County Commission - Regular Meeting

All right. Not that that makes any difference. We all just, we are who we are at all times, I'm sure. Remind me of, was that a Steve Martin movie? It was Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor. Sort of like us. Sort of like that this morning. Mayor, Mayor, Mayor, Mayor, Mayor. We had to have all the mayors here today that are here. And then I'm sure y'all represent the rest of the mayors that are not here. And some of them probably sent some notes and instructions, which is a good thing. It's a good thing. Glad to have our staff folks here that are here. I see Patrice here from emergency management and Aslan here from 911. let's see here we've got clay for roads and we got the assistant sheriff back there she's she's uh hanging in there pretty good glad you're here and if you got freddie close to retirement yet he is sliding in the home plate okay chairman we're not live yet and someone is checking on me man i gotta say all that all over the issues right now Are we now?

I'm waiting on John to text me back.

I love technology.

You should have recorded it.

Huh?

You should have recorded it. We recorded it. Maybe I got it on my phone.

John is currently working on it.

Anybody want to practice anything they want to say between now and the time John gets us plugged in? Katrina, I didn't see you. I'm glad to see you here today. Are you going to get here on Bateman time, which is like the last second? I know. Well, I didn't see you when I came through.

Yeah, they call that Bateman time. Just barely here.

I don't know what he does.

Y'all mix and mingle and everybody just get acquainted. We're all in this together.

I have to fit in to speak it.

And you did say Michelle's on her way over too.

She's here for the budget meeting.

Did she go to the wrong courthouse? No.

We do so bad. He's working on it.

I think that's a good idea.

He's not going to be able to get it fixed, so we need the council to speak. Yeah, there you go. Probably so. I'm going to go have breakfast.

There's no way they're going to go have breakfast. There's no video right now.

Don't bear with us. We're getting there. Any of y'all ever have any problem with your technology at your meetings or anything? Have you ever had to start over and redo one? We had to back up one time learning how to get all this done in today's modern world. Pretty simple when we were filming it on the cell phone.

You went by and got you a coffee.

That's from my office. I just stopped by there.

There's some coffee in there, Chairman.

Anybody need a cup of coffee?

Ricky, how about you, bud?

Coffee right in there. I'm happy. I drank some energy drink this morning. I bet you do it anyways.

probably up there we're just not recording okay now we're ready all right

Okay, there's a copy of the agenda on the screen, so we're ready to go then. Before we get started with our meeting, if you'll bow with me, I'll ask God to watch over us as we go through this meeting today. Dear God, we just come before you again, dear Lord, humble and filled with joy, dear Lord, that you're our God and that you give us grace. God, we thank you for the positions you've put us in. We know their importance as you've listed it in your word, and we ask you to guide our steps today. do things that are only there to lift you up, then those are the things that'll be right, no matter what our feelings are about it. So God, we just ask you that that's what we all do today, and that we just lift our meeting up to you and our bodies up to you, ourselves up to you, dear Lord. We just thank you for all that you bless us with. And God, we also thank you for watching over us in our health, our mental health, our physical health, our family's health. Dear Lord, we know that you're the source of all healing, and we just lay all of those health issues at your feet. God, we thank you also for keeping the little pains of compassion in our hearts for those that don't have the things we have and that we know that our governments are set up, dear Lord, to take care of the less fortunate. We ask all these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

OK. OK. Mayor Marger came in. Glad to have you here, Matt. And I think our coroner came in. He always makes me nervous when he comes in. The older I get, the more nervous I get about his appearance at my meetings. I'm not sure. Thank you for being here, Mr. Coroner. I know you're very active. If he shows up, it's usually not good. Oh, I'm telling you. I'm a little worried about that. not a really long agenda today but we're going to be sure that we open up our agenda to some discussion about some issues that i'm sure that that the mayors and the mayor's association are interested in and some other issues that we've got before us to discuss as we go into our budget process we're just like y'all we're in the middle of budgeting and uh that's uh That's always a stressful time to try to be sure that we spend the people's money in a way that keeps the county strong fiscally and that also helps as many people as possible at that time. And Revenue Commissioner, Ken, I didn't mention you. I'm so sorry I left you out. You want to say something? Just make up for it? You sure? OK. All right. All right. with all that pontification then I call this meeting to order first item to take up is our agenda entertain a motion to approve the agenda motion second any discussion on that agenda additions deletions if not all in favor say aye all opposed no motion carries okay Okay, the first item on our agenda is to approve the minutes of the regular meeting of July the 14th. Entertain a motion to approve those minutes. Motion.

Second.

Properly moved and second. You had a chance to look those over. Are there any changes to those minutes at this time? Any additions, deletions? If not, all in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries to pass those minutes approval.

Okay.

In our agenda, we have a report section where we make sure we leave a spot open for other people that are here with different issues and that we need to take up that we might not have handled during our work session. So within the report section, we've got all the commissioners and the county attorney County Administrator. And today we have several of the mayors here want to discuss some relationships between the county and the mayors and how we handle our funding with our citizens in the cities. The first item on that to speak for the mayors, I think I've got down Mayor Rusty Jessup. And if the rest of y'all don't agree with what he's saying, y'all, it's another year out voting. I hope y'all can see that right now. Mayor, good to see you today. And once again, congratulations on your position as the president of Alabama Mayors Association. Thank you.

It's an honor, not only for me, but for St. Clair County and Riverside. Yeah, proud of that. Thank you. Thank you. I'm here to talk about big guest dispatch fees. We first heard that it was being discussed that it was going to have to go up by 10%, which scared the heck out of all of us. Then we heard, no, the recommendation was 5%. So that adds to confusion. So everybody gets to calling. And we understand things are going up. I think all the mayors do. We're here to help. We want to move this county forward. All of our cities do. But the confusion adds to a lot of questions and gets everybody. And our clerks, every city clerk in the county has been buzzing all over town trying to figure out where these numbers came from, how they arrive at this. And Ricky told me before the meeting that he does have the numbers on exactly what that dispatch costs. every year, which will be very revealing. And that helps us to understand what our share should be. And we, as mayors, need to know that. Because, see, I got to go to my police chief and say, you're not getting a new car next year because it's dispatch. And he deserves to know why. And he expects me to answer that. And the other mayors the same way. And we want those. We need to be able to tell them, not by Bateman math, Not by Parker math, but in real numbers. Real math. Yeah, real math. And so thank you for doing that, Rick. I really, really do appreciate that. That will help us. The other question I'd like for y'all to start considering looking at, too, is how you disperse this among the cities to be paid. And the general consistency is it's done by population. But the way it's dispersed and what each city has, that doesn't make sense. And then we thought, well, maybe they do it by number of persons in that city. But that doesn't make sense either. If it was poor old Ragland. They're paying $29.45 per person, where Pell City's only paying $15.65 per person. So we know that's not the way it's dispersed. And we want to help you with that. If you need some numbers or you need some ideas on how to disperse that, where all the cities would completely understand, this is our portion, and we're good with this. We don't like it, but we get it. Things are going up. And the last thing I want to get across right now is we want to help. I remember years ago when I first got on the city council, Ed Gardner and I think Stan came up with this idea of an economic development council. You know, and how in the world are we going to pay for that? This is going to cost a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. And the city's chipped in. And we all work together. And we made that happen. And look what benefits it's paid for us. You know, we needed the task force several years ago. The city's chipped in. We will always chip in. We want to be a part of helping move this. So don't take our whining and crying as adversarial. We do not want to be your adversary. We want to work with you in every way we can. And I'm not saying that any of you do that. I'm not saying that at all. But perception is everything. And we get these numbers out there, it'll really help. And Chairman, with your permission, I'd like to yield the floor to any other mayor that may have something to say today.

yes sir yeah any of you that want to make sure it's about the way this is affecting your budget or whatever what you want to say also let me ask staff uh do they have this yes sir okay well let's let's copy this and give it to them once we put it in here it's our public record anyway can we get some copies of this to hand out yes sir yeah sure what is that what we have here i told you about oh yeah this is it says see the numbers below and this has to do with uh operation fund dash dispatch And while we're making those copies, let me back up a little bit. And then, of course, if anybody wants to speak, can. But this may add some to the discussion about this process. 31 years ago now, Donnie Todd was the chairman. And that's where the idea for central dispatch came from then. And he came from the Birmingham Police Department. I think he had 17 years with the city of Birmingham and ended up being a, I believe he was a patrol sergeant. And, of course, Donnie Todd had a business over in Cook Springs, very successful business. He's now a corporate pilot, as we know, and he's semi-retired from that business, and he's a corporate pilot. He's a businessman. And he's one of the first actually practicing businessmen that we had ever had, not just as chairman, but on the county commission. He and I ran around together quite a bit, and that was a time when they were talking about governments combining, governments getting together, local governments getting together to share responsibilities and expenses on government services, obviously partially to not have any more duplication than we had to have. And of course, one of the things that came up was sharing police. That's why we have a shared drug task force and those kinds of things is so we don't just have to do it in our little microcosm. We actually can do that as a group and actually hopefully be more effective. And one of the things that we looked at in our shared thing was already doing some of this, but jail, shared jail. A lot of that was done because of jails being so susceptible to litigation. It was getting very expensive for cities and counties to run their own jails because every other prisoner, every prisoner was a potential lawsuit. uh and before y'all read this and get carried away let me just tell you this is this is a copy from our very uh uh accurate uh county uh cfo uh michelle but she works off of some figures sometimes we work off of bateman math not just paper man we do work off of some different figures like you move things around so you can take things Because I think within here, Freddie Tarentine, for instance, has a little different figure on the total cost of central dispatch. And part of that is because he takes some of that dispatch funding and uses it in other places that won't show up on here necessarily. So I'll get that in a minute. But anyway, going back to what I was talking about, how we got to where we are now. I think the first awareness that I had of a municipality that combined governments completely, this was a step too far for me. It was a step too far for a lot of governments. That was Duval County, Florida. Anybody know where that is? That's Jacksonville, Florida. In my memory of working with local government and getting really involved in what that means and studying local government, Jacksonville, Florida was the first meaningful-sized county that created a combined government. And it became the combined government of Jacksonville slash Duval County. They actually had a chief of police and a sheriff. The sheriff, though, was over the entire law enforcement operations. I'm not saying that would work here. But they also had more than one jail, as big as they are. They had several jails scattered around. And their dispatch, though, was combined. And we got to notice, will that work here? That's a whole lot of traffic. wait a minute they also do this in buffalo new york so well if they can do it in those kind of places with a lot more traffic than we got we can do it too so that's kind of where centralized centralized dispatch came from also trying to work it into a brand new a brand new concept for our county in that time frame was e911 enhanced 9-1-1 For many years, governments could have a 911 program where you dial 911, somebody answered the phone, and a lot of talking went on. Enhanced 911 fed you back information immediately on the call. For instance, when you called our new system 30 years ago and said, Enhanced 911, it was supposed to pop up the location of where that call came from. And you'd run in there to the kitchen to your yellow telephone call if the kitchen had a fire. And you couldn't run very far because you tethered to the wall with about a, well it started out a six foot cord, but all of y'all are like me, you probably stretched it out into a 15 foot cord so when you hung it up, it curled up on the bottom. Next time you answered it, you're right here. Anybody remember those phones? Everybody had them, everybody did the same thing I'm talking about. Then we really had a wrench thrown into the whole thing called cell phones. First thing I had was in a bag. I had a bag phone. I could carry it over my shoulders. When I first got my cell phone, I went over here in the management area, Jeff. And I went way out there in the woods on that Lawley property. And I called my wife. And I said, you're not going to believe where I am. She said, where? I said, I'm over here in the management area. She said, that thing will reach from there? That's where we were not that many years ago. That thing will reach from there. And I was so excited to have my bag phone. It was amazing. And we just took off like a rocket from that with technology. And speaking of rocket, that's kind of where we are now with Elon Musk. We've come all the way from that. I mean, that phone tied to the wall with the yellow phone with the cord. Elon Musk and the satellites that he has up and the whole world is changing. And you know what? We really didn't notice, yeah, this is not going to be free. I don't think any of us realized how much it would really cost us and how much is it really worth. So far, in my opinion, everything we've done in technology and dispatch for getting the first responders out there has been worth the cost. We can respond quicker and more accurately. The biggest thing we're running into now is to respond to another people to put it out there. So that's where we started with centralized dispatch. Well, how are we going to pay for it? Well, we're going to ask the mayors and cities to help us with it. Well, how much are we going to charge? There again, Donnie may be listening. I'll tell you, well, how much are we going to charge? He said, well, let's just ask them what they're willing to pay. We did. That's what we started out with. How much will y'all pay? And of course, the mayor of Riverside said, well, we'll pay $50.

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute. Let's talk about $40. $40, yeah. So we really did start off way low because the county was committed. And we paid the majority of it back then. And we did adjust it some and got reasonable. It wasn't $50. All of the municipalities pitched in what they felt like they could afford. Some municipalities were in better fiscal sector. Now, We have never in the 31 years adjusted this properly. And we may not do it this time, but we are at least having a discussion. What does centralized dispatch cost us, and what's it worth? What's it worth to you? What's it worth to us? Centralized dispatch keeps you from having dispatchers. and dispatch location desk in New City Hall and equipment. There we go back to Elon Musk. There's one place. Well, what's the big thing we just did the last four years? We plugged in $8 million plus worth of new equipment. Why did we do that? Well, the policeman and the fireman said, we've got to do this. We're so far behind. We can't talk to other police agencies. The technology's totally run past us. So every time we come up with a budget, then we say, We've got to figure out some way to pay for this stuff. It just costs more and more and more. And that's kind of what's got us here. I think everybody knows that, but I'm not sure the citizens know that. We have worked at it together during this time. Yes, sir, Mayor.

On this one he just gave us. It says expenses total, $3,382,021. Is that the cost of the program entirely?

No. The cost of the program entirely is some more figures that Freddie has, and it's closer to $3.9 million, $3.8 million. whatever it is.

Mayor, I think that's just the operational expense, purely operational expense per year.

When you take into consideration heating and cooling the building, adding on, upgrading the desks, a lot of those kind of things, that may not be reflected in this. Furnishing the operation itself, furnishing the the facility uh which has got to be pretty expensive in itself uh 3 382 is how much needs to be divided or how much we that's what we've come up with here freddie's like i say the figures he and matt have been working on those in the The total figure, we'll let them share with y'all also. At some point, we'll get them. And then any differences in those, y'all call them and get them to explain why it's different so that you'll know that. But the total cost is that. You'll look down there about what we, the general fund contributes an amount. Municipality's considered, they've got a considerable contribution compared to what we started out with, especially. And then 911 contributes it. Well, we have never done this. And y'all decide whether you want to do this, and y'all start demanding you do this. It's your central dispatches, not the counties. Now, you've got a 1 third investment in it, basically. So your 1 third investment, y'all don't like it running this way. For instance, do you want to know that total figure every year? And what do you want to base it on? Like you said, it's going to be populations. It's going to be your gross receipts. In your contract, if you read your contract with them, it says call volume. We will increase this based on call volume. When we strictly go back to that, Some municipalities was going to get hit really hard on call volume way back 20 years ago. And some were not going to get hit that hard because call volume was different. Part of that was, well, without getting off in the weeds like y'all know me, I'm likely to do. Letters have consequences. Maybe I'll have a less pontificating chairman here. But call volume... If you still kind of got your clerk dispatching some things, people call City Hall. May not have ever made it to Central.

We call the mayor's phone.

Call the mayor's phone. Any of y'all ever have that? Any of y'all ever get a phone call yourself and say, Chief, can you run down to Soil and Soil's house and check on Soil and Soil? They're gone. I know you do. But call volume, if we really use call volume, ought to give us a pretty good reason, I mean a pretty good figure, set of figures of what you're, investment in this should be the volume of what's the what's the ambulance calls here's something else the big thing that I remember is doing is call volume we've always said we'll dispatch and start out volunteer fire departments afraid of what we say we'll dispatch volunteer fire departments free early on 31 years ago I'm gonna charge our volunteer fire departments anything well 31 years ago, Argo's fire department was probably listed as a volunteer fire department. So now we've got more fire departments that are not volunteer. So we muddied the water right there with our own methods of operation. But until this day, I can't tell you what we're charging fire departments that are full-time fire departments for dispatch. Are we charging them anything? Are you in this figure? So we got some work to do to work this out where the terminology means the same to everybody. And we don't have that right now. Because officially, originally, 31 years ago, no charge to volunteer fire departments. Well, then we kind of got into a deal on the volunteer thing. The law that gave all the fire departments 2% of ad valorem taxes in this county that started out about $24,000 a year is now up to about $100,000 a year. If you go read the language in that, it says, I'm going to get some argument from the, this is not only Bateman math, this is Bateman law. I'm pretty sure that says that the charge, I mean, the money goes to volunteer firefighters.

Not fire departments.

Well, we chose, we're the entity that collects the two-mill tax, and we distribute it. We know what another part of the loss is. We distribute it in another crazy method, equally. You all get an equal share, which y'all probably hadn't had a problem with that because you did share the million dollars the county gave you for other operations equally. Y'all good with that because you work together so well. Well, that's the way that this... this money from the two mil taxis has nothing to do with what your taxes are made in your city if we didn't i mean pale city moody springville the bigger municipalities uh uh well margaret if you based just on the number of people there and measured the the uh uh the property values and you distributed that two mil tax according to kind of the way the laws made The point is we've got a lot of work to do. That tax being collected on all the What is it, Ken? Two meals tax for all acreage, or does it include forestry? It's based on your assessed value. When you assess the value, not the value if you have a million dollar home. It's based on what the government assessment is, which may be 280,000. So the two meals collect on that. So that's all in this pool of discussion that we've had here. How are we going to... Adjust it after 30 years of growth and looking at another 30 years growth to make it fit within the laws and rules that we have. So that's what's got us here. How are we going to raise the fees that you pay? Or let's not even say raise. How are we going to assess you for your share of centralized dispatch? And I've been a little bit callous a time or two. I'll admit, I'm sorry. I get a little bit pointed at the tongue sometimes and a little aggravated. And I said, well, do your own dispatch. Because I already know you can go back and do those figures and you're not going to do it. It's so much more efficient to do it this way. But that's not fair in a lot of ways. One way is your citizens or our citizens, we just start figuring county money. Sometimes we forget that county money, a big chunk of it comes from the municipalities to us. And then we choose how to spend it, which is not all good. You need to be involved in that because part of this growth and part of this money that's coming in comes from your activity. Yes, sir?

716-227, municipalities.

contribution that's for this year that's what this when you're 25 dollar request you're 25 that's all that might be you look at the next one down there fiscal year 26 its contribution from the cities will be 752 over 39 which is roughly 22 percent that's what is that like a 5%

It looks like it's not 10% increase for us.

I think it moved around depending on the municipality because we kind of tried to take the way the contract says based on call volume. Is there a contract? Pardon?

Is there a contract?

Yes. Your city's got it. Your city signed a contract for a centralized dispatch. I think.

You sign one every year.

Yeah. Yeah. Same thing with the jail.

Does it have the rate that we're supposed to increase every year?

I'm not sure what's on the contract. We sent out a letter as well with all the amounts on the letter.

And I guess my biggest problem.

Hi, commissioners.

I think I've talked to most of y'all on the phone. So I think my biggest concern with this is.

Just because I'm not coming back, you didn't even call me and talk to me about this.

Don't answer that. And I think Rusty hit on it. It's like we don't know where the figures are coming from. So if we're going to go on call volume or population, I could see us in Pell City being close in population-wise. But if you're going on call volume alone, I want to be half of Pell City because I run half the calls. And then the fire service that we provide to the unincorporated parts of the county, my citizens are the ones that are having to pay for the fire trucks. We're having to pay for all that. But yet we're still providing that same service. support to the ones that we're paying for it in the municipality and That's where we're taking a hit and we're not charging the county for that We're not charging those citizens for that the 9-1-1 number that's on here Well, that money comes from the cities to like this county gets all of our 9-1-1 contribution. We don't get any of it You don't have a 9-1-1 exactly So but essentially that money is coming from the municipalities as well How much did we raise it? considerable yeah I just don't know that you know I'm having to provide the new fire trucks I'm having to provide the workers I'm having to do this but yet I'm getting cut for the dispatch and it's just we have no way of knowing in our budget we're going up 10% we're going up 20% we're going up 30% like we don't know And it's all just a round number, and we're trying to do our budget, and we can't. And I get it. I've told Commissioner Brown and the rest of them, you know, we understand that things go up. We all do. I think every one of us do. But it's just how is it? It just doesn't seem fair in the way it goes up. I mean, are we going by call volume? Are we going by population? Like, we don't know. Like, we're all sitting here going, how do we come up with these numbers? So I guess that's my biggest concern is how are we getting to where we're at and where are we going from here? And if this number is going to keep going up 30% and 40% and 50% every year or whatever it is, like, at some point, we're all going to say, hey, we can't provide services to some of this anymore because we're not going to be able to pay for it. And that's where I'm at. Thank you.

The number on the other sheet totals 823. And so that's 14 or 15, almost 15% increase. And so I just got enough for Margaret, the one over for the total. So all the cities combined on the first sheet is 823,000, where you have 752 here. So that's a 15% total over 25. I know that may be the crux of the extra 10%. But I think we all want to know where that extra 10% is. Okay. Mayor Phillips.

Appreciate you guys having us in, letting us have the floor today. I want to piggyback a little bit off of what Mayor Jessup said. We appreciate the working relationship that we've had between county and municipality. It's something that has benefited municipalities. I think it's benefited the county as a whole. And I'm looking forward to that being something that we continue on. I don't know how, you said you've had this dispatch for 30 years, and I don't know, you know, I don't know what the annual increase has been over the course of the last 10 or 15 years, but, you know, it seems to me like if this is something that we've had, that a more established routine increase makes a lot more sense to me as opposed to ripping the band-aid off in one year. I can stomach budgeting for my community with an annual 5% or something based off of CPI, something that can give us some way to try to make up for it. Because we're not making any more revenue to cover the cost associated with this increase. This is not a money-making thing for us. So we're really kind of taking it on the chin when we step into a meeting and we hear, hey, you got a 25% increase on this line item in your budget that doesn't bring any revenue into your community. And so I understand. that these costs go up. They go up on us. Everything goes up. Our insurance, our everything, our fuel costs, everything goes up. I get it. But there needs to, we've got to find a more consistent and established way to make routine increases as opposed to Margaret trying to carve out 50% more in their budget for an item. That's not reasonable in my mind. So my concern is not the fact that y'all have to increase. I understand. My concern is the impact that it's going to have on our communities. So like for Springville, for instance, I think we're looking at somewhere around a $16,000 or $17,000 a year increase, I think roughly. I see another item, and I'm not trying to jump, I'm sorry. $12,000. It's right at 25%. It's 25%. So I see another item over here on the agenda that talks about decreasing the municipal cooperative funding for the road paving. we've been getting $100,000 a year out of that 4 cent gas tax that the county assessed.

It's been coming out of the general fund.

It's been coming out of the general fund so that it could be shifted around and changed. Anyways, you know, if you decrease that to $50,000, that turns this hit into a $62,000 a year hit to our general fund as the city to do things that we need to do for our communities. You know, again, I want to be able to work with you. I'm not I'm not trying to be confrontational. I'm not trying to be adversarial. I want to be an asset. I want the communities to be an asset. I want the county to work together. I think that that's what we all want. You know, cities like Springville and Moody, we help to cover the cost of SROs. We receive, I think, $50,000 a year as a city in Springville per SRO. We have three SROs. We get $50,000 and that helps cover salary. There's also retirement there's insurance there's training there's equipment there's a lot of other things that go into that as well part of that in my mind goes back to the community policing and just the desire to have our officers in our communities be in our schools so i want to bring that up as well i mean we're talking about cooperation and working together we appreciate the funds that y'all put in for the ssut money right to cover that And we're excited to have our officers. Now, Moody and Springville also have two new school, a new school each. So keep that in mind as we go forward. But, you know, from that aspect, we're saving the county money to cover what we cover associated with these officers. So I understand the increase. I understand that you need to go up. I need it to be in a more digestible way. We've spent two months as a budget committee in Springville trying to hash out our budget, work and cutting where we need to cut, adding where we need to add, line item by line item. And now we're going to have to go back through. If this comes to fruition the way that it's drawn up, we're going to have to go back through, and there's going to be a lot of things that we can't provide. And there's not a lot of meat left on the bone. So I appreciate, like I said, you opening the floor, allowing us the opportunity to speak, and look forward to working with you. And if there's anything that I can do, any numbers you need from me, let me know. Thank you.

Here we have another mayor that wanted to speak. I like this. As y'all know, I like that. That gets us together on these things, just like when we really have been in the mix of subdivision regulations. We really didn't get a lot of input from the developers that were really interested in it until we said, okay, we're ready to pass them. And then the room filled up next time, which is what's going on here. But sometimes that's just the way it works. That's just the nature of the business. I think it would have been better for you to know that If our budget looked like it was going to be committed to other places, you needed to know whether or not your money that you were getting, the $100,000 was going down. You needed to know whether or not your dispatch and your cost for jail services was going up. You needed to know those things earlier. And we talked about that about April or May. But we didn't have figures in either. We don't have the figures of what we do any earlier than you do. So we're working into the final figures somewhere around October. Part of this is still a guess. But it's not much of a guess, for instance, on the amount of 9-1-1 money we're going to get next year. It's pretty well fixed. We know it pretty quick. We've had a couple of... surprises ourself one the four cent fuel tax uh did it go down they created a hundred thousand dollars this year it went down regardless of the of the number it went down how did our how did our four cent fuel tax go down we think something's wrong if you have a city fuel tax in your city And it went down this year. All of us need to get together and figure out somebody to go check this thing. The state addressed this several years ago and actually did legislation in Montgomery that changed the way the State Department of Revenue collected the fuel tax. And they went to what they call collected at the rack, which means they collected at the tank. Like if they go to Oxford and fill it up, or they go to the tank farm south of Birmingham, it's collected at the tank, the rack. Isn't that right, Clay? Yes. And that increased their collection. You think, how did it increase it? You're getting so much a gallon. Because somewhere in that system, their bookkeeping is being very creative. And we think that's happening with fuel tax now. So that's what's affecting the fuel tax. It went down this year. so okay how do we you know that affects your money that you were getting out of the general fund because we basically stopped subsidizing the road department because they were getting more and more of the fuel tax well now they're getting less of the fuel tax we're probably going to subsidize it more out of the general fund which we took away from you that's kind of what the discussion was uh i still think there's enough money to do both personally But my figures are a little bit gray and a little bit close to the bone. My figures are a little bit scary to our people that really know how to do bookkeeping and how to do our figures. My figures are not reckless, but they're not finite either. I have a tendency to round off up.

Have you thought about an audit?

Now, we get audited every year.

No, he's talking about the same time. We had a meeting yesterday with an auditor I did, Kurt and Clay, Tina. And yes, we're looking at some way. We've offered $100,000. But we didn't just now say, we didn't just now say that. We don't know where it's at. We'll find it.

Well, I mean, when fuel prices increase, people tend to buy less fuel. And since it's a cent, right, it's a four cent gas tax, right? So it's not a percentage. So just because the cost of fuel goes up doesn't mean you get more every time again.

But I'm comparing like leaves. Equal to steel and diesel sale. That's not right. Steel, they sell way more diesel than lead. That's what the numbers we're looking at. So there's some discrepancies is what I'm saying.

And let me just point this out. That meeting that was held yesterday is not the first meeting we've had on this. We actually met with the people that we said go audit our fuel tax two years ago. So this was a meeting with the people we said go audit our fuel tax two years ago. And they were having difficulty auditing it for some reason. It's been going down for that long. So for this reason, does that mean we need to fire the people that's doing our audit now and hire somebody new? Because this audit's not satisfactory to us. That's what the meeting yesterday was about. So we need to see, do any of y'all audit your fuel tax? I guess the largest fuel tax collector in the room would probably be Moody. Do y'all audit your fuel tanks? Do you have an auditor? If you're happy with that auditor's numbers, we need to know who your auditor is and use yours. It's our same auditor. Same one. Same one. And so what we might want to do is share your data on your audit with our audit for county and see, do we see a discrepancy? We need to fight this system with our system. And we know we disbelieve there's something wrong. To pass a four cent fuel tax and the growth of this county and also the number of new service stations and the traffic, the traffic on the interstate has not gotten less. All you got to do is drive on it for four years and you realize it's gotten more. So we think something's wrong. So we're working on that. But even looking at that figure, I came back into office as the only commissioner other than Jeff had worked with before that had worked with the budget. Jeff and I had worked with the budget, didn't even have the 4-cent fuel tax. We could do it without the 4-cent fuel tax. If 4-cent fuel tax does so-and-so, are we getting that much benefit out of it? And my answer was no. It's going somewhere else. We're doing something with it instead of other than building roads, and it's possibly going to paying cash for equipment that's come up, for instance. Maybe we should start looking at going back to like we used to, go to Cat Finance. Well, you've got to pay interest. Well, in a big business like a $73 million budget for a county, it's not always a bad thing to borrow the money. You use your borrowing power. And that may be what we need to do there. Instead of spending $800,000 for a piece of equipment in the road department, maybe we should have put that on a budget where we paid for it over a period of the length of the piece of equipment, 10 years or something. So those are all factoring into this very same thing. Where can we adjust our budget? Well, one place we know is Central Dispatch. Another place we know... Y'all don't want to hear the figures for the jail. Y'all don't want to hear the figures. The figures for the jail are unbelievable. There's no fault of the jail. We have a new jail. You would have thought the new jail would be more efficient. Well, it's kind of like when you upgrade a house under your building codes. If you leave that old-timey wiring and plumbing alone, you don't have to mess with it. But you remodel, now you've got to bring it up to code. That's exactly what happened there. It wasn't just code on the building. It was code on how many people you've got to have to run the jail. So how many people did we hire, Michelle? Something like... Something like a dozen, I forgot. We hired a bunch of people. Well, a jailer, like all of our employees, probably a little more than yours because of the way we made our benefit package, but I would say that our average cost for a jailer is $65,000, $75,000.

Wasn't there a fee added increase to cover that cost?

Yes, and that's a good point to make. That fee is probably a fourth of what we said it was going to be.

You mean it's only generating a fourth of what you need?

It's not generating anywhere near what we said it's going to generate. So that was a figure factored in to make us feel better about ourselves being able to pay the bill on the jail. It has not produced the money. There again, do we need to audit that figure too? I don't know. But the fees, what was that one? The fee on every case in court? Yeah. $2? It was minimal. It has not produced the money to factor in. The cost of the operation of the jail is what surprised all of us. You'd think you'd put in a new jail with new heating and cooling and new way of operating it with one jail. And we're operating two scattered out in the county. One reason we do this is we can put one in one place and capitalize on the efficiency. It has not been efficient. It cost us, we've got a figure. I won't throw it out there to you because they'll get on to me for Bateman math. But the cost of running one jail, the day we moved the people out of Asheville and moved everybody over here to one jail, went up over 15%. And we're not talking about thousands here. We're talking about millions by the time you count up what it costs to run a jail. So the big animal is outgrowing us. That's for sure. It's tough to fat crawl that in. And now we have another bean counter here. And Don, listen to him real close. Don is also a bean counter.

Well, it wasn't what I came up here for, but we should definitely have that auditor look into how much Bucky's is drawing, because I guarantee you they're pulling people off of 459 as well as 20. So all that decrease in the gas tax, I can almost tell you that's going to correlate right back to that Bucky's. But what I came up here for was, one, thank you for the changes y'all made and putting the meetings online, letting people see them, being more transparent and being out there. I mean, that's a huge, huge, huge win for public trust and everything. But one thing I think that I think communication is key and it needs to be, you know, the shock is from finding out after the fact rather than during the conversation. And so, like, being in communication and, you know, even if it's just rusty, like, having someone here be part of the conversation so that we can catch this up front or be aware of it and be part of the discussion. I know it's y'all's decision, but we have to, like, pass news on and plan for it. And so, you know, the email shows one number, and then the sheet of the expected cost shows another number, right? So a 5% increase versus a 15% increase. That's just something that we need to be aware of ahead of time and have time to plan. And it's a simple solution, sending an email. Believe it or not, Besides what you hear, I communicate a lot via email, send information out, send lots of data out, sometimes too much. But I'd rather always have too much data than not enough. And rather know, even if it's not going to come to fruition, I'd rather be aware that it's a possibility than to find out after the fact or to get hit with it post-mortem. And so that's my only ask. I just appreciate all y'all are doing and appreciate where y'all are going. And if you need anything, call me.

Yes, sir.

Hey, my name is Randy Hedage. I'm the mayor of Argo. Thanks for having us. I just want to take us more to a personal level from the small cities. I've probably got one of the smallest cities is not the smallest city in the county. And our budget splatters a pancake. So and it's hard to generate revenue. And when these things hit us, it hurts us a lot. We had a bridge go out with by half a million dollars, which is a fourth of our budget. So we're behind way behind. So in road repair, any road repair we were going to do just disappeared. for a couple of years. So as y'all go through and make these decisions, just be sure and keep that in your mind. The smaller cities suffer the most in these things. Some of the bigger cities, they can absorb 5%, 10%. We can't. It really will hurt us. We'll have to do something, whatever something is. And I appreciate how hard it is for you guys to figure these budgets and keep everything running. I know it's not easy, because that's where we're at. So I just wanted to say that, and I appreciate your time. Thank you, Mayor.

You brought up a few minutes ago was the decrease in the fuel that's been purchased and I think it's important that may spur a longer term conversation that we need to have as counties, municipalities, government in general. We fund road improvements based off of taxes generated from gas and electric vehicles and things like that are becoming more and more prevalent, causing less people to spend money on fuel. So that's something I think, I don't know if you guys would be on the commission when it comes time for those sorts of conversations really, but I think it is something we need to try to figure out long term how we're gonna fund road improvements because I do think that there will be a trend of fuel starting to decrease. And I think it will continue. And I don't think it's an anomaly. I think it's something that's electric vehicles are becoming more efficient. car manufacturers making vehicles that use less miles, less fuel per mile. So by nature, some of these things are going to continue to decrease. So that's not something necessarily for this commission to figure out or us generally as cities, but I think that's an overarching state federal, and we're all gonna have to pay attention to that as we go down the road.

So as we go that way, I think it'll be good to have feedback from the cities. We've got some pretty smart people here. I'm not one of them. But anyway, if you put a committee together to look at some of this stuff, don't hesitate to reach out. We all have vested interest in what happens.

That's the point where we are now. We used to basically do our own in-house budgeting as we got to it. The parts that we're sharing, we'll continue to to share more of it or take on more of it. But I think you need to know about what's the part we're doing. Let me touch on 9-1-1. And first of all, let me just point out that Aslyn does an excellent job with our 9-1-1. She's well known all over the state as a person that's very efficient and knows what 9-1-1 is. few years ago got a little more complicated the state passed a law and created the state 9-1-1 board and so the money that used to be collected from the phones used to come to us and then and we ran our communication district out of it now all the money goes to the state and the state 9-1-1 board under law distributes it back and that's created another bureaucracy is there some money in there that can come back to counties that's gonna be counties argument but You don't have nine. When you look down here at the 911 figure, we're one of three counties that the county commission sits as the 911 board. And that means that the county commission has the responsibility and the benefit of looking at that 911 money and using it for sending out responses to the 911 calls, dispatches. So that's how money comes out of 9-1-1 into dispatch. But by law, it's only supposed to pay for the 9-1-1 calls to dispatch. Now, when I came back in four years ago, I'm thinking, man, we've got to do something. The 9-1-1 calls were probably at least 3 fourths of the calls coming into central dispatch. They're actually less than half.

Is that right?

30%. They're about 30%. I thought the cost coming in central was everybody in there said, 911, what's your emergency? No. One out of three is that. So we can't pay for central dispatch any more out of 911 than we are. Because we're not really paying for dispatch. We're paying for call takers. It's a totally different term. It has different legal responsibilities. That's why this board has to pay attention to it from a different standpoint. Call takers in most counties answer the phone. 911, what is your emergency, or whatever they're supposed to say. There's a rule even that says, what are they supposed to say? 911, where are you located? Well, you'd think, why are they even asking that? We've got this little thing that puts a dot on your phone. No, that had never totally materialized. And that's where you're located now, what's your emergency. there are rules for 9-1-1 the way we can spend the money we could can't just pour it all over into central dispatch because it's not about dispatch 9-1-1 in most of the counties a 9-1-1 call taking center answers the call they send that call to your dispatcher and the county's dispatcher because most of them have separate quite a few have centralized it it's That's a oversimplification. But what I'm saying is, OK, what about all this money laying over there, 9-1-1? Well, it belongs to 9-1-1. It's for certain purposes. It's for equipment. It's for running the 9-1-1 program within the law. So tapping into it, $600,000 was a pretty big exercise of how do we do this. Aslan pretty well figured it out. If we're not going to build a building with the money we've accumulated for 9-1-1, then we need to put more of it right now into our contract. 9-1-1, the 9-1-1 board and its number one employee, Aslan, contracts with St. Clair County just like you contract with St. Clair County for dispatch services. so our 9-1-1 funding went up from a million dollars to roughly 1.6 million dollars well that's what it says here so you know so there's another entity that did go up but we had to arrange what's the purpose for this money anyway uh We're doing about all out of 9-1-1 we can do is what I'm saying. We're not sitting on money from 9-1-1. The county 9-1-1 board, which just happens to be us, chose to put more of the money that we've accumulated into the contract for centralized dispatch. So, Aslan, do you have anything to add to the dispatch cost factor? Is this anything we need to discuss?

Well, just one thing I want to point out is that For 911, the funds that we collect every year come to, now at this point, come to $1.3 million. So in employee salaries alone for your dispatchers, our contribution to that, we're already running in the deficit. So don't think that 911 has money sitting around, extra money. We do not. Just for the program, just for the infrastructure, programs alone that dispatch uses to take a call. We look at about it's about $600,000 in your base. So if you were to start your own dispatch, if you want to say we'll just do our own dispatch, you're looking at $600,000 a year, just operating expenses, not employees. So y'all just I mean, having a centralized dispatch is buying power. So you're not duplicating the efforts everything that that comes out of your 9-1-1 fund the county's 9-1-1 fund goes to answer every call for every municipality and you're paying for the programs one time you're paying for the server one time so 9-1-1 is your 9-1-1 funds are being spent properly

Yes, sir. Mayor Jessup.

One more question, then I know y'all got to move on. And I do, too. Is the leads coming on? Are they going to help us offset any of this conversation?

Well, if they come on.

How is that going to, will that offset? No, we'll have to hire four more dispatchers. And there's some discussion there, and I don't agree with that. There's even differences up here. We're going to cost us money. Let me point out, I've been in several meetings with the Blount County 911 who dispatches leads. Make sure everybody knows that. Blount County 9-1-1 Communications District dispatches leads. They dispatch leads. They figured out the number. Their dispatchers and how many it takes. Right now, they're dispatching leads with two, the equivalency of two dispatchers. Well, how can they do it with two when we say we've got to have four? you know just just drawing a difference in the two why don't we go to three i think we can do three but what's in it for us we can erase that if it's going to cost you more money to take on leads then that we need to get away from that what's in it for anybody part of that has to do with the uh bringing leads back into the family Leeds is larger than four of our municipalities. The number of people in Leeds that live in St. Clair County is larger than four of our municipalities. The Leeds contribution to our revenue stream is larger than three of our municipalities. You got Walmart and Lowe's, the only Lowe's we have. That's in St. Clair County. The houses that have been built, if you look at the interstate, that's in St. Clair County. You run into the little wall out there pretty quick, though, that is now in another county. But the part that's in St. Clair County leads is a municipality of St. Clair County. And they have asked for a portion of, Money that we share if we give you some money out of the Fuel tax money They got three major stations right there in Leeds. They could make the arguments like make the same art the same argument that moody can Right across the road. We they got some big stations over there, too and So Well, the point is they have some stations over there, and we have some stations over here. And regardless, we know what the figures are that we should be getting out of the Moody stations. Hypothetically, we don't think it's enough, but we know that. So using that factor, we know about what we ought to be getting out of Leeds, too. Leeds population is not even in question. We know how many people live in the St. Clair County portion of Leeds, as well as we know what lives in the city of Odenville, for instance. We know. And we know the revenue stream that comes out of Leeds, out of Walmart and Lowe's and all those stores and a few restaurants and whatever is open over there. So Leeds community has been pretty careful to not come over here and ask for another slice of the pie, for instance.

Are there a couple other counties they can reach out to? Pardon? They've got a couple of other counties they can reach out to.

Yeah, but the other counties, for instance, Jefferson County hadn't got a four-cent fuel tax that they can even ask them to share. Jefferson County doesn't have a one-cent sales tax. It goes all 100% into the county general fund. So they don't have resources to ask for out of Leeds that our other ten municipalities have. So Leeds is a little different.

They have occupational taxes that we don't all have, too.

We're jealous of their occupational tax. Any municipality in this town can have one if you want to go propose it and put it on your agenda to vote on tomorrow. Don't you all have the authority?

I'd like to get reelected.

There you go. That's a political question. They have one because somebody over there had the political courage to pass an occupational tax.

Look, I want to say, I think I'll reiterate for all of us mayors, I don't think it's a problem in us sharing in the expense and 911 and all that. I think it's just that we all need a better understanding of how that is broke up, how our contributions are going to be forward because ultimately none of us even have a We don't get a vote. Our counsels, we're going to have to go back to our counsels and say, hey, this is why this is going up so much. And we're going to tell our police chiefs and our fire chiefs, hey, this is where this money's coming from. It's coming out of y'all's budget. That's where it's coming from. So I think that's where we're all out with this whole thing.

I'm just sitting here and I'm so glad that y'all are here this morning because we need more of this, not less of this. We need to talk more. And I share your frustration and your concern about communication and predictability. I think that this would be a little bit smoother process if there were more communication and there were some more predictability in what's coming. I think Mayor Phillips made the point very well that insofar as the municipalities are concerned, just like any organization, whether you're a business, whether you're a government agency or a government body, you need some sort of predictability. And we've got to do better at communicating what's going on with all of you. Bottom line, we've just got to do better at that. It is frustrating.

Thank you.

And just personally, I'll I look forward to working with anybody that will talk with me on how we can improve that. I really do, because I think that this is, I mean, look, this is a big deal. I mean, you know, it doesn't sound so bad when you say it real fast, but, you know, $10,000 here to $20,000 here, I mean, that's, that can be significant to some budget somewhere. That can be a very significant. So we've got to do a better job as the county at communicating with all of you. That's how I see it. That's what I think. There needs to be some level of predictability where the rates are not jumping just crazy from one year to the next. Without warning. You've got predictability. That would help y'all, I think, a lot. I wish we had a little bit more of that. So thank you for expressing those concerns and I concur wholeheartedly with your concerns.

I'll share with you some of our conversations that we've had during the budgeting process related to the municipalities. There's still some people that still feel like you should get part of the $0.04 fuel tax. And by the way, you don't get any of it right now. Zero. This much right here. You get zero. And some of you hit me up over the years about pointing that out. You get zero. So we give you $1 million. And the mayor's association, I thought, was a great agreement. Because you did lift up the small communities by splitting that money equally. Everybody got $100,000. But you got that out of the general fund. And if our general fund is growing, but our road department fund has died, and we're taking any money out of the general fund to do things at the road department, then just like your budget, we've got to adjust that. think part of that is what do we want to do with the money that's on our plate for instance clays organization last year for lack of any better figures that they've given me paved 81 miles of road last year close close okay that's 81 miles of road where are any of those city streets Well, it's supposed to be, but are any of them roads inside of city limits that we claim as our roads? So that's going to be another continuing discussion. So my feelings about sharing the fuel tax money is still like it was, which basically says different from what we're doing now. No, you can't use it for anything except paving, not paving and equipment like our resolution says. Our resolution is not a state law. A resolution was passed on the county commission to impose a $0.04 fuel tax, $0.04 on every gallon of fuel, diesel, gasoline, et cetera. In that process, it says that money must be spent on paving or paving equipment. My position has never been we should share money with the municipalities for letting you buy more paving equipment. It ought to be for paving for me. That's my position, always has been. 100 000 this year last year we did the other we kind of loosened it up you can spend it on education some people there's been indication that some municipalities didn't even spend it well once once we gave it to you under last year's rules you don't have to spend it you put it aside and save it to add to another 200 000 for next year if you get that although this year you're not going to get 50 looks like but you see where i'm going with that that's uh That $100,000, we paid it last year. And we're going to see there's something really important on the things that we get. Estimated June 30. Estimated July 30. Estimated. Estimated. That gets into this year's budget just like yours does. Last year in January, when we finalized all of our figures, we were surprised that our sales tax went up, for instance, more than we estimated it was going to be, which was a great surprise. I'm a gambler with your money. I jump out there and say, we're going to go up. I don't just make that haphazardly. Every year, I try to figure, did we go up last year? No, but did we go up the year before? Over a five-year period, I want to know if the graph is going up. And I've been chairman of the county commission 16 years in a row and four years added to it for 20 years. I've never left a budget where we were broke I also don't ever remember a five-year period that we went wrong. In a five-year period, we've always gone up some. That's what I base my figure on. Yeah, pretty loose math. It doesn't fit into Don Smith's and Michelle's and Mayor Margaret's bean counting necessarily. But that's the best I can do with what Tarrant High School provided me with. Yeah, one of us followed math. There you go. Yeah, one of us did. Well, I took it again. So I think this is good. I think you now know more about why we're at this decision. I'd like you to know this. We have two out of five new people that will be making the decision on this budget. This budget has me involved and Jeff involved, but we won't be spending this budget. We're trying to make a budget that whoever's coming in, the New York ones, don't have to go back as a whole commission and readjust it in January when we're gone. We're trying to do a budget that also matches what the desires of those people are, which is kind of hard to do. We don't know what those are yet. But we didn't want to say, OK, I'm going to stand my ground now. I'm demanding that you. that the county pays so and so because y'all can blame me next. I won't be here next year. I can demand all I want this year. But I don't want to put the new chairman in that kind of box either. I mean, he's just going to have to come back and say, what a sorry job I did. I want to do a job that somehow transitions into the job and the thought process there. So part of this has been that also. It may be a more conservative budget. It may be we say, we don't think we're going to get this much money. If I've been there and say, I think we are. So that's part of it.

We don't ask a favor. 21.6% of the total cost is what this breaks out to be. $823,000. Would you all, as the city's mayors, agree to take this number? And y'all go among yourselves and come back to us and tell us how you'd want us to pay. Take it off our back. Where y'all could disperse it among yourselves. Would y'all consider doing you an idea of how to disperse that that bill?

I think we could do that.

Yeah, it's not 55. It could be 45 for raglan or whatever the number may be.

We can do that suggestion.

That means some of you that may be some of the other cities gonna be paying more than what they're gonna be paying.

I think everybody understands that. You see what I mean? No, that'll take it off us making that decision.

Yeah.

about how we disperse it, if that's something you'd like to do.

We're like y'all, we ain't gonna have time to do it now. This year's budget, but in the long run, I think we could get you something by the time your next year's budget comes around. I think we could come up with a way.

I just have a question. In this process, did you determine what each minute's probably going to be?

They're hanging on the communications office.

It comes based upon a recommendation from the communication office.

As long as we're provided similar information that they're making that decision on, I think we can take on that task.

I think next year would be good if we could do that.

You're talking about from the sheriff's office? Yeah. Didn't they recommend 5% though? Across the board and overall. 5% of the cost.

Yeah, Freddie, would you like to speak to that? I think Freddie's original figures to us when we started looking at the budget.

5% because of the cost, trying to share the cost. We just want to cross the board 5% for everybody. And the expense, $230,000 for the core fee is $8,000, and the maintenance fee is $150,000. $55,000 a year that we just started paying two years ago. And then we also had an expense of $55,000 on repeaters that we shared with Shelby County. So all together, we're looking at $330,000 of expense that went up this year just for the running of the operation of the radio. That's just running the radio system itself. That's not counting about 1996 when I came here the first time. We had three dispatchers on day shift. three sometimes about 10 o'clock at night, then went down to two after 10 o'clock at night. Today we have seven on day shift and five to six on night shift.

So we've increased our cost year after year after year.

But the big thing is the radio system costs so much just to upkeep. Not counting, we upgraded our phone system last year through asthma and a grant that she's able to get for $300,000. Which the grant helped pay for that. It goes up, something goes down, you gotta replace it. Badger backup goes down, you gotta spend two, three hundred dollars to get a badger backup to come back in there. So it's a lot of expense that a lot of people don't see that maybe we need to start sharing so everybody can see how much it really does cost us to go up. Because Motorola don't mind going up on us every year. As far as the county has to come up with. So this year we just 5% across the board for everybody.

Is the maintenance contract dead out or is that just straight from Motorola?

It's just proprietary mayor with Motorola.

And why did we choose them? We went along with firing EMS. And working with the police agencies, what do y'all want? Your chief wants such and such brand. And your chief wants such and such brand. And your chief wants, even if it's this brand, he wants these features. And we didn't dictate the features or the brands. But within that, we had to accommodate whether those radios would operate on the system we chose.

Also, this coming up budget, we're going to put $55,000 in our budget. to program the fire radios because they don't have encryption in their fire radios. And to do that, we have 599 motor-rotor radios and 312 Kenwood radios that had to be touched. Every police department, every fire department radio has to be touched. But the county, I believe, has agreed to pay that $5,000 to get that done because the fire department's having people show up on their scene by scanning. We said, we're supposed to be able to scan these radios. Somebody figured a way out. But we don't think they can do the encryption part because it's never been hacked before. was having for years. So that's something else the county has agreed to pay for us this year.

Change in subject just a wee bit. Y'all were talking about the fuel tax and the $100,000 we got that's probably going to go away at some point. Are y'all committing to help pave the streets of the cities? Because that's what that's used for. I mean, that's what she's for today is to pay roads that need to be paid. We paid, I don't know, 19 roads last year with the money we got. And that's not gonna be here. Yes.

For example, and I'll use this example, 19th Street here in Pell City is ours. We maintain that. But we maintain that. And I think we helped Mayor Jessup pay 9 tenths of a mile. last year. Depot Street. And I think we did a road at Providence for Yadavich Road. We took care of that. 68,000. No problem. But, you know, we're going to help. Absolutely.

We'll see on that black road last year. That's fantastic. But I'm worried about the 44 miles that we're on. It's got to be updated. I was whining about the bridge earlier. That's a big hit for a small city. I'm not going to say people dropped the ball, but there was no grants involved at all with that. It was right out of our budget. So I was just curious where y'all stood on that. Somewhere down the road, and I don't mean next week, are we going to prioritize the roads that need paving the way and try to get so many a year? I know Clay's done a great job with us, but I don't know how that works. I'm the newest guy in the room, so I'm just trying to work through it.

Well, I'm aware not for this municipal funding cooperative to go away. It is my intent that it remain in place and not go the other way.

Well, what about the idea that Mr. Bateman had about guaranteeing it for 10 years and we could borrow gifts and pay all of our roads. You know, as Shangri La, you know, it'd been great. We all be happy afterwards. Same kumbaya. But in reality, I don't think that's possible. But that funding does does feed all these cities, and they do use it for the roads.

Well, I would have never proposed it if I didn't feel like, in reality, it was possible at 100,000 per municipality times 10. Because it is possible. But I really believe it's definitely possible now at 50. If we could tell you that all of you, when you start your budget process next year in April and May, and you knew you were going to get 50. That'd be something. If you just know from year to year, this is what you're going to get. And our decision wouldn't affect you that year. It wouldn't affect you until the next year. Or my proposal was it wouldn't affect you for 10. We're going to tell you you're going to get $50,000 a year for 10 years instead of just $50,000 this coming year. $50,000 a year for 10 years would give you the opportunity to go to the bank and borrow money to do several projects at one time that ought to last you the 10 years.

Well, the big deal is the unknown is horrible. I mean, your personal life or your business life. If we know what we're going to get and it's consistent and a commitment, that helps us a lot.

That's right. And that gets us back to predictability. And that would be very helpful.

And I want to speak up for Mayor Lee. He did the right thing. We originally had this down in percentages. And Raglan was going to get a very small percent overall. He come forward and said the right thing to do is do it equally. And then he come back and said we need to take the road and pavement out of it and let it for safety, anything needed. They have general funds, but the money out of this $0.04 has to go, supposed to go, for pavement. And that's what we're going to do. We've already talked about it this year coming up for y'all.

Okay. Once again, I think it's been a good meeting overall. A little more understanding, a little more history. That's one thing that we miss as we transition into newer people. We just take it for granted sometimes that we all know how we got here. We don't. It changes all the time. uh so uh these meetings if nothing else get us caught up a little bit on the history how did we get here and uh you know the path was a little rocky but it's been pretty good overall it's been pretty good the history of the cooperation between the county and municipalities i think will only continue to get better because we all feel we really do feel that we're all in this together we really do and i thank y'all history number

i want to say one thing before i leave the door so none of y'all will shoot me after i say this but you know it probably time to start looking for some more sources of revenue

And we are. And we are. As he jogged out the door. Oh, boy. I know that's a scary thing. How do we produce more revenue? First thing we have to do is make sure that people think we're taking the money that we're taking now and using it wisely. And we've always got a trust situation there. Are we using it wisely? We think we are. We wouldn't have made that decision. Sure we are. We've got no waste. There you go. Anything else? Okay. Glad y'all are here. Y'all are more than welcome to stay for the entire meeting. We've got reports coming from Clay. He's going to report on some paving that's going on and then Tina will report on some administrative issues and we'll go to the county attorney and he's going to tell us whether we are or are not about to get sued by anybody. So far he's kept us all out of lawsuits pretty much and definitely kept us out of jail. Some people would have put us in jail real quick on different issues, but we have a really good, efficient staff that works hard to make this county the best county in Alabama. Then we'll go to each one of us and we'll have our discussion on what our thoughts are for the day. And if that's it, then we'll, anybody else so we can move on? Mayor?

Yeah, I need more revenue, but I get mine personally from Southern Pipe.

All right. Then we will move on with our agenda then. And the next item on the agenda is Clay Phillips, the county engineer. And while Clay comes to the microphone to give us his report, let me point this out. We mentioned 19th Street and Pell City. Up until just a few years ago, 19th and Pell City wasn't even a question. Neither was Depot Street, and neither was the street in Moody that runs in front of City Hall. Those were county roads based... That determined some federal money that we got. There were some changes made in the Federal Highway Administration on how that federal money came down to counties. It became less money, but it didn't have any strings attached as such. We could move it around. So whether or not those roads continued to be the county's responsibility is up to us. We will not. But the good part of that is, to get the federal money, we had to build that road. We had to build that road based on standards set by the federal government.

You've got several down there in movement.

Yeah, it came with strings attached, didn't it, Clay? Feds told us how to build that road. Now then, the feds don't tell us how to build that road. So we don't want to build less of a road. We want your right of ways to be just as wide. You're draining to meet the standards set by the certain standards that are out there. So that's kind of what Clay's dealing with. His company shifts gears too, but it is one of the largest pools of money that we spend in this county because the one of the main things we do is we design build and maintain public roads to the county and we could do that for municipalities and we do that for schools we do that for fire departments there's certain places we do it for but mainly it's for county roads so the roads i just mentioned along with a lot of other roads have been assumed to be county roads for years

In the cities. And we want to continue to maintain them. They're in the cities.

They're in the cities. We don't want to run from that. Yeah. If you ever have a county commission that gets up here and says, that's not our road anymore. Well, that was because we said it would. We can keep saying it's ours if we want to. And so we're going to keep maintaining that to each street, Depot Street. Park Avenue and Steel Road, Park Avenue, Kelly Creek Road, Steel all the way to the stop sign on Highway 11, Springville, County Road 9, County Road 9. Where does it start, Clay? Starts at the railroad track. 11. Starts at Highway 11.

Starts at 11.

Goes through a big chunk of Springville, and then up the mountain, outside Springville. Well, Springville City. County line. Springville City 11 is down. Goes to the county line, don't it? No. Well, I think it's time for y'all to annex that mountain. Take that mountain.

It stops as you turn to go up the mountain. It stops right at the bottom. Y'all just stop right there.

I didn't hear y'all say Rail Lane Road.

Row Lane Road? We used to always do Row Lane Road when it was dirt. I remember thinking, what are we doing to Row Lane Road?

Row Lane Road is on for them. It's not ours.

What street did we take in for Pell City and bring it up to standard and then give it to them? Trust Ferry? No, that was ours.

That was a federal aid road, Trust Ferry. Right there. But that's the one we did. By the refractory.

Yeah. Trust Ferry Road was originally a foreign market road.

It was a federal aid road.

And we brought it up to standard again, and then we'd give it to the city of Pell City to take home, right? That's true. OK.

It was a weird route. It turned off of 78 on Trust Ferry Road. It came down to the stop sign. It turned right and went up Golf Course Road. It got to Mace Bend Road, turned to the left, and went down to Cedar Lane, turned to the right, and went over to Highway 34. That was the federal aid route, which was all ours. It's crazy. Part of this history is scary. I'm glad we don't have all that. Clay, you patched all the potholes.

Okay. Ready for me to go to item one? Did you get the pad built for friendship? All right. First going to update on crews and projects. Our base crew's been working on Kelly Creek Road, getting it ready for the letting of the federal aid road, the federally funded project. They should be done this week. It's our intent that they'll be done this week. Paving crew this week has been paving some parking lots in Springville on behalf of the city of Springville. And we should get surface treatment on Camp Road finished this week as well in Springville. And of course our federal, our ATRIP project is moving forward there at Kerr Road and US 411. Moving on to item two.

What about, we heard any more out of the 411, and Central Road, what we had on it?

They want to assess the beaver situation and the dewatering situation. It's supposed to go out there next week or two with representatives from Allendine.

Are they going to let it out and remove the water line?

I think so, yes. Item number two is to consider a request to remove three vehicles from the inventory and place them on govdeals.com. List of the vehicles on that list, on my report. Item number three is consider a request to remove.

Using a little bit of, we're gonna do that now.

You heard the recommendation, remove those items from the inventory. It's about three pickup trucks, and they're old. And one of them's a 2002. So we're taking some old vehicles out of the inventory out there and putting them on the gov deals to be sold. Entertain a motion? Motion. Second? Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Approved. We approve the recommendation of the county engineer. OK.

Wait a minute before we go any further. Let me ask you this since Moody's still here. Red lights down there in Moody. Have you heard anything out of them when they're supposed to look at the beach?

No, I have not. I have. Have you heard anything? I have. What's the holdup on?

We're on camera.

Somebody's going to hold me to that. Yeah? Yeah. So last... I've been in. Me and Aldot are pretty much on a first-name basis, but they're supposed to let it in September. I signed the right-of-way agreement this week, and they sent it back to Aldot, and so they're supposed to let it in September, which I would assume construction sometime around December, January-ish, probably three months, I'm guessing, after letting it.

usually two at best that's yes that's that's where we're at i'll bring it up too i've had i've had other requests from a couple of citizens and i'm sure this is why i got also a request from officials in the city of leeds about a red light coming out of the subdivision down there that's been on our plate for years and years and years It's on a state highway. And now the city street. It just keeps getting to be a larger and larger subdivision. And the people can't get out in the mornings. What's the time, Oliver? Oliver's crossing the red light on US 411.

We're four years in this process. Yeah.

It takes, like I say, it takes a little bit. We're probably... They've both been on the plate for years and years and years.

So that's going to be another cooperative project with the city and the state and the county doing some kind of help there.

And I've been working around about the red light.

They've already got that done.

Community planning.

All that around about right. Clay promised me he'd get me one. So just so y'all know. Y'all gonna find that? That's county right?

Both of them. 2.6 million. roundabout right there.

About $2 million. To what you're talking about that I met with Mike the other day because he's got some people looking at developing some stuff out there.

I know he's probably talking to y'all.

That's the other thing you're going to be having to think about. And I ask him about it. If we're going to do a roundabout there, we're going to have to have more right of way. So that means we're going to be getting over on that property. DAVID BURRAGE.

Well, that, me and Clay, we've all met out there about six times already. DAVID BURRAGE.

You better wait and see. When he goes selling and developing that, he's got some people looking and buying that out there.

DAVID BURRAGE. Does any city in the county that y'all know of have their own roundabout? Is there a county roundabout?

Yeah. Two towns.

Asheville.

Asheville. Two towns. A state. A state. Oh, yeah. A state. The one that's going to be in .

Let me ask the question again. Does the county have a roundabout? No. No. Does any city own a roundabout? No. Those roundabouts were built by Federal Highway Safety Funds. and there's just a certain amount of money every year allocated to those our state's been pretty aggressive at getting that money and yeah we've got some roundabouts in some places that look more like eggs than they do circles but but if you see a roundabout it wasn't because the county built a roundabout they're and they're pretty expensive they do they do decrease fatal accidents and serious accidents because the speed of the accident is brought down really low We are looking at a place that possibly could have been one on one of the county, two county roads. But it would, the state would help fund that out of some money they have, but the roundabout safety money ran out Last year they had more projects than they had money I don't know what will happen this year how much money but clay can keep up with that He'll he can find out what money is available for roundabouts Mr. Cooper director Cooper was very involved. He liked those Dependent part of this is going to depend on who your next highway director is and does he like roundabouts and City wants to build one. The county wants to build one. You just about got to come out of our own pocket right now. There's no federal money. to do that with.

Moving forward is to wait until the funds get available. Yeah. 80%.

I just want to go into D.C.'s real important. I know. I got my hat. Y'all got yours. The mayor, there you go. The mayor and the mayor of Pro Tem went to D.C. last year. That's why those trips are so important.

Yes.

Go and get with the right people. Take the right people. Discuss it with staff that's the right people to handle that. You may be discussing a highway project and they'll be over there just smiling and having a big time. in a meeting and it's a person that actually handles uh uh health care that's gonna change that didn't help you get to washington dc you want to meet with the person if you're out there about a road meet with the person that's responsible for roads okay so okay all right number three finish up there that's we've got to finish up number two we got stephen in my eyes all right are you a discussion on those pickup trucks on face the eye opposed no most kicks All right, item three, right? Inventory there again. This is two plotters and a copier. Entertain a motion? Motion. Second? Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries. Item four, now back to Clay.

Consider approving a proposal slash agreement from Price Road Boring Incorporated for a pipeline project on Canyon Road 26 for $78,868.

Motion. DAVID BURRAGE- Second.

DAVID BURRAGE- Properly moved and seconded. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. DAVID BURRAGE- All opposed, no. Motion carries. Thank you.

Consider approving a proposal slash agreement from Remac Incorporated for a crack ceiling project on Canyon Road 30 and Mountain View Road for $67,638. So moved. DAVID BURRAGE- Motion to have a second.

Second. DAVID BURRAGE- Properly moved and seconded. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. DAVID BURRAGE- All opposed, no. Motion carries. OK.

Consider approving a proposal agreement from Corrective Asphalt Materials for a preservation project to place reclamite on Canyon Road 42 on top of Channel Mountain Road. We paved it about three years ago and this is to help preserve that plant mix that was placed on that road.

How long will that extend the life of that road?

Oh, approximately five years. OK. Motion. Second. That's an incredibly good value.

We have a motion and a second. Any more discussion on that? In the way of discussion, I want to thank you for, if you'll notice, the last three items here, they're all different. They're all different things, a pipeliner project, a crack seal project, a preservative project. All those come through clay. Clay looks at these roads and can help make a determination of what will help that road. And many times it's, When you help that road, we're still tied to federal government if we ask for a match. If we hadn't done certain things on those roads, then we're not going to get the match. And I want to thank you for keeping us up to speed on that. I think we learned a lot when we started talking about tip and stip. Correct. Thank you for the work you're doing on that.

OK, item, oh, do we finish?

Motion to second. Any more discussion? Opposed, aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries on item six.

Consider approving a proposal agreement from Eugene L. Evans Manufacturing. for $8,750 to replace the green canvas awnings on the front of the Highway Department's office building with bronze metal buildings. And also, I'd like to add that he's requesting some money up front to cover the materials. And he's not requesting any of the labor and equipment expenses. But I would like to have it approved pending Our attorney's approval. And the total is $8,750? It is. OK.

The county attorney will look at it before we release any checks to be sure that we're compliant. Have a motion? Motion. Second? Second. Probably move to second. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries.

So we're approving a boundary survey proposal from Darryl Luker for St. Clair County's lot. St. Clair County's commission's lot located at 392 5th Street, Asheville. The amount of the proposal is $850. So he can do the boundary survey.

DAVID BURRAGE. Motion to have a second. Robert, you're moved to second. Any discussion? All in favor, say aye. Aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries.

Lastly we'd consider, well just for informational items, we'd like to donate old highway construction plans to the museum, Ashford Museum and Archives.

Do I have a motion to donate those? Motion to second. Properly moved and seconded. Any discussion? In web discussion, do we still have our old maps? i've been here so long i'm so old in 1986 if you brought up a motion in the county commission meeting to make a road at such and such a county road and it got a motion and it got a second and we debated it and we passed it well then the engineer goes back to the office and pulls out a little thin drawer and he pulls out the map that's got that on it and he draws that road in there if it's not already on there with a pencil And to make sure that we knew in our documentation that it was a county road, he put a C on the line. Where are those maps? We still have them. Do we need to keep those or give those to our county?

No, we're keeping those. They're tattered.

I just knew where we came from. We're using them on two roads right now, right? OK.

Yes.

That's the only way we know where. Some of these roads are county roads. They literally were drawn in with a pencil and a C put across the line. Or a P for private.

Or a P for private.

If you want to go in there and you haven't looked at those, go in there and look through those a little bit. You sure we're out of it while we're not getting rid of them. Yeah, there you go. It's the only way we know. Those C's and P's are older than Clay. Can I motion a second on giving the old county highway construction plans to the archives? Does that have any more discussion? All in favor say aye. Opposed no. Motion carries. Thank you Clay. Any more questions for Clay? Moving on now to Tina Morgan our county administrator.

uh she's got a copy of her report in the file there okay okay item one consider the request of county administrator keen awarding the surplus 2013 for its floor and sell on good deals this is the explore that we offered to the corner. And I apologize, I did not realize it was not in working condition.

Did he find that out before or after he went out? After. He found out after the fact. Wipers didn't work.

Battery didn't work, wipers didn't work, and H-PAC went out.

Well, we tried. I have a motion from Commissioner Parker. And a second from Commissioner Stevens. Any other discussion? Do we have any other broke down vehicles we'd like to give to the car? Discussion all in favor say aye. All those no. Motion carries.

Next item is just an informational item to be recorded in the minutes. Property manager Roddy Wolf recommended hiring Roseanne George to fill the vacant housekeeping position. And that's just informational.

Okay.

And that's all I have, Chairman, unless y'all have any questions for me.

Any of the commissioners have any questions for the county administrator? If not, our county attorney, Kirk Walker. Thank you.

Okay, so I got several things to talk with you about this morning. One has to do with the generator bed. So there were a couple of things. Okay, good point. We are talking about two. So the one in particular that we're talking about is the one at the sheriff's office, the operations center there. And there were a couple of questions that I just wanted to make sure that those had been considered. So it's my understanding that when the generator is replaced, that the new generator is going to go back on that same site, that same footprint. Is that correct? It's not. It's not. Okay.

The new generator will be going over by the side of the fence. All that stuff is going to be tore down. That generator and that tank is going to be moved to Asheville to the road department. Right. And that new building is going to be built right there. It's going to take up where that is.

Okay.

All right.

All right. Well, that takes care of that. So that will be able to stay in place and operational until the new one is installed. So there won't be any.

Before we cut that one off, the new one is going to be installed. Right.

There won't be a need for auxiliary power. That won't work. Okay. All right. Well, that's good. All right. Okay. Do we know if there was any sort of load capacity requirement that was, I mean, an assessment of the demand for electricity? It was done by, okay, all right. Good on that, all right. And then Well, then there's not anything to talk about there, then. We'll have that one done and ready to go.

Ready to go out for bed? Yes, sir. What was our estimate of the cost of that?

So there were two numbers on the amount. So without replacing, there was some switch. It's a box bigger than these doors. Right. So without that, it was 97 and some change. And replacing the switch, it was just over 100. So it... made sense to just bid it and have an alternative pricing for the switch if it's Deemed needed in the process That's which will have to be relocated the one they're using present day to that side

if we use it okay it's dated it's old it's old because it would have been the one that was installed when the it's one of those right on the side of the building there next to right out the window from dma out there i'm sure it's operational because it's it's there but do that with no downtime though yeah

It should be anything. The only risk you run is the day you're making that switch over if the power did go out. Right. In that window of time. No man's land.

Right.

So. It'll take them that long to switch it over. No. It'll just be a matter of plugging in three phases.

The reason I brought that up is we might want to consider again having an alternate about including the switch. That's the way. You're only talking about $8,000 or $10,000. I think that's the way you're doing it anyway. Yes, sir. About that.

I agree with you. You can look inside those switches. They look pretty good. It'd be my guess. It'd be wiser, like you said, to go with a new switch and then hold them alive for the warranty. Right. Because they're not going to warranty that old switch.

And I think that's the way the bed's going out. Yeah. For the switch.

For the switch. That's right. The gas line's going to be run and stubbed up with no meter set. Until that generator's in place. And at that point, they'll set a meter, and he'll hook it up, whoever gets the bid. He'll hook in the gas line.

Connection to the gas line, okay. All right, so the generator bid will be squared away, and that'll be out shortly. Thank heavens. Thank heavens, right.

Six months.

So another topic that we need to go over has to do with a request from our GIS mapping department that's been discussed previously. considered approval of a MOU subject to you know legal review and I've gone through that and I just want to make sure before that's distributed that that you all are on board for going forward with that project so it's Sir?

All the water, he's going to put all the water systems on GIS.

That's correct. Yes, sir.

And so that would be, sir?

Right. Yeah, and I think that there has been some resistance from some of the water authorities in signing on for providing at least the extent of the information that was requested. And so I don't know it seems like if that were maybe made a little bit more generic that might make it a little easier for the authorities to accept The purposes of it are for the emergency management to discuss rerouting if we had a disturbance in providing water to an area. For economic development, I understand that that's important for getting grants and that sort of thing. And for y'all's decision-making generally. And then also for reduction in risk exposure for line strikes, like when we're working out on a right-of-way, that sort of thing. It isn't a replacement for a... know call before you dig sort of thing but it'll at least bring some awareness to that so I guess the input that I am requesting from y'all is whether or not to alter the request in any way because we were asking for some very specific things like where are the shutoff valves for you know these things and so What is y'all's take on that?

Some of them don't want to tell where their shutoff valves are. Right.

Yeah.

Do you think if it were made an issue with Eric, they wouldn't? Then you put it out in the public where their shutoff valves are.

Compensation.

Compensation and everything else. Some of them are afraid that, you know, get somebody else to find out where their stuff is and go ahead and shut it down. and do something to their pump station. And was arrested.

Isn't critical information, that's not public? It's not. Critical information is not public knowledge. Right. So that would, that, these maps wouldn't be going to the public.

Right. This would be for internal use only, it'd be. Maybe we wouldn't need to know the shit on that.

We just need to know where the lines are, what size lines of the generator, what size generator. Um, it makes it a lot quicker because we've had to do it during a disaster because we've had water cut off and, uh, I don't need to know where the lines are. That's what I'm saying.

He's asking, he's asked some of these for too much stuff. He's asking stuff they don't need. They don't want to put on there. They'll be fine with getting you lined where the line location is. ain't got a problem with that. They should give you about a few other little things that's in there.

Well maybe if you can make the request a little more generic and a little less burdensome from the water authority's point of view maybe they'll be a little more forthcoming with the information. Okay. And maybe that will get us where we need to go.

I can do that. And maybe I can request some information about what particulars are that y'all would need. So we had some discussion about the gas tax, the funding of cooperative agreement with municipalities. I don't know if that is on the agenda for today.

Yes, I had Kirk to review the draft of the resolution, changing the resolution from 50,000 to 100. The amount is not in the resolution. I just wanted him to look at our local fuel tax to make sure we can disperse that from the local fuel tax. We didn't think it was going to be an issue, but I just wanted him to look it over. As long as they use the funds for roads and paving.

So we're good to go forward with that. And then the last topic is there was a question that came up about the scanning and digitizing of records when we were in our work session last week. From my perspective and from what I have seen, it doesn't seem that that presents any sort of exposure as far as those records becoming remotely accessible. Just because they're scanned and stored on a device here on site, that doesn't create the exposure that we were concerned about. So anyway.

Excellent. You working on the lodging tax thing? Sir? Are you working on the lodging tax? The 10%? Lodging tax. The 10%.

Right. We'll have it together for the next work session.

I did. What's y'all's lodging tax? 10%? Mayor, what was it before? Six. Six percent. What hours was it? It's not even time.

Well, I get ready.

Thank you, Kurt. All right. Thank you.

OK.

Thank you, Kurt. Moving on now in the report section, starting off the report from the chairman, I won't be but just a minute or two, but I did want to clarify some things.

Well, give me a while.

I know, but y'all could have talked all you wanted to. I just wanted to point out some things that I've checked on some of this from both a legal standpoint and just an operational standpoint. And these don't require an answer or anything right now. It's just something for you to think about as a commission. The commission as a whole, the chairman and the four commissioners in St. Clair County serve as the commission ruling body, for lack of a better term, of St. Clair County's funding and our funds and the way they're spent and that sort of thing. But I want you to think about who oversees the daily business operations, manages the resources, and executes the plans. Y'all think about who that is. My opinion, it's our county administrator, which is the chief operating officer. That's the definition of a chief operating officer. Our chief financial officer is, without a doubt, because of the title and everything else, is Michelle. She's our chief financial officer. I want you to know that there have been a couple of minor cases to determine who is the chief executive officer of a county, and it depends on how a county is formed and how it's managed and how it's set up. For instance, Shelby County has nine county commissioners. But they have nine districts. So neither one of those commissioners is the CEO, Chief Executive Officer of the county, except for the five months or so. You divide four years of a term with nine commissioners, that's how long one person gets to be the CEO. The chairman of the county commission in a county where you separate out a person to be the chairman, that person is the first person that's going to be at the top of the lawsuit, for instance. The liability comes to that chief executive officer. It flows down to those that The chief executive officer can't make any decisions on their own. My decisions have to come 100% to the commission. I may disagree with them, but they tell me to do something. That's the way it is by law. And then by the same token, I can't tell the chief operating officer anything specific if the commission disagrees. But under the chief executive officer, chief operating officer, chief financial officer, day-to-day operation, I can until the governing body says I can't. So that's why me, the full-time chairman in this county, working with the county administrator, works just like it does in any other corporate structure. The county chairman is the CEO. COO is the county administrator. And the CFO, in this case, is Michelle. It's different in some places in that there's actually verbiage in a commission meeting somewhere that declares the county chairman as a CEO for instance in some counties the CEO runs not only the day-to-day operations the COO works directly for the CEO We don't, I don't even advocate that here. COO has certain day-to-day operations and they are responsible for them. That's why if I tell her to do something, she knows whether or not y'all said I can or not. And she can say, I ain't doing that. Well, she should because she knows I've stepped outside of the bounds that I've been authorized to do by the board of directors. So I just wanted to point that out. That was a big issue this last one. Not a big issue, but it became a big issue later on. Who is the CEO of a county? It depends on the county, and it depends on what the governing board allows that person to be. If you want to tell that person they're not, then you can. Otherwise, they are just because that position is... what it is it's the chief executive officer working under the guidance under the command really of the executive board and then the coo has their responsibilities and the cfo so i want to point that out as we go forward that can be totally different next time you know if you've got a chairman that doesn't want to be ceo uh this board would have to declare that that they are to make them you can't make that the chairman coming in can be the ceo of this county if they choose to they don't choose to uh that still doesn't relieve them from liability of certain things that's going to happen as that that is the top of the heap first name on the lawsuits we have always good that's the first name on the lawsuit and uh and then the next thing's usually yours and y'all follow in if it's something in your district or whatever So I wanted to point that out. I've done a little work on it this week, and that's the last I will say anything about it. Y'all need to know that there may be a change in the way that we're assumed by the next term. So that's all I had. Moving on with District 1, probably took everything away from Jeff that he was going to say. You got it.

Thank you.

District 2, I know I left something for Ricky Parker.

District 3. Well I'm gonna say something I just appreciate all these mayors showing up today to where we can have this discussion this dialogue about these fees and the municipal cooperative agreement and your concerns did not go unheard. I look forward to working with y'all to hopefully improve our communication because Matt and Freddie do a lot of work putting together numbers and budgets and things of that nature with respect to the central dispatch issue. We got to do a better job at communicating with you guys about what's going on. That way you have that predictability that we talked about. So I appreciate y'all coming, and I hope that we can continue to have a dialogue and move this thing down the road and improve our communication with all of you. That's what I expect, and that's what I want to happen.

That's all. Okay. Moving on to District 4. I don't have anything. All right. Going into old business here, we've got considered requests from another Dollar General store, Mountaintop Loop. I think that's one we tabled for two weeks to get community input. We're ready to move. So entertain a motion to approve that request. Have a motion. Second. Probably move and second. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed no. Motion carries. Moving on now to new business. Consider adopting resolution 2026-31A for the FY27 municipal cooperative funding. The funding to each municipality is decreased to $50,000 each to be paid out of the local fuel tax and restricted to road projects only with supporting documentation. So that is the money that last year came out of the general fund. You can see the major change for us is it's actually going to be taken out of the local fuel tax money. But because of that, it also is going to be restricted to actual road work. And it will require documentation from the municipality for whatever road work that is. And that includes replacing pipes, cleaning out ditches, anything to do with the road work and maintenance with that. So entertain a motion to approve that resolution. So may. I have a motion and a second. Properly moved and seconded. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Chairman. Oh, excuse me. I do have a question.

Yes, ma'am. Do y'all want August the 1st to be in the resolution? Are y'all deciding if y'all are going to be able to do that next year? Or do you want June the 1st like it was in the original?

Leave it August. Leave it August. That'll give us.

And the way it is in the resolution, as you discussed, is the city will provide us invoices and prepayment, then we will reimburse the city. That's the way it was discussed at the work session, the way we put it in the resolution. So I just wanted to bring it to your attention. So leave it as August the 1st.

That's probably about as early as we can notify and let us know what we got. That's part of our budget. OK. That motion made and seconded. We didn't totally get the vote out until we interjected that in there. So all in favor? Nay. We have one nay. And all in favor? Yes. Motion passes. And moving on now to item two, consider the FY27 municipal contract and fees for central dispatch and emergency management. Got those laid out there. Let's see if we've got a motion and second first before we discuss. Do I have a motion? So moved. Second? Second. Properly moved and second. Now, any discussion? This is the time that you've heard the reports from the mayors. Is there any kind of way to intervene for the table? Do you want to talk some more? Are you all ready to move on with this? If you are, then the vote would move this on to the, put it down as the way it is. Any other discussion?

Yes. No, we will go forward with this. But next year, like I requested, if they would come to the table and agree to tell us what part, how they'd want to divide that up, take it off us.

in the future not this time it might be that we would want to communicate with the mayor's association and have a meeting about may could do that address that directly so that's that's probably probably the way we can we can get more more feedback into that so am i correct the fees are going to be the same as what was provided in the work session 27 what we had on the thing okay okay

Any other discussion?

All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed, no. Opposed, kids. OK. Moving on now to item number three. Before we have folks disappear on us, we might want to ask some questions. We didn't want to ask Matt any questions, did we, before he leaves back there? I want to ask Matt something really difficult. Will he leave? OK. Got you. OK. And part of our meeting gets kind of boring. I want to thank our director of our, what would be your title? Not director anymore. You used to be county agent. CEO. As far as I'm concerned, she's still the county agent. She's the CEO. There you go. CEO. In this county. That's right. Appreciate you being here. Walter Lewis, appreciate you being here today also. We're looking at some issues on some bond issues. That's what Walter does for a living, lives down in Moody. That's a shameless plug, Walter. There you go. There you go. You could live in Moody if you wanted, though, couldn't you? You could live in Moody, couldn't you?

Office is in Moody.

Office is in Moody. All right, moving on to item number three. Consider a request from 911 Director Aslyn Campbell to surplus and dispose of the following items. All items are broken and of no value, including the black leather high-back chair that I questioned. Y'all see the list there? Entertain a motion to approve. Motion. Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed no. Motion carried. All right. Number four, consider ratifying Chairman Bateman's signature of the FY26 Certified Emergency Manager Salary Supplement subaward in the amount of $17,000. I have a motion. So moved. Second. Second. Properly moved and seconded to ratify my signature. And let me point out, that's been $17,000 for quite a while, hasn't it?

Oh, yes. And it's supposed to go up with the cost of living, too.

Okay. That's what I was thinking. Is that the federal EMTG money? no this is this is given directly from the state of alabama that was tied to your certification yes i have to go through certifications every year to receive that okay gotcha have a motion and a second to have any other discussion all in favor say aye aye opposed no motion carries item five city request revenue commissioner ken crow to surplus and dispose of the following items a dual wireless radio and a samsung smart tv you have a motion to approve that second i'll be moved to second any discussion All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries. Item six. Consider request Sheriff Billy Murray to renew the Virtual Academy Solutions annual subscription in the amount of $3,825 per year. This will be paid for by the Sheriff's earmarked discretionary fund, fund number 194. Do we have a motion? So moved. Second. Properly moved and seconded. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries. Item seven. Sir, request Sheriff Billy Murray to declare 2004 Thor Four Winds Travel Trailer as surplus and donate that travel trailer to the town of Raglan. Do we have a motion? Motion. Second. Properly moved and seconded. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries.

Congratulations, Mayor. You got your travel trailer. Thank you.

Get it down to Fort Strother. That's right. That's about as far as I believe it would make it. You'll have some great adventures in it, I'm sure. There you go. OK. I also want to recognize our probate judge, Andrew Weathington, who snuck in the back door back there. Appreciate you being here. And if we don't do this right, would you tell us after the meeting?

Yes.

After we turn the television off. OK. Next item number eight, consider recommendation from property manager Roddy Wolf to renew the SecureTech Systems Inc. maintenance contract for two years in the amount of $4,881. This system manages the panic buttons for Asheville and Pell City. Have a motion? So moved. Second. Property moved and seconded. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. DAVID BURRAGE. All opposed, press that panic button. DAVID BURRAGE. Let's do it. DAVID BURRAGE. If you don't like it, there you go. Item 9, consider increasing the mileage rate from $0.72.5 to $0.76 per mile for county use of a personal vehicle effective July 1, 2026, in accordance with St. Clair County policy number 2, which bases the county mileage rate on the rate paid by the state of Alabama. I have a motion. DAVID BURRAGE. Motion. Second. It properly moved and seconded. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed, no. Motion carried. I'm going to go back to the discussion, but it's not totally having to do with that. But let me mention, we have quite a few county vehicles, and sometimes I'll have some. In fact, I had it here recently. i've been told by a supervisor to drive my one of our pool vehicles we have here in the lot but when i go to this conference there's an off-site event that is is that sponsored by some entity that i might not be authorized to drive a county vehicle to and there are other things because of the way the conference is set up that i can't drive a county vehicle in those cases we allow our employees to drive their personal vehicle if there's an issue with them driving the county vehicle that might come up that just basically restricts them to being at the conference site and they're locked in their room then it hypothetically would cost us about the same amount of money to pay them mileage as it would to buy gas on the county credit card and the wear and tear on the county vehicle. So the county commission gives our employees the flexibility to do that through the county administrator. Is that right? That way we handle it. We don't handle it for the other departments. We do not handle it for the probate judge's office, revenue commissioner's office, or the sheriff's office. That is handled on an individual basis to be, that decision is made by those department heads, not the county commission. It's not a policy as such, but it also is a common sense thing. If you're driving a county vehicle and it ends up in places that it shouldn't be, and that's the only transportation you had down there, you've got a problem. So that we don't want you doing that. We don't want you getting in trouble because you drove the county vehicle. We'd rather you drive your own vehicle, pay your mileage.

Or if you have family with you.

Yeah, family with you is a good point.

You don't need family in a county vehicle.

Good part of it. Okay. A liability there and all that kind of stuff. That's our decision. And that's also, I've had an employee say, don't we have a policy to let us drive our own vehicle to a conference? Well, not exactly. Don't we leave that up to those department heads? Yes, sir. But there again, I told that employee, if you don't have family going with you and all that, you don't need us. You don't need to be in a county vehicle. All right. On now to county number 10. Consider a contract with Spire for the installation of gas line and meter to the coroner's building in the amount of $493. Y'all got that way down there. We spent more time in discussing this than $493. Have a motion. Have a second. Probably moved and seconded. Have any more discussion on the first item? All opposed, no. Let's get this done. Item 11. Center contract with Spire for installation of a gas line and meter. to the Sheriff's SWAT building at the road department campus at an estimated cost of $15,000. As you can see, it's a considerably longer distance to install a line that will furnish the volume of delivery of natural gas. to our heating systems in those buildings out there. So that's why it costs more to have a motion.

Motion. Second.

Moved and seconded. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed no. Motion carries. And I want to thank the commissioners. Maybe one more here.

That 15,000, they did come down off 29,000. They did. That's correct. Yeah. And we sort of questioned them. And they said, well, we'll see if we can adjust.

I want to thank the commissioners for working on this. But Commissioner Mize, specifically you, you're really good about getting in there on those items. working through the, we're not the only one with bureaucracy, are we? The guy in corporate bureaucracy can be pretty hard to deal with too. Item 12. Informational item to be recorded in the minutes. Good Game Company Inc. provided a justification letter and a quote in the amount of $3,500 for removing a firewall as part of the Revenue Commissioner Ken Crow's office remodel. It had a firewall in it and to do the changes that we needed to make in there. You had to remove a firewall. Do you have a motion? No, just information. Are we good there?

Because the money's in the budget.

All right. Good to go. Item 13, consider travel request. You have a copy of the travel request in your file. I want to remind some of you that tomorrow is the 9-1-1 training class. Isn't it tomorrow, Thursday?

It's Thursday and Friday.

Thursday and Friday. There you go.

It's very, very.

the 9-1-1 board signed up for that needs to go down there through that process and they're going to share information about some of the changes and rules regulations we've got a new state director don't executive director so they'll be there i'm sure item 14 consider board appointments i think we have some board appointments Do what? Travel. Oh, yeah. All in favor? Motion and a second on the travel. I have a motion and a second? Second. Properly moved and seconded. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed, no on the travel request. Now, board appointments.

On the health authority, Mayor Joe Lee resigned, and he's already seen his letter of resignation in. I'm going to make a motion. We put Nick Rutledge on there as the mayor of Booneville. And then that's final.

Okay, you've shown the recommendation to replace Mayor Joe Lee with the mayor of Moody now, Nick Rutledge, on the Health Care Authority. Do you have a motion? Motion. Second. Proper move and second. Well, it came with a motion there. You've got all the motions and seconds you can deal with.

Mr. Parker and Commissioner Brown.

There you go. Any other discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed, no.

Down here on mine, on Coosa Valley, where it said my term expires 1st August. Katrina told me that's over for you. You'll be appointed whenever you get sworn in. I'm saving that one for you. You'll be appointed to the RC&D board.

Okay. Any other appointment activity? Not right now. Okay. Moving on now to payment of the regular bills. You've got a copy of the bills in your files. They're different every month according to the activity of the county. This particular one shows on the name sheet. $1,251,493.54 and then the Second run on it also covered $3,963.69. Sometime we have a run that has to come right after this to try to get to the end of today's meeting. Interested in motion to pay the bills. Motion. Second. Properly moved and seconded. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries. All righty. Number 16, entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. Properly moved and seconded. All opposed say aye. Aye. All opposed no. Motion carries. Okay.