are transitioning customer service for the NeighborLink. Sorry, some of the customer service staff for NeighborLink. To Transdev, we will not have them, but medical costs, as you all are probably experiencing, an 8% to 10% increase. Other services, you're seeing the almost $4 million increase, and that is for the MOU with Orange County. Fuel expenses we are proposing to decrease. We expect the fuel to stabilize, but we have been replacing our diesel fleet with CNG. CNG has not experienced the fluctuation in the market like diesel and unleaded has. So as we are getting in the rest of our CNG fleet, we expect the fuel... Expense to go down Purchase transportation is increasing six point five Three million of that is paratransit cost and that is the cost of the contractual increase of three and a half percent as well as the trip count increase and the rest is related to customer service transition to transdev for paratransit and And again, our expenses, the majority is salary and wages, and that is drivers in the seat, mechanics on the ground. Our administrative cost is posted on the LINCS website as a result of House Bill 1301 a few years ago. The LINCS admin cost is about 24 million, and we are below the statewide average on that. Quickly going through our capital budget overview. Our proposed capital budget for FY27 is almost 195 million. These are not all new grant dollars. There is a significant amount of rollover and I will show you where the majority of that is. That is in our vehicles. And I feel like I have skipped something, but we currently have 120 vehicles in our program. 95 of those are carryover, and that is because 95 of the CNG vehicles, that is because from the time we order it to the time it's delivered is taking 18 to 24 months. We have two transit bus manufacturers in the United States that are serving all the transit agencies. The other vehicles that are in here are 144 pair transit vehicles. 131 of those are carryover from previous years because those vehicles are taking about 12 months. And the others are van pull vehicles, which are taking approximately six months. Other carryover for facilities is our HVAC project. We are replacing all of the HVACs at our operations center at John Young and Princeton, as well as Link Central Station. Link Central Station is coming up on 22 years old, 20 years in LOC. We are also doing a window replacement with... at lcs when lcs was built it was value engineered that single pane windows would be sufficient for the florida sun and that has not worked out so well so uh And then some other improvements at LOC and LCS. Passenger amenities program, the majority of that is the Orange County Accelerated Transportation Safety Plan Shelter Program. And then we have some technology passenger information programs. projects. LIMO is a state of good repair dollars. Those are federal funds that are assigned to LIMO based on formula. Then we have some support and those are maintenance equipment replacements and then security. One point 1% of our federal funds that we get needs to be allocated to security, improvement, safety, and we do put a high priority on the safety of our passengers and employees. So you will see that the majority of the capital budget is vehicles. and that those new vehicles do help with the maintenance costs, and then the facilities and passenger amenities round out the rest of what constitutes that capital budget. So moving on to the partner funding, Orange County is and has always been the lion's share. I did pass that. 77%, Osceola County is 14%, and Seminole is almost 8.5% of the operating share. So the partner funding for FY27 is under the new funding model where we have allocated a portion of the administrative overhead to paratransit based on service hours. And the operating contribution increase for FY27 is 14.35%. For Seminole County, this is 1.68% over FY26. Capital contribution is the $3 per service hour. And so Seminole County's contribution that we are requesting is $125,000. And that is based on the service hours that you all have on the fixed route here in Seminole County. And so our total ask of Seminole County is $11.7 million. um and uh again the total contribution increase of uh 1.03 percent so i know i went through that uh pretty fast so happy to answer any questions commissioners any questions mr zenbauer miss hawkins thank you very much for being here today and uh

I'll digress. I started this conversation with your predecessor seven plus years ago in trying to follow the numbers and the accounting and funding models. And so if you'll just follow me a little bit, I want to talk a little bit about access links and some of the concerns that I have. And for the record, for the public purpose, the access link basically is two programs. You alluded to those just a moment ago, which is the ADA Payer Transit, based on the federal ADA guidelines for individuals whose disability prevents them from riding a fixed route bus. Second, Transportation Disadvantaged, TDs, a program for individuals who have no other means of transportation to meet specific income guidelines. As of September of 2025, Seminole County had approximately 2,566 Access Links customers. Here's where it gets a little lost on me when I look through all these numbers, and I appreciate staff gathering some of these numbers from your folks for my benefit and for our board's benefit. But since Scout, our total trips fell from 31,479 in quarter one to 28,119 in quarter two, a 10.7% decrease. Transportation disadvantaged TD trips had a 5.5% decrease. ADA paratransit trips had a 12.2% decline. Before Scout, the Florida Commission for the Transportation Disadvantaged reports that Seminole County had a decrease of 6% in ADA trips from 2023 to 2025. A 2% decrease from 2023-2024 and a 4% decrease from 2024-2025. The cost, however, the total long-term operating cost, total operating cost increased 2.58 million in fiscal year 2019 to 6.71 million in fiscal year 2026. That's an increase of over 160% in seven years. The cost for ADA service grew from 2.3 million in fiscal year 2019 to 5.13 million in fiscal year 2026 an increase of 123%. Transportation disadvantage portion only operating costs, TD costs rose from 279K in fiscal year 2019 to $1.57 million fiscal year 2026, an increase of 460%. Projected for 27 total costs expected to rise from $6.71 million in 26 to $8.72 million in 27, another 30% increase in a single year. Can you explain how we are rapidly going in this direction? So, Commissioner... A huge increase in numbers. And I understand there's been an increase in costs to do business. I understand there's increase in materials and increase in wages, benefits, all that. And I think... Last year you heard me say, at least in my opinion, the Lynx model is a broken model. That's my opinion from a business perspective. But can you explain why are we rapidly going in that direction when Seminole County's ridership is actually going down on the paratransit side?

Commissioner, I will do my best to answer. I don't have those numbers specifically in front of me, and that was a lot of numbers.

And I'm happy if your staff wants to get back with us. In fairness, that's probably best. I don't want to put you on the spot, but there's a lot of numbers that we just went through. But in addition to that, I have a report from the Florida Commission on the Transportation Disadvantage, which I don't quite follow because it's my understanding from them, this information is supplied by the links to them for a report to be generated. The complimentary ADA ridership in 23 from Seminole County was 80,750. In 24, it was 93,775, increase of 13,000. From 24 to 25, it went down to 63,580. On the paratransit side, 23 was 46,356, and 24 went down to 30,348, and 25 went back up to 55,855. And while those numbers are important to me as I look through this, there's a lot of numbers on these reports, but my forensic training, when I go through documents and see this kind of information, tells me something's wrong. It may be the numbers being reported. It may be an error in the report that was put together. But it brings me to a theme that I've continued to struggle with with your predecessor, and ultimately I just surrendered because I wasn't getting the information, which is who from Seminole County is riding in their customers on the paratransit side, and can they actually be identified?

That I can answer. Yes, they can be identified. They are registered. We know exactly when they are picked up, when they are dropped off, what days they use. We do have that information. Okay.

So it would be interesting to know how our costs continue to increase when ridership has dropped and why the state reports indicate such a fluctuation in the reporting or the numbers that Seminole County customers are utilizing. So if that's something, and I'm happy offline to work with your staff, give you the details, it's a lot of stuff that was covered, but our costs, even with revenue replacement, is going through the roof. And I can tell you, somebody from transportation, which is my origin, I can run a pair of transit a lot cheaper than what we're paying for the amount of customers we're handling. So it's going to be helpful as a decision maker for us to really understand.

But one of the numbers that you did talk about is the increase in this year for the paratransit contribution, and that is because of how we are allocating the general overhead. Going from the, I apologize, the six point, 19 to the 8.7. Had we not moved to the new funding model formula, that increase would be 6.9. And so it is because of the hours that are spent in Seminole County on paratransit vehicles, that is why the general overhead is allocated to that. So that is that cost increase.

So with that said, I would assume you can supply me with an hour spent in Seminole for the last two, three, four years?

We download it from our trapeze system by hour.

And is that tracked for productivity? Yes. Meaning a driver is not parked at some county park waiting for a call to go somewhere? Correct. Okay. So it's actual work time, either driving, picking up, dropping off?

Revenue service, yes. Okay.

So that should be easy to track. Obviously, if somebody's going, let's say, down to the medical center in Orlando to the hospital down in Lucerne, if it was the middle of the day, if they were leaving Orlando to come to Seminole and going back down there, that's less than an hour, probably closer to 40 minutes.

We'll be happy to update the heat maps for you all to show where the origin and destinations are for the Seminole County residents.

No, understood. I think what I'm asking for something is a little different. Specifics for rides. Correct. Which is different than a heat map. Heat map can give us a general idea, more specific. That's something that could be supplied?

Yes, we can. But recognize with some of these clients, there are HIPAA because of the medical.

I don't want to know why they're gone. I don't want to know their names. I would hope, because of HIPAA, there's no names associated with the time that an operator in a vehicle is coming and going into Seminole County.

Correct. So, yes, we can give you all that. Okay.

So I would ask that our staff, Darren, if you could, I know I ask for a lot of stuff, if you could work with Lynx to try to gather that information. If you have any questions, get with my office. Commissioner Lockhart, who sits on that board at Lynx, if you could coordinate anything that she may be helpful during those board meetings and gathering anything, I'd appreciate it.

So I'm going to take this in a little bit of a simpler direction. And this is slide number 147. And this is, I think, the crux of all the questions that Commissioners Zimbaor just asked. But I'm just going to ask a question. What made you change the funding model? It's been the same funding model for years.

It was, and it was as a result of the reduction in the fixed route cost, all of the administrative overhead was allocated on fixed route. Seminole County's reduction in their service hours, the equity, if you will, had been discussed during the budget presentations and budget adoption last year at the LINCS board. And it was... asked for us to bring back some recommendations. We brought back several and that was the change to cover the, when you cut service and you do cut bus operators, you can cut mechanics and some supervisors, but we still have payroll, we still have accounts payable functions, grants that handle paratransit.

That we were- I have a follow up to that.

Okay. I got it. I got it. What equity was in question?

It was about the administrative overhead for links and who was paying in this regional system.

Meaning that Seminole needed to pay more? In some form or fashion? Yes. Yes. I'll take that. Not of the head in the affirmative as a yes. Yes. It is very obvious to us that we have been questioning these numbers for years with difficulty in obtaining ridership. Separate from paratransit, you can report all of that.

Correct.

The data that we get now versus the data that we had before is two wildly different worlds. And quite frankly, this doesn't feel like a partnership anymore. It used to, because we sat quietly and never questioned anything. And when we did question things, we actually just were told, not you. We're not too small. You're just a little piece. Not by you, but this is how it works. And so I will tell you I am one of the biggest supporters of links on this board. I was a supporter of yours. I am not in that position anymore. If I could get out entirely, I would. Because I think that this was punitive. And I share that with my partners on that board so that it's coming from my mouth to their ears. I am just really disappointed at the lack of regionalism with this. And I appreciate that. there is a perception that we were not regional in our thought process to pull out, but we were forced into that position with unsustainable budget increases and service that wasn't increasing. Increasing in a lot of the other areas, but not in ours. And so with that, I'll look to my right, because you had your hand up first.

You know, I... Regionalism is ideal when it works. And equity and equality are two different words. They have two very different meanings. And I believe what, and please, Tiffany, do not hesitate to correct me. last year during our conversations at the LINCS board meeting, Seminoles reducing routes significantly in order to reduce costs and, frankly, to eliminate underperforming routes that had been underperforming for many, many years, but no one was willing to pull the trigger to eliminate them when they should have been eliminated prior to our action. Mayor Demings made a very clear statement that he wanted to look at how this regional approach and what the documents pertaining to our participation in LINCS would look like. I think it was, I don't remember, I hate to misquote him, so I'm not trying to quote him identically. But essentially it was, we need to look at whether or not Seminole County needs to be a part of LINCS. if you're not going to be a part of it. That's my sense a year later of how that was delivered. My response was very much like yours. You're right. I think we should look at whether or not Seminole County is still a part of LINCS or what that looks like because... We are not better, not worse, but different in terms of needs of public transportation in this county than our other partners. And maybe it does make more sense for us to do our own thing. I do believe, putting all the cards on the table, that we need to prioritize this next legislative session and upcoming sessions to talk about legislative language changes that moves us from being required to participate in the Central Florida Regional Transportation Authority to May. The shall to a May would give us much greater flexibility. I think that's something that we really need to talk about seriously. Because just like on other regional boards that we participate on, we are the minority vote. And we are regularly outvoted against our interests. I know Mr. Jax has done a wonderful job representing our board on the finance committee. He speaks his mind. He shares his perspective from Seminole County's perspective. It's not taken into consideration because it just doesn't matter. We will be consistently outvoted. Even if we want to contain costs and make recommendations for how to do that, it We really have no power to do it. And I know serving five masters is very hard for how many of us are there? Orange, Seminole, Osceola. Yeah, it's very difficult because you're trying to make very different people happy, different organizations happy, and be all things to all people in that approach. And it's hard. It is not easy to do. And I don't envy the organization's position that they're in. But it is obvious to us when... The the big personalities were the big players in the room say I want to look at how to redo this formula and it's Suddenly done and it's done in a way that makes Seminole County have to pay more. I mean we're we weren't you know We weren't born yesterday so I We need to continue to have these conversations. I think we have always been very candid with Lynx and the organization about what we intend to do and how we plan to move forward. So, again, I think we need to continue that transparency and keep all the cards on the table and be very clear about our intentions.

Some follow-up on that. Commissioner DeLaurie next.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I would agree with everything that's been said here. I'd also like to take a look at the funding formula and make sure it makes sense to us, even though it's being dictated by links, because we could go, when we talk about this up in Tallahassee, about if it's not in our best interest, that would be another piece of it. But we've also asked our staff to look at paratransit. and how we can reduce costs as we go through this budget process. I'm hoping that we have that conversation at some point because we have to keep on continuing to reduce our costs as well as provide services, and I think that's what we're trying to do here. We've been working on this for a number of years, Commissioner. I'm not going to go back how many years, but it's been a number of years that we've all been questioning it.

I've been talking about it for seven years.

I understand that. And, you know, a dollar can always be spent one time, as Commissioner Henley always talked about. And the dollars are getting very limited. And I think that between the funding formula and how we can reinvent paratransit and talk to the state, I think that's what needs to happen.

I just want to follow up on a couple things that were said. And Ms. Hawkins, I envy your position. This is not about you. Please understand that. This is about our job as decision makers who are tasked with protecting the taxpayers' dollars in Seminole County. And I think what I heard in exchange between Commissioner Lockhart and yourself is when Seminole County reduced our fixed route, that a decision was made because the overhead of mechanics, other individuals, and so forth, that that funding model no longer worked. And so we lumped that and changed the funding model to keep those overheads and spread it further out, which defeats the whole reason why we reduced the fixed routes to start with in Seminole County. So whether it was... purposefully thought out and premeditated to drop that on Seminole because our intent was to save our taxpayers' dollars for routes that arguably nobody was riding. Onesies, twosies, threesies here and there. And so I would just ask that Lynx and our partners put themselves in our shoes of what this looks like and help us find the answers to the questions I had, and I think those are the same questions that everybody else had in a little different articulated way, because at the end of the day, it's really about us making sure we're protecting our taxpayers' dollars. We understand this is not a moneymaker. We understand this is something that is necessary in our community. What this board has to ultimately decide is, is the current model what Seminole County's taxpayers should be funding, or should we be funding something different? And I think you saw us take the first step. So that first step was to save taxpayers' dollars, but conveniently the funding model has switched, which means now it's eventually going to cost us more. to do what we've done to save the taxpayers' dollars. So again, if you would work with Darren and his team to get us that information, I would be very thankful to be able to understand that. So thank you.

Absolutely. I just want to continue with another. I had an epiphany while we were talking here. If I look at this slide and I look at total operating expense, And I look at Seminoles, we went from 11.4 million to 11.6 with a huge reduction in service. Fair statement?

Yes, you had a huge reduction in fixed-route service.

And it went up? Yes. Nothing short of miraculous. And Osceola County went from 16.3 million to 19.5 million. So presumably, had the model not changed, Osceola and Orange that went from 92 to 105, they would have gone up higher.

Now, had the funding model not changed, Osceola would have been reduced. Seminole and Osceola were in the same, but yes. So they got hurt as well?

Osceola did. But their service stayed, so they're paying more, but they didn't decrease service. We're paying more and we decrease service. Yes. And so Orange benefited. That is a way to look at it.

That's the only way we're going to look at it. That's the way I've been looking at it. Case closed.

Didn't go to law school, don't want to be a lawyer, but case closed. All right, commissioners, any other questions? Hearing none, we appreciate you being here.

Yes, thank you.

We will follow up with that information. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we have come to the public comment portion of the program. We have a public comment. I see a yellow form. If you have a public comment and you know better, don't hold on to your form. You better get it up there. All right. How many speakers do we have?

Chairman, we have three speakers.

All right. Call the first three up. How about that? So we know the order.

Leslie Grubble, Justin Harvey, Wynne Adams.

Before you take that microphone, I want to say how much we appreciate you being here all day long.

Yes.

We feel your support from the audience.

Thank you, and I also watch you on TV.

We've got to find you some other hobbies.

And I hope you keep track of that, who watches, how many the numbers are, because I hope it's bigger than the number that appears in these rooms. Yes.

Probably be less.

I'm Leslie Griffithel, and I live in Longwood. As an individual citizen, I stand against the proposed amendment to raise our homestead exemption rate. As I drove here today, and I'm going to kind of get into the personal things, not the most complex that you talk about today. I thought about who keeps my streetlights burning, fixes my sidewalks, fills in the sinkholes, works on water drainage issues, and provides patrols for my neighborhood. I have listened to most of the board meetings in the last two years. I have heard the board protect our streets from overcrowding by refusing to permit a school on EE Williamson, and I saw a refusing of a dense housing subdivision on Sand Lake Road. You don't rubber stamp. I appreciate that. The board has worked to lower public transportation costs by implementing Scout, and I hope that works out.

It's kind of disgusting to hear what I heard today.

Always forward-thinking, the county is protecting our aquifer and available potable water with a water management plan. There is also a well-considered need-not-want five-year plan to build or refurbish our fire departments. There is a plan to change closed golf courses into local parks like Rolling Hills. To save money, I have seen proposals being made for numerous grants to fill the coffers in our state. When outside agencies work with our county staff, they have made nothing but compliments on that organization of our county staff, even while they have presently cut staff by 9%. I want to maintain our local tax and budgeting control. We have public comment times if we have a concern about spending or any other decision making. We can also vote in or out our local officials. The homestead funding cut is by the state, overreaching into our local control. My understanding is this action can cause 20 to 30% decrease in ad valorem funding. Our millage rate increase last year was the first one in 15 years. If the state wants to cut our costs, they should address homeowners insurance rates and housing costs. They could help our county budget by paying for their state mandates. And we still are waiting, and this is not from local or from state, but we are waiting for FEMA payouts from the federal government. I am outraged that the state wants to interfere the funding for our local government budget. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker.

The next speaker is Justin Harvey, followed by Wayne Adams.

Mr. Harvey, name and address for the record.

Hello, my name is Justin Harvey. I'm at 1025 Hamlet Drive. First off, I just want to thank this commission for voting to end water fluoridation last year. You were one of the 26 Florida communities to listen to your residents and take initiative for the statewide ban. So thank you so much for that. Today I want to touch on the topic of AI data centers. I'm sure you've seen this has quickly become a hot button issue across the country and the state as local residents are pushing back. And this is against these hyperscale data centers, and I want to specify on that. I'm not talking about the small and mid-sized buildings that are more like an office building. These hyperscale data centers are more like an industrial power plant the size of UCF campus. It's enough power and water to energize a small city. The first hyperscale data center in Florida was quietly approved in Fort Meade and residents were furious. And to avoid getting blindsided in Lakeland, 50 residents came to their next meeting and are saying no to their proposed data center. And it's not just brewing in Polk County. There have been discussions happening all over the state. I think Hernando and Citrus have already passed moratoriums, a one-year ban on data centers, so they can further evaluate the environmental and health impacts to their residents. Escambia and Lake County have also announced they're in the process of doing the same. And that's why today I'd like to request that Seminole County look into drafting and passing a one-year moratorium on hyperscale AI data centers in our county to make sure that they don't sneak one in on us. The last thing I want to see is our untouched Oviedo, Geneva, or Chuliota, what we have left of them, get smacked with an AI data center in it. They have no benefit. It's going to strain our water and our energy. And if you haven't heard, these mini-sized facilities are so massive, they produce a 24-7 hum that you really can't escape. So just imagine what that's going to do to the residents and wildlife living nearby. So let's protect our residents and get out in front of this issue, just like you all do with many things, and go ahead and put a ban on these things. Thank you so much.

Yeah, I've got a comment on that, if you don't mind. The good news is there's no property in this county to be able to do such a thing. Even out in Geneva, it's protected. That's my district, so as long as I'm breathing, it's not going to happen.

You don't live in Tallahassee, sir.

But I might be.

Could I just for a moment? Thank you. Could we have staff look at that and just see what that would entail? Is it even a possibility to do a moratorium legally? I don't believe we've ever done a moratorium in this county for anything. Not that I don't want to learn about what that would look like, but I don't have the information if that's something.

I mean, just off the cuff without doing any research. We're really constrained in what we can do because of Senate Bill 180.

Okay.

Okay.

If that's the answer, if you just give us that answer, that'd be awesome.

Well, and it would be good to understand how others are doing it or are they doing it despite.

Yeah, and maybe they're not in the path of the storm. You know, part of the moratorium or part of the restriction had to do with how close you were to the eye of the storms over the last few years. So they might.

have a different analysis but we'll definitely look at that and even though the state's priorities are in other directions um what the state is or is not doing because they were they were trying to or some people were trying to address this year uh this issue this year and they did not I can also say that the National Association of Counties and others are doing a lot of research on this because of the, as you said, sir, and rightfully so, that this has become a strain on the resources of counties. So much so that Virginia is in a really big situation, troubling situation right now, because they all want to be centered around the Washington-Baltimore area.

Not to mention the load on the power grid. Mm-hmm.

Thank you for being here, sir. Thank you. All right, next speaker.

Yes, just a comment on that. There is talk.

Your time is ticking, though. His time is ticking.

Okay. Wynn Adams, 646 Fellowship Drive, Fern Park, Florida. With regards to what you were talking about, these centers, that will probably be turned into a federal issue. That's unfortunately what I think will happen.

I have a lot of belief that they will stay here.

They take so much power. Anyways, the reason why I'm here is about my favorite subject, the indoor sports complex. I sent a letter to the clerk, and I'll just quickly read it to you, and I'll provide this for you. It says, I have heard that several county commissioners are planning on building an indoor sports complex near Sanford Airport. The estimated cost is around $175 million. How does the county commission plan to pay for the indoor sports complex? Will they borrow the money, tax the Seminole County property owners, raise the county sales tax? Please provide me with information about this issue, regards Winfield Adams. And I'm just asking that question as to when hopefully I can have a written response.

You sent it to the clerk.

I sent it, and they forwarded it to the county. I never saw.

I can follow up with Mr. Adams.

Because you went through that completely with Tim, with you sitting there, Mr. Adams.

What I'm asking for, Commissioner, is I would like a written response to my email.

We'll get you a written response.

I really appreciate that.

Mr. Adams, in the future, if you want an answer from us, please send it to us directly. I mean, we're here to help. We're here at your service. Oh, I fully understand.

The reason why I did it, though, is the clerk of the court is also the comptroller. And I thought, under those circumstances, they would have that type of information, knowing that they would not make the decision, but they would have access to that information.

Did you get an answer from him?

No, what I got was that they would forward it to him. Let me read what they said. The clerk of the office is in receipt of the public records request below. Please note that ordinarily the County Office of Management and Budget, OMB, determines the funding sources to be used for expenditures. As such, your request has been forwarded to the County OMB for review and response.

So the county OMB is us. So send it to us in the future. We'll be glad to help you.

I appreciate that information.

Thank you.

Have a great day. Since this isn't for you, Mr. Adams. Pardon? My question is not for you. Oh, okay. Thank you. Since it's out there and we have a dangling participle now, if we could, Mr. Jex, for the benefit of the public, could you quickly summarize where the funds are coming from for the indoor complex?

I will mention that the email that came to me was not a public records request. It was not a public record. It was a question. So we sent it to the county manager and we're responding now. But the county has the new tourism improvement district. That's the new revenue that we've discussed internally about potentially bonding that, pledging that revenue. The county has sales tax funding that we've discussed putting towards the project. And the county's not intending to put any general fund dollars. So it's tourism funding and sales tax funding that we've discussed using for the project. Great. Thank you very much.

I'm sure. Commissioner Delary. Thank you, Madam Chair. Darren Gray, I know you're the county manager, obviously, but we've had quite a bit of conversation on this topic. Can you make sure that all departments that have all the meetings that we've had regarding this are in that memo so that they know that we've been having this conversation not just once or twice, but ignosiam? and they can actually give the time and the minutes of where those conversations took place so they can actually see the full conversation. Absolutely. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Yep. Good point. Yeah, that was a good suggestion. Any other comments for the good of the order before we all see each other again tomorrow morning?

Tomorrow morning at 9.30.

And by the way, if you couldn't respond to that, given all the work that you've done to get us here today and tomorrow with all of the material you've put together, that is just how it is. Yep. Good prioritizing.

That's all we have for today. All we have.

Meeting adjourned. Thank you.