Board of Commissioners - Regular Meeting

The August 10 Board of Commissioners work session.

Testing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This is, as you can see over there, right at 0 dB. Testing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Everyone. And thank you for joining us today, and I'd like to officially welcome you to our August 10th, 2026 work session. Now called this work session to order. Next, we have four items on the agenda for today. One being preparation for the 2027 Strategic Planning Retreat. Two, the Triangle Bikeway Update. Three, the Business Development Grant Policy Recommendations. And four, preparations for the 2027 Board of Commissioners. So we will now move to our first item on the agenda. And at this time, I'd like to call Jason Horton, Assistant County Manager, to the podium. Welcome, Jason. So you may go ahead and start with your presentation. Thank you.

All right, good afternoon, commissioners. Welcome back from some time off. As we get back into the regular swing of meetings, we want to take a moment to lift up the strategic plan and share a little bit of context as we head into this fall and leading into your retreat that is scheduled later this month about the strategic plan and some potential changes that may be in store. Whenever we created the strategic plan, we had the approach that this would be a living document, and the document could change and evolve over time. And over the past, it was adopted in April of 2024, and over the past couple years, we have actively been working on identifying and implementing initiatives There have been some lessons learned. We have already started seeing some accomplishments that we have reached through that, but also conditions are changing and it may be approaching a time where we need to make some revisions and updates to the plan. So I wanted, again, to give you some context so that you can start preparing and thinking about those changes heading into the fall. What hasn't changed is the role for the Board of Commissioners. You all help set the vision. You adopt those strategic plan goals and establish policies for the county. That, to me, is more on the evergreen side of the equation. On the right side is the role that staff plays. When we have that clear direction on what it is that you all would like for us to accomplish, we can develop, start, and pursue initiatives. Initiatives that are not working, we can quickly pivot and move to those that will work. We implement those programs, and we are striving to measure those, and as we get that information, we will share the results with you. Oh, excuse me. Again, over the past few years, we are starting to see some successes from the efforts behind the strategic plan. What you may not see is that behind the scenes, we have six focus teams that comprise of over 100 staff that get together on a quarterly basis, and we work together to identify initiatives and how that departments can collaborate with each other on moving those initiatives forward. That effort is helping establish momentum. In addition to those focus teams, there is intentionality behind connecting those initiatives to department business plans. And that further emphasizes the importance of these initiatives in accomplishing the goals in that plan. Those focus teams help bring people together that may not otherwise interact with one another and encourages more collaborations and conversations between departments in reducing those silos and finding organizational alignment, again, towards those goals. And already, even though we're about two years into a five-year window, we're starting to see some successes in some areas where we have met and potentially are in a position to surpass some of our stretch targets that we identified in the plan. Of course, there are also emerging challenges that we are recognizing. Economic conditions in our community are shifting, not just within our community, but nationwide. There are new barriers that are affecting access to some services that the county provides. We are responding to directives and guidance from state and federal agencies the state and federal levels, and about how that might affect our services from benefits and program delivery. We are also, as we work to implement some of these initiatives, we are recognizing some areas where we may need to tweak some of our language, improve our phrasing, and potentially reframe some of the goals that are in the plan. And then we may want to adjust some of the measurements, some of those stretch targets that we've identified in the plan. Included in your packet is a two-page summary of the 24 goals. You will notice that in that strategic plan, we were intentional in using SMART principles in establishing the goals. So SMART, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. Those are intentional on encouraging staff to go beyond the status quo, to not rest on our laurels, to push to try to make services to our community better. And those benchmarks were established using the best available information at the time. If the information was not available, there were some goals where we used proxies until we were in a position to measure the impact of those goals. We are starting to gather some of that information. We may need to adjust what our stretch targets is to move away from substitute data to real data that affects those policy areas. I'll also point out that we are, if you look at our strategic plan, about a third of our goals rely on a community perception survey. We are planning to do that survey again. We are likely gonna do that late this year, quite possibly after the election cycle. Some of our goals rely on those perceptions. Over time, what we are striving to do is swap out some of those perceptions to objective, measurable data that we can replace. So that may come later, but I wanted to make sure that you were aware of those potential changes. I do wanna highlight a couple of areas where there's been success. One of those areas revolves around Plan Wake. Plan Wake was established in 2021. It was one of the first plans where you really see us establishing a stretch target about directing growth and development towards municipalities. And in doing that, it helps preserve rural and community, more undeveloped land that we have within the county. We co-opted that goal in developing the strategic plan in 2024, but this was established back in 2021. At that point, they were under that 97% benchmark. They more quickly than they realized surpassed that in 2022. And what you see if they've been able to maintain that development pattern being directed towards more suburban areas, walkable areas, and transit oriented development within the county. Yeah, if you wanna take a moment and celebrate that, feel free. Another area that comes of potential success where we are quickly approaching our target revolves around our, is also in our growth land use and environment area, that's goal three, about protecting 1,000 acres of green space. That includes open space parks, greenways, farmlands, and forest. When we created that goal in the strategic plan, we had a goal of about 1,000 acres. We came to that number based on financial resources and history of programs. Some of you may recall we discussed whether or not to include voluntary ag districts, enhanced voluntary ag districts, which preserve land for about a 10-year period. We opted to look at more permanent conservation in the county. And so we did not include VAD and EVAD, but I really want to give credit to Theresa Furr and her team over at Soil and Water Conservation District. They have used VAD and EVAD data or conversations with property owners to talk about, hey, if you really want to preserve land further out, you can look at agricultural conservation easements. And they have been able to leverage programs offered through the state to preserve 407 acres, and they have over 1,200 acres that are pending. Some, not all of that may get to that permanent conservation status, but it's something that we did not foresee or anticipate when we were creating the strategic plan. So having that adaptability, agility with initiatives has proved to be beneficial in our implementation. Another example that I would really like to highlight is the work around veteran and veteran families. When we established our goal, we looked at, we were able to get information from the VA about how many families, veterans and veteran families were we interacting with compared to our population. And when we looked at that, about 18,540 veterans, or just over a third of our population, were receiving the benefits that they had earned through their military service. We estimated that through outreach and marketing, we might be able to improve that number by about 4%. But the team at Housing and Community Revitalization and the team at the Veterans Services has really been getting the word out about veteran benefits. And they, in part, has contributed to a significant increase. And I had the pleasure of being in the room with the VSO director when she received the message from the VA talking about how over 24, thousand veterans in wake county and their families are receiving benefits that they've earned that's approaching 47 or just over 46 percent are now again that's an example where we did not foresee we established a stretch target which we thought was the best available at the time but they have blown that number out of the water and so i want to recognize them for all the work that they've done in housing and community revitalization So looking ahead at the strategic plan and what we may be able to do ahead, in some prior meetings, I had asked the board, hey, do you recognize potential gaps or areas that we may need to reflect in the strategic plan? And some of you have given us feedback. And the areas that I am aware of are around these four areas, accessibility, aging population. Some of you may know that Wake County is one of the top destinations for those that are 65 and older. In fact, we rank third among metropolitan areas in a study that was developed by the US Census Bureau. The other two areas that just edge us out are Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and the Wilmington area, but the Wake County region is the third fastest growing metro for those 65 that were in the country. We'd also receive feedback about the benefits gap or the benefits cliff. Some may refer to this as a donut hole where someone that may receive a slight bump in pay suddenly become ineligible for benefits and it's not an even trade off between the benefits that the pay increase versus the benefits that they lost. And it can create unforeseen hardships. We've also received feedback that creative arts may be an area that the commissioners would like to see reflected in the strategic plan. Some staff observations is that those changing conditions are current conditions within our community. We are identifying some tweaks or changes that we could make to language in the strategic plan on those goals. We also may wanna look to broaden some of our goal language to be more inclusive of other initiatives that we have on our radar. We may need to refine some of the language that we have and then also refine some of the targets. Just one other pass at some of the lessons learned. Benefits access, that is changing considerably in the moment. Changes in eligibility criteria and administrative processes are impacting The way our goal is written now, right now for benefits and assistance we want to reduce barriers. That may not be in our control. We have contemplated potentially looking at making sure our role is about informing residents of benefits that they're eligible for and how they can access those benefits. Some of our goals could benefit from framing. An example would be around employment and public safety. Uh, right now when we compare our unemployment rate or our violent crime rate compared to the state average or regional averages, we are below, uh, those averages. So we may want to reflect that, um, we are in a position of strength on employment or a relatively safe community compared to our regional partners. And we want to maintain that advantage or that, that area. So, uh, or that position, uh, relative to benchmarks. In this graphic, I wanted to include so you could see that represented through the data. When unemployment tends to go up, even in our area, it's reflective of the trend in the overall state. If I had a chart for violent crime, you would see a similar trend as well. Over time, we usually stay at least a percentage point below the statewide average on unemployment rates. We'll talk about this type of information in more detail during our retreat, but again, the purpose of today is to give you some context as we prepare for that meeting later in the month. In the strategic plan, this is one of, next to my last slide, this is a visual representation of the process, the cycle that we go through when we were developing the strategic plan back in 2024. We were in that vision in establishing the goals. When it goes into implementation, we reach those bottom three areas where we look at measuring. We want to learn from the initiatives and our actions in departments, and we want to identify areas to improve. I want to point out that not all 24 goals we have in the strategic plan will move evenly through the cycle. Some are still in the measurement phase. Others may be in an area where we are ready to improve. Whenever we want to make changes to the strategic plan, we'll do our best to bring those to you in one package, but there may be times where we need to bring some of those edits or revisions at different points of the year, particularly as we look at the strategic plan being a living document. So for our retreat coming up, we are gonna review some of the metrics, look at some of the trends. We're gonna share with you some of the initiatives and highlights from initiatives that are currently underway, some that have completed. We will discuss potential edits and revisions. We'll be looking to you all if there are things that we need to include. I would stress that if we look to add initiatives, we may look at other areas where we combine or remove some, excuse me, not initiatives but goals in our strategic plan. The more we can stay focused and get more department staff working on goal areas, we can make meaningful improvement. Any of the feedback you share with us at the retreat, I would encourage we take it back to include department staff and our focus teams on refining language. We would bring that back to the Board of Commissioners at a later date for consideration of those recommendations along with any edits that you may want to make. With that, that's the end of my slides. I'm happy to take any questions.

Thank you, Jason. Our county manager had first dibs there.

First, I want to publicly acknowledge Jason for his work on the strategic plan. He has been the quarterback that's been leading the team down the field and has just done a marvelous job. And so I want to publicly acknowledge Jason for all of his work. So thank you, Jason. And we're going to have it advanced. We're not going to have a retreat because we never go backwards. We're going to keep going forward. And then lastly...

You never retreat.

You also don't go anywhere, and it's anything but a retreat. I'd like for us to find another phrase.

And lastly, I just want to... support what Jason has said. So our success thus far in the strategic plan has been because we're laser focused. 24 goals is a stretch. You know, for folks who have been around a while and we used to come out of these things with 50 or so tasks to accomplish, it was virtually impossible to get them done, right? Because you're just spreading yourself thin. And so I just want to reinforce that You know, if things are being added, we need to look at things coming off so that we can continue to be laser focused. And as you know, I always tell you, if everything's a priority, then nothing is a priority. And so we just want to be able to come to have you all come to a conclusion and send us with our marching orders after the we'll call it the event next week.

Thank you, Manager. I think Madam Vice had a comment that she wanted to add.

I'm really looking forward to the conversation and appreciate the work that. Okay, getting back into the swing of things. Just thank you for all of the work to prepare and particularly the early conversations with board members about what could be added to strengthen the plan moving forward. Just one question about one of the successes. Goal one about directing growth toward the cities and towns. Can you just share a little bit more about what that means to direct the growth to cities and towns?

Yeah, so there have, what I'm gonna refer to are some of the initiatives that are included under that goal. I'm going off memory, but I believe there's about seven initiatives that are underway that support goal one for GLUE. One of those is around working and partnering with the municipalities about growth and development patterns in their area. There are seven small area land use plans that were recognized as needed in that support and build upon Plan Wake. I believe they are working on number six of seven right now, and those are when one more is planned next year, I believe. Those, again, engage with municipalities around the area to be more prescriptive, and it also has a conversation with the municipality about what they can do to better position and market their areas for growth and development. What I would also add is that sometimes our goals complement each other. So as, and I just, I'm taking advantage of the fact that goal three was also included in the presentation about the preservation of green space within the county. As some of the farmland has received permanent protection, it has taken the temptation to convert that farmland into development, and that too has encouraged more development to occur in those suburban areas of the county. There are a number of initiatives underway. I'm happy to bring more information at our retreat about what has been done and what is currently underway.

Awesome. Thank you.

Yes, thank you. I just want to say thank you, Jason, for bringing forth these goals that have already exceeded our expectations, if you will, and that's great to see. But what I want to highlight that I appreciate the most is that we're going to be nimble. about you know saying okay well we probably need to take a different look at this and and figure out what is the next thing we need to be measuring and so I just so appreciate you and your team and that you know we're not okay resting with our laurels we're like okay we're accomplishing this and more than we expected what should we be looking at and I also appreciated hearing that um we're going to make an attempt to move away from as many of the metrics as possible being based on just public feedback and trying to find more specific measurable things. And so I know that was a challenge when we were putting it all together at the beginnings, but I liked hearing that the team is mindful of moving in that direction and I definitely support that as well. And so I look forward to our planning advance.

Commissioner Waters.

Well, I want to jump on the bandwagon of showing appreciation for your leadership on the strategic plan. I know you've been really thoughtful and intentional, and I also really appreciate your attention to detail and lifting up some of the feedback that you have received a while back. I appreciate seeing accessibility on the list. And I really appreciate also all of Team Wake that is doing work behind the scenes that we may not necessarily get a chance to connect with on a regular basis. But this is really exciting and look forward to our upcoming time together and what's going to happen in the future.

Commissioner Stallings.

Yes, thank you, Jason, for all the work. And I just wanna echo and highlight the farmland preservation work that I think has been a value of this board and the community as well. And if we're going to preserve green space and farmlands, we're gonna have to have our development with our municipal partners. So just partnership with our municipalities and helping them to understand that. and just being able to bring that value and goal to fruition is very important to me as a board member. We have our time with our farmers and we know how important farming is to them, but also to our community in terms of our foods, our food sources, and I just want to thank you for the work in that regard and just really look forward to our time and our retreat. Thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner Stallings. Any other board members have a comment? Not seeing any. Is that concludes your presentation, Jason?

That does. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate it. So thank you, Jason, with your presentation. Commission, the floor is now open for discussion on this item if there is any further discussion that's required. If not, this item is just a reminder on the agenda for a purpose and no action is required of us today on this item. Not seeing it, then we'll move on to item two. Okay, so I will call Assistant Manager Ashley Jacobs, I think. Okay, awesome.

Good afternoon everyone. My name is Kara Russell and I am a senior transportation planner at Campo. And I'm here today to give you a bit of an update on the Triangle Bikeway project. So today we're gonna go over a little bit of where we've been since 2024 at the start of the project a little bit of a progress update i'll keep it condensed and then start to talk through our next steps on the project that are coming very soon so just a little bit of an update we are just coming off of the tails of the most recent milestone being the final alignment endorsement, which is the darker blue line up on the screen, which is the portion of the Triangle Bikeway that connects RTP to Raleigh around the art museum area. We had done some engagement in the winter and had taken that feedback back in with a lot of the alternatives that were developed in key areas where we're connecting to our existing infrastructure and were able to present a recommendation for one final routing through the area. So that was adopted by both TWTPO and the Campo Executive Board in June. What that does is it allows us to continue along in the progression of preliminary design to start to get that cost estimate for construction from RTP to Raleigh and do the design reviews required through NCDOT. So I'll talk about that a little bit more, but we're hoping to continue that along and anticipate the completion of the preliminary design phase in the spring of 2027. Just as a reminder, the goals of the Triangle Bikeway East design project was to continue to advance the design forward and evaluate implementation as we were able to better position the project for future funding opportunities for construction. And just a recap of how all of our roles are aligned In this process. It is a pretty large project. It spans multiple counties multiple municipalities multiple Department of Transportation districts so Wake County with the help of the Research Triangle Foundation partnered together to fund this design phase of the project and And then Campo was asked on behalf of Wake County to manage the design of the project. So that is where I come in. But we serve as a facilitator as there is a lot of coordination with the municipalities in the region, as well as we have a review and oversight agreement with NCDOT for those reviews. those environmental documentation reviews, and things of that nature. So that is currently how we operate within our jurisdictional relationships on the preliminary design side of the project. and then as we advance into the next phase which would be final design this is the phase where we are preparing for construction looking at doing permitting doing encroachment agreements things of that nature we would continue along in those roles so the design is still funded through wake county campo is still signed on to project manage and facilitate between organizations. And then we can look at a number of ways to partner with DOT either in the same fashion with a review and oversight agreement into that final design or look at some other opportunities if portions of the project were phased. And then similarly, our jurisdictions may have projects that are adjacent and they may want to start thinking about partnering in a little bit of a different fashion. i'm going to go over what that is starting to look like i know that was pretty vague i know that these are the burning questions around the region whenever we go out to do engagement and talk with folks about the project everybody wants to know who's going to build this who's going to maintain it and how are we going to fund it so you can think about some of these big burning questions in these buckets of questions about construction, questions about maintenance, and then questions about funding. So we've split it out this way to start to make a really daunting sounding list of questions into little bite-sized pieces to try to fit together where the region's strengths are, where weaknesses and gaps are, so we can continue to think about defining that pathway to leverage local and state funds as much as possible. All right, so I'm gonna jump into how we started to do that. So we were able to convene technical and management level staff across the region from municipalities, counties, DOT, and our other partners such as Central Pines to start thinking about each of these questions in these categories. And so we looked at our existing structures what does our region do really well and then we started to look out nationally to other examples across the country to see how they were able to think about construction sponsorship maintenance sponsorship and how did they fund these things what opportunities were they able to leverage along the way We quickly found that it is a little bit of a chicken or an egg situation in terms of timeline of construction. You might think that we need to figure out the construction sponsor and the funding first and then further down the line we can talk about maintenance. But when you're working on a large regional project and you have different folks at the table, they need some different assurances to make sure that if one construction sponsor steps forward, that there is a maintenance sponsor ready to step in and take on the maintenance of that project in perpetuity. And I know those maintainers are also wondering and want some assurances of, if we maintain this, are we partnering together? Is there accountability for the funding of that maintenance? So these are just some of the big questions, burning questions. But we started with the question of what does this type of project, the Triangle Bikeway, need? A little bit different in that it is envisioned as this commuter corridor between Chapel Hill and Raleigh as a whole. It does capitalize on the connection to our existing bike and pedestrian infrastructure across the region. And it does require a consolidated and coordinated effort to maintenance across the region. We heard loud and clear there would need to be a maintenance plan. coordination as we go, no matter how the structure of maintenance sponsorship is formed. So we're able to take this all into account, lean on our lessons learned from the Tobacco Trail, from Neuse River Trail, and others like it in the region, and then we were able to pull it all out into what I am calling now the matrix of opportunity. It is, again, looking at existing conditions, what we know we do well and how we're strong as a region, and then looking at our gaps so that in a world of uncertainty, we are able to pivot and continue to think through all of these pieces together, the pros, the cons, and have a consolidated plan no matter what may arise in the future. So again, it does look daunting, but I'm just gonna focus in on our blue boxes here up on the screen for maintenance sponsorship. We felt that that was the easiest path forward in terms of knowing what we know and knowing some things that we can look at from other regions that might make sense to right size a maintenance sponsor for our region. So the first one up at the top is looking at our existing structures and relationships how we are organized around the design side. It could be that we look into a solution where the county has more of an administrative role and coordination role amongst all of the different partners in that maintenance coordination. The second box looks at a more of a tried and true, what we know works around the region today. As these portions of the project are built out, municipalities will be able to step forward to take maintenance over on their two or five miles of bikeway that's in their jurisdiction, and then we'd have some agreements amongst municipalities to make sure that standard is implemented across the board. And then there's also another solution, what we're calling a new regional creation, is maybe some sort of combination of the prior two examples, but it looks at having a consolidated approach of If you're going out to do maintenance and say you have seven different contracts for mowing for each of the little pieces, it might have some cost savings to think about that as the 23, 24 some odd miles as a whole. So again, we thought about this not in isolation. We have created some if-then scenarios, such as if a federal competitive grant program comes out of reauthorization, it would show competitiveness to have an answer for how we would handle maintenance. You know, things of that nature. If we were to look at the project in phases and pieces, does our maintenance solution make sense for that as well? We were also able to pull together an order of magnitude cost of maintenance just to get a solid idea of what kind of commitment are we talking about. This is not calibrated to the Triangle Bikeway specifically. This is really more of a conservative estimate considering the hundreds of miles that we do have in the region as a baseline. And so annually, when you think about that cost of $122, $121,000 a year, and you split that across equal share, it starts to become a little more palatable and not as daunting as to what maintenance could look like for the project. Okay, so as the staff, the technical and leadership management level staff came together, we came up with a recommendation for a two-pronged approach for maintenance, and I'll go through it. It really is, again, leaning on the strengths of what we do well as a region today, and thinking about the nimbleness of what might be needed in the future. So in the short term, we have recommended that the municipalities would be able to agree to take on maintenance for a short amount of time as pieces are either built out in phases or as a whole. while our long term solution is ongoing. So our long term solution is recommended as a one entity lead for maintenance. Whatever flavor of one entity lead that looks like, I'll go over on the next slide. But really, that short term solution ends up being really the backup plan. If we think about, if we have agreement across the region that we would like to investigate and really right size this one entity maintenance structure for the region, we can start to develop that over the next two years. And when we're thinking about the timeline for construction, that solution, if it's only a year or two away from now, might be already in place before portions of the project are even on the ground. So it's really just that backup plan, if that's making sense. all right so in terms of that long-term solution what that looks like in terms of this one regional maintaining entity for the triangle bikeway we've talked a little bit with the school of government to make sure we're understanding some of the bounds of being able to work together across the region and it turns out that similar to what we're hearing across the nation there's a variety of different ways to handle maintenance whether it looks like an intergovernmental-based system or collaborative, which would have the least amount of control, to something more on the line of an authority structure. That, again, CAMPO does not have control over that. It would take a legislative action for that to occur. But we can prepare should that be a reality in the future, if that's something that exists. or something more in the middle or a two-pronged approach of looking at more of a non-profit, something like a Friends of the Triangle Bikeway. We can lean on our partners there again. The Central Plains Regional Council does have the ability to leverage their non-profit status and so we can look at what that would entail as a region if we started to partner together and think of different ways that we can either form maybe one portion of this entity that looks more at like event planning or volunteer base or things that may be more of a traditional nonprofit conservancy that would handle, but would be able to partner more with the governmental side Making sure somebody's there to do the bridge inspections and things of that nature So all that to say there is still quite a bit to investigate together But starting to bring this conversation forward now as we gear up for our policymaker forum So commissioners you're seeing this presentation first today before the region, but we're recommending to create a policy maker forum with elected folks from across the region with a lot of our stakeholder boards that are a part of the project to be able to start to talk through some of these future decisions as we move the project along. I think again our goal here is to continue to fine tune that project readiness for construction as we move ahead and really work together across jurisdictional lines to figure out how to right size the maintenance and construction and management plan as we continue to move on forward. So we are anticipating to send letters out inviting MPO board representatives to this policymaker forum and then hoping to try to arrange for that first kickoff meeting in September. Um, but I am here today, uh, to ask for your feedback. Um, just any preferences that the county has in this process and, and some of these decisions as we move forward and here to answer any questions you might have, um, about the project. But thank you all for your time.

Thank you for that great presentation. Uh, board members, uh, any questions or comments at this time? Yes. Commission waters.

Thank you, it was a very helpful update. I just had a question about the routine maintenance. I was looking at the cost per mile. Could you speak just a little bit to what maintenance would look like? Sure. Just processing that dollar figure.

so we were able to reach out to our partners at the town of kerry in the city of raleigh and ask them basically for their average cost per mile per year on systems so this would include things like patching mowing fence repair you know if there's any signage repair graffiti and things of that nature so more routine that second I'll go back to that that second category for cost major that would be something on the level of The boardwalk got washed out and we need to do a whole section over again to get it back up to Use for folks to be able to pass and then bridge inspection is another piece that we were able to pull out that happens routinely every couple of years. But that is kind of the big ticket items for maintenance pretty much across the region. It did not account for number of staff, did not account for any sort of equipment that might be had. That would need to be fine-tuned dependent on the solution in the future.

Thank you, that's very helpful.

No problem.

Commissioner Thomas.

Thank you so much. I just had a quick question. You mentioned a federal reauthorization. So can you tell me a little bit more about what specific bill that would be that we're considering? Or is there even a conversation about a federal reauthorization that's possible? And is there a lobbying effort around a reauthorization?

I would have to check into the specifics on the bill number. I'm not sure off the top of my head, but every couple of years there is an authorization that occurs, and we are slated this year to have that update. I know there has been some initial pieces of information that have been released. These are the things that define some of the federal formula grants, how much is allocated to that versus some of those competitive grant programs. So predecessors would be the IIJA or the BUILD program and that authorization would define that future of what that looks like. But I don't know off the top of my head. We're just waiting to see as that moves on ahead what that looks like.

Okay, because I know build was essentially a one-time authorization. And so just wondering, because that would help determine what the maintenance could continue to be or what the build out, what might be left. Like even here where you talk about the split of share, 70-30, to understand how much of a reauthorization or even what the past authorizations have been would give, at least me, a good indication of what the split share could be or what the maintenance might total. So that's my question. Thank you.

And I could answer on the IIJA as an example. Would that be helpful? Sure. Okay. So for the IIJA example, if that program still existed and it was out there today, we would prepare an application with that cost estimate, fine-tuned cost estimate, so we know our federal ask. And then it would be a 20% commitment of cost for that construction of whatever that federal ask is. So we would be at a point right now where we'd have that construction estimate in the spring to be able to bring forward to any sort of subsequent competitive grant process and that would give us that better understanding of what that 20% match is. I just don't have it at the moment.

Okay, thank you. And I also want to know, and this is probably not a question for you, but maybe more of a question for Ben. Thinking about federal grants and the opportunity to partner with the congressional delegation, do we know if this has been something that we've been able to ask for for funds in the past or that we might be able to ask for funds in the future from Congresswoman Ross or Fushi or any of the congressional delegation?

To my knowledge, we have not explored that, but we can. I am not sure if bike and pedestrian paths would be well-ranked compared to other needs, but we can absolutely explore that.

Thank you for the information. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Okay, you good, Commissioner Thompson? Yes. Okay, Commissioner Jackson.

to see this project moving along. Can you talk a little bit about your comment about chicken and egg, and chiclet I saw in there, and how the timing of these decisions could influence, and specifically, if we were to, yeah, just particularly the maintenance and the construction time periods.

Sure, and I can walk through a very specific subset. So in the example of the I-5966 project, it's a DOT project to look at auxiliary lanes going from Airport Boulevard to North Harrison. That is a stretch of 40 that they are already going out and doing construction, doing the grading in that area. But it also aligns with a portion of the Triangle Bikeway, which we are locating within the right-of-way of DOT. So with that particular project, they're moving along with their design actually at a similar timeframe to the Triangle Bikeway project. And usually with DOT projects around the 30% or so after preliminary design is complete, They typically look to their municipal partners and ask for a maintenance agreement at that time. It's a pretty straightforward document. It just pretty much states DOT will build this portion of bike and pedestrian infrastructure if the locality agrees to maintain that piece of infrastructure in perpetuity. And then they have clear guidance as they move forward to prepare for construction. as they have some of those more finer tune encroachment agreements and things of that nature that they have an identified maintenance sponsor. So if we're thinking about the Triangle Bikeway project and in phases, and we just talk about this one phase, having the ability with confidence when DOT finishes their preliminary design to say, yes, the municipality will take on the maintenance of the bike and pedestrian infrastructure, then that gives a clear pathway. So again, a little bit of a chicken or an egg because for DOT to construct and have assurance that there's a maintaining partner, that maintaining partner has to have confidence at that point to sign on for maintenance. So it is in terms of Aligning schedules, if we kind of have that understanding as a region that the localities can do that and are willing to do that, as these pieces come on board and are adjacent to the project, we have a clear path to be able to continue the design and for DOT to have confidence that they maybe could take on portions knowing that there is a planned sponsorship for maintenance.

Okay, awesome, thank you. And I really like the idea of the policymaker forum to get those conversations started now because it seems, you know, if we're asking DOT to invest about 90 million 122,000 annually to maintain seems like something that we can take on regionally. So I look forward to what comes of the policymaker forum. I also really like the idea of the recommendation for a short term asking municipalities to really step up in those first five years and really demonstrate the buy-in. And I also understand the value of having a single entity more long term sort of lead as opposed to sort of breaking up little pieces by municipal. But thank you for bringing this forward and I look forward to the policy maker forum and hoping that we can locally figure out a way to maintain what You know, 122,000 is not small change, but in the grand scheme of what we're creating seems like something that we could figure out with our municipal partners. So thank you.

Thank you.

Commissioner Adamson.

Thank you for bringing this forward. When I look at this, 122,000 a year for what we pay for maintenance for other items just seems really low. I'm trying to figure out what's included in that number. Security, because my understanding is there'll be lights because it's not just a greenway, it's a transportation way. So would the electric bill, the maintenance of the lights, because i can see people shooting the lights out right that feels like i mean there's a street lights in my neighborhood that there's always a truck out working on so is that included in the maintenance

Now, I will say, because this came from our municipal partners, a lot of the area on the greenways aren't necessarily lit. They pretty much close. Okay. So that's not included.

So that would be an additional expense. Correct. How about security? Is it because typically greenways in municipalities... their regular police force, and the ones in the county, the Greenways, our Sheriff's Department does. Would that just be added to the local law enforcement community, or would we have to get our own security people?

So I think that would depend on the structure that's selected, but that's another good point of something that we would need to further investigate on the maintenance side where this is a little different.

So this is like the base and we'll need to keep adding things to it.

Correct.

It's basically what this is. Okay, that makes a lot more sense. And the other thing, I know I personally get a lot of complaints from community members about the bridges about the tagging, you know, the graffiti. And so the bridges and things for this, I'm assuming the graffiti cleanup would be in the maintenance as well.

Correct.

Because we get a lot, I hear a lot about the graffiti on the Beltline. And what I've heard from the Department of Transportation is as soon as we clean it, they do it again. So, you know, that's an ongoing cost. And one of the... my reservations with this project to start with was we were paying for, these are Wake County taxpayer dollars, and we're paying for the design in Durham County and beyond. With what you're proposing, is there some, Wake County will only pay for Wake County's part, so we won't be paying for maintenance for Durham, Chapel Hill, and the other areas?

So for the design portion, that is correct. We are only focused on this blue line here, and the partnership with Research Triangle Foundation, that is the portion that's within Durham County. So they were a partner on that funding. Now, in terms of maintenance, in this policymaker forum, we did invite for Orange and Durham County to be involved and listen in on that conversation. I'll highlight on the Chapel Hill end, there's actually been a development that they are slated to be building a portion of the bikeway in the next couple of years. So they might be the first to have something on the ground. So in terms of thinking about maintenance, we didn't want to exclude them from the conversation. But we also understand that we can work out a way where we're having equal accountability and talk through that with the policy makers to their comfort level.

So Tom Lott. Let's say you get an agreement for the maintenance. When would construction start? Because the design will be finished in early 27. And my understanding from our initial conversations about this is the designs are good for a certain period of time. Because there had been partial designs of this done once before, and then we had to repay to do them because there was too much time lapsed. So what is the timeline to get this started before this design is out of date or would have to be updated?

So I would say probably five, three to five years. Now I would say on the timeline that's highly dependent on the funding source unfortunately. So in the event of like a federal competitive grant If we put it in next year for application, we'd have to probably wait a year until we knew we could obligate it, and then it would probably be another year until we can construct it. In the event that it's phased, the DOT project, it would be with their construction schedule. Thank you.

One last question. I feel like we've almost got the cart in front of the horse. When we started the design work, which was a little over $5 million, we said, oh, we can't apply for grants, money to build it until we have the design. Is that normal? That felt kind of backwards to me. It looks like you would say, okay, Department of Transportation, we agree there's a need for this bikeway. if we do the design, is there some assurance that you'll have money for it? Is that normally how it happens, or is this normally how it happens?

In terms of the federal grant process, unfortunately, because it's a competitive process, they're looking for projects that are shovel-ready.

Right.

So the more that you have done, the more competitive that looks against the rest of the projects in the nation. So there is some degree of advancing the project and showing commitment to show that competitiveness and readiness. So in terms of being ready for a future federal grant, I think we've already made some strides since 2024. I think we've got regional buy-in, we've got that endorsement from both boards We've done some of the documentation on the environmental side. We've been able to now have this updated cost estimate. So those are all really good things that we can show readiness for. And if we can figure out these solutions and say, hey, maintenance, we got a plan, like that's even better. If we can say, hey, we've got a construction sponsor, that's even better. So just continuing to do those pieces. But I do appreciate the feeling of risk involved with the project.

Okay, thank you so much.

No problem. Commissioner Stallings.

Thank you so much for the presentation. This is a detailed, big project, right? And thanks to my colleagues, too, for all your thoughtful comments and questions. I really like the matrix of opportunity. I think I wanna use that phrase. You don't have to go back, just use the phrase. I like that a lot. And I do agree that I think the Policymaker Forum will be a good opportunity, assuming municipal partners will be invited to this, right? And has there been much conversation with the municipal partners yet about the maintenance opportunities?

Definitely at a technical and management staff level. You know, as much slides as I've put up on the slide today, I've probably got 100 in the back burner on a lot of the pros and cons, so they've definitely been aware. But this may be the first time from an elected official staff that they're receiving this information.

Okay, so there's more opportunity coming for that, which I think will be good. And I think this is a really exciting project for our region, given it's a greenway and transportation project, but I know it's a lot of details and trying to manage and plan for. You had mentioned lessons learned from the Tobacco Trail and Neuse River Trail projects. I'm curious if you could highlight some of those.

Sure. I could do my best. So, and I'm really just standing on the shoulder of giants and visionaries in the region, so I'm learning from them too. The tobacco trail, I think you can see it on the screen, that number one, that's kind of the... it's probably really hard to see up on the screen, but as it runs through different municipalities, they do follow that structure of the municipal takes care of the portions that are within their area. And it is really more of an informal kind of in terms of meeting schedule and how they coordinate with the maintenance. But there has been some innovation. That little portion that's within Chatham County, there's actually an MOU between Town of Cary and Chatham County for the maintenance of that portion. Chatham County is similar to other counties around the state. They really only maintain the pathways that are within their park system or on their property. So they were able to work on that MOU structure to make sure there's continuity, oh I'm sorry, continuity on the gaps of maintenance there. And then the new server trail, actually majority of it is within the city of Raleigh. And then I think there are some partnerships similar to as described, the tobacco trail as it touches down into Clayton and Johnston County as well. And I think they're looking at more partnerships potentially with conservancies in the area as that has continued to age over time. No problem.

You good, Commissioner Stoltz? Okay, Commissioner Jackson.

Yes, Commissioner Adamson's question brought my attention back to a particular slide. The order, the magnitude of cost of maintenance where you break down the 122 roughly? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. and show us what's included there. My question is about the second asterisk, that these numbers are based on 400 miles of current commitments, but it's for illustrative purposes. What are some examples of things that could change these numbers, and how much more firm will these numbers be by the time the policy forum occurs?

I will say that they will probably be similar, I'll probably use this same slide, but what I can. It's 400 miles for 14, pretty solid. I'm hoping so. We did get a detailed breakdown from municipality, but I could go back and pull out more specific information of what that entailed. There was a little bit of translation, right, because different, Municipalities have different structures for maintenance within all of their different departments, so this is just our best guess of trying to get the estimate. Some of the things that can change was what was mentioned in terms of security, in terms of staff hours and capacity and overhead. If a structure is chosen where there is some sort of collaborative structure of municipalities, that's already kind of built into they have the department set up and they have the staff capacity. They might need to add one or two staff, but it's not building a staff from the ground up. Another thing that might change would be, I think those are the two big ones. If I'm thinking back, it's really the security, the lighting, and then how much of the staff build out are you doing? How much of an equipment build out are you needing? If we do some sort of collaborative structure, it could be something where if the county were to take on an administrative role, maybe they're able to have some sort of agreement with the municipal for joint use of equipment for whatever is needed out on the bikeway. So all of those kinds of decisions in terms of how we set up the structure could influence the cost.

Yeah, rather fine decisions. I remember reading this and thinking like there's, I mean, a solid base of estimation here and that this is a pretty solid number. So I was just really happy to see that it seems so reasonable. And those fine tweaks that might occur would just come out of the conversation and planning. Thank you. No problem.

Okay, Commissioner Evans.

Thank you. Good to see you, Kara. Just for my own curiosity, the proposed build out of the 14, 15 miles, are we expecting most of that to be a raised boardwalk or will some of it be asphalt or is all of that still to be decided?

All the above. So we are getting a better idea. I'll go back to this main map for us. We are getting a better idea as we're developing the 30% design set. We've actually, we are, this week, we are working with technical staff to talk about this very thing of the boardwalk and bridge placement and about how much that may or may not have shifted from this study. So in areas kind of in RTP or really more traditional where you would see side of the road multi-use path, the bridges and boardwalk is really dependent on the stream crossings, some topography challenges along the way, which starts to happen near the lake. And then again, it starts to touch down on the side of the existing and connection to this existing infrastructure on the Raleigh end as well. So really probably there's boardwalks scattered throughout depending on constraints, but it's a little mix of everything.

Okay, so I thought it was likely the case, but wasn't sure if we knew. And then talking about various municipalities or jurisdictions participating in cost sharing and so forth, I'm assuming we're talking about Raleigh, Cary, Morrisville, and then some of the areas are probably just in Wake County. Would that be correct in terms of the municipalities or jurisdictions that would be sharing?

Correct. In terms of construction or for maintenance? Well, both.

I mean, those are the jurisdictions that it runs through. I assume some of it, I know it starts in Raleigh, I assume some of it is in Cary, town limits proper, and some of it is maybe in Morrisville, town limits proper, and some of it may just be in county. But those would be the entities that would likely be sharing in anything. Would that be a correct statement?

Yes, that's correct for the Wake County side.

Right, right. Yeah, just talking about this first segment. Yeah, this first segment. And then I know Durham and Orange would get involved. in the other okay well and I just mentioned to my colleagues that I will be participating in the policy forum as the Wake County representative at Campo and then there'll be Raleigh folks, Morrisville folks and Cary folks and I've also asked Apex to be included even though it doesn't run through them it's so close that I know they'd have an interest in it so if you have information you want to share with me or thoughts that you think of after today before we meet feel free to share those with me thanks any any other questions or comments colleagues

Okay, not seeing any, I will add my comment here before we move on to the next item. I'm glad you brought this before the Board today. I think it's something definitely we need to continue to work on, especially with DOT involvement, and as Wake County continually grows, We're still at 66 per day and roughly 24,000 people per year, which is a new window every year moving into Wake County. So transportation is definitely at the top of everyone's list. So we definitely appreciate you bringing this to us today. So colleagues, anything else on this? Yeah, Commissioner Stallings.

Clerk Yoyer just said that some people are having a hard time hearing us that might be in the room or either listening online. So just asking us to speak into our mics as best we can. Thank you.

Okay. Awesome. Not seeing any other comments. Thank you for the presentation. We'll move on to our third item.

All right, thank you all so much.

So at this point then, Michael James. And his supporting cast.

Yes, thank you, and good afternoon, Chair. It's good to be with you all. Today we are bringing back several updates to your incentive or business development grant policy, several changes to that policy. These were all discussed in some detail with the Growth, Sustainability, and Economic Strength Committee back in March. The committee okayed in advancing that all of the policy changes to the full board for discussion at a work session. We initially hoped to bring those to you in June, but adjusted that to accommodate some other items in June. So we are here before you today. And if the board is ready to move forward after your discussion today, we have an item prepared for you all to vote and adopt the changes as soon as your regular meeting next Monday. If not, we'll go from there. I know it has been a while since March when the committee discussion was held, so we are going to walk through the changes again today with you all in detail again. I'm gonna start by just kind of reviewing some of the policy itself, the policy objectives, and I'll talk briefly about the committee discussions, outcome of those, and then I'm gonna turn it over to Mr. Haley to walk you through each of the proposed changes and then we'll turn it back to the committee for your consideration, discussion and direction on next steps. So you'll have a good policy. It's formalized, it's written, well-documented, it's transparent, it's easy for anyone, member of the public, company, consultant, to access, read, and understand. It has clear goals and objectives. And of course, as you know, it's based on performance. And it has several goals. Obviously, we want to attract and encourage new investment, create new jobs, and diversify the tax base. And then one of the additions to the goals that the board made back in 2023 was to promote economic mobility and sustainable business practices. And a lot of that was in the policy through the upward upward mobility bonus in the past. But we formalize that as clear goals in policy. You may remember that we really started this discussion about policy changes a year ago now, so we actually had a discussion with the committee last August where we had more of kind of a review of the whole current policy as it's written now. We talked a lot about the legal context for incentives, philosophy behind that, why we do economic development incentives, and we previewed a lot of the changes that we're gonna talk to you about today at that time, and we brought those changes forward in March. And the committee was generally okay with the changes at that point in time. We had one minor retitling of one of the tiers of the policy, which we'll talk about. And so we've incorporated that based on the committee's feedback. But otherwise, we didn't hear changes from the committee in March. And so we're here to talk with you all about the changes today. So with that, I'll call Michael up here to walk you through each of the changes.

Thank you.

Thank you, commissioners, again, for the time today to walk through these proposed changes. Thank you also for your ongoing support of economic development and unwavering support for economic opportunity here in Wake County. Like Michael said, we're going to walk you through a few of these proposed updates and adjustments to the policies to help ensure that Wake County remains competitive and supports further job creation. and economic opportunity, which continues to be at the core of what we do in economic development. First, we're proposing a text change to the wage threshold language. The request is to change the policy to provide the commissioners with additional flexibility related to wages by replacing the living wage floor with new language and adjusting the wage threshold from 110% of the county average wage to 100% of the county average wage. A couple justifications for this requested change. One, as you can note here as the data shows, wage inflation is something we've talked about previously, has occurred rapidly over the last several years here in Wake County and around the country as these data demonstrate. Second, the proposed change will allow the policy to support More entry level and early career positions. These are positions that we've talked a lot about that really are the first step or the first rung in terms of economic opportunity and economic mobility. These positions come with a clear pathway for economic opportunity themselves, which is really important. And then third, Companies have to pay market rates related to Wake County's current wage rates that we found within the market as their final wage level. So a potential unintended consequence is that a policy that discourages wage growth by setting a floor is something we want to avoid. Obviously it bears repeating we've talked about this a lot in the past but capillary workforce development and Wake Tech are critical to our economic development here in Wake County. These partners are involved literally in every economic development project that we do and we are talking with them about how they can support companies through training data and more particularly for these entry-level positions. Next, we're requesting a simplification of the tiers by reducing the number of tiers from five to three. This just simplifies the policy. Most of the investment level distinctions of the tiers were adopted at a very different time in economic cycle and project life cycle for economic development. The flexibility and distinctions aren't necessary, we feel, anymore, and several elements that will relate to you as we go through these changes, if they're adopted, make some of these tiers irrelevant for us. Next is a request, this is probably the most important policy change request that we're making, is the establishment of a transformational project here Projects are more competitive, more transformational, larger, more complex than ever before. But most importantly, they provide more economic impact in terms of broad economic impact and opportunity that can be felt across the entire county. So we're requesting the creation of a new transformational project here. This would codify the type of flexibility that The commissioners have offered similar projects in the past with very large capital investment, in this case over $500 million, and significant job creation. This flexibility is being requested in terms of both the incentive percentage and the payout years, which allow the maximum level of flexibility during the incentive negotiation process when the county attorney and the assistant county manager are engaged in that. It's also important to note that our municipal partners. Michael. Yes, sir. Sorry. We've got one person commissioned.

Sorry. Before we move on. I'm sorry. You're fine.

The fact that you just pointed right at me, I don't know if I appreciate that, Michael. I just have a question, because you went from the wages to the next. Yes, ma'am. So I just had a question about the wage, adjusting the wage thresholds. Yes, ma'am. When you looked at that slide, the third one, it says employer promotes economic mobility. I'm wondering... how exactly promoting economic mobility works as opposed to the employer maybe showing a track record of economic mobility or of having economic mobility and not just promoting. And you had said something about Something discourages replacing the living wage floor, but I didn't catch what that was.

I'll answer two questions. The second part was an unintended consequence of a floor, potentially. So the first part of this promotes, this would be a new adjusted language that we've developed, this idea of, the commissioners allowing the commissioners to have flexibility in these conversations, particularly around entry-level jobs, early career positions that are so important. For us, this idea of the things that we're doing that we'd want to make the checks for as we're talking to companies is making sure, one, that they are going to qualify for the upper mobility bonus, the three and two bonus, which says, hey, these are the certain things that we have an expectation of the county that really high-functioning employers have for their employees, one. Two, obviously they're going to qualify for municipal incentive. This is about partnership. That's really important for us. And then finally, when we think about promoting economic mobility here, what we want to make sure is we understand that we've had these conversations before that when we see entry-level jobs, we understand from the company how the entry-level job becomes the next job and the next job. So it's less than just, we've had these conversations in the past, it's less just about a potential pathway and more of a defined pathway. I think that's going to be very important as we move forward with this. Again, wanting to know what the employers are doing here in our community.

Right, and I think that's why I asked about the language there, for it to be a little more specific in showing that the company has a track record of.

I want to elaborate on Michael's response, which I appreciate. So I think our intent in the language is this would be a company that can demonstrate to you all in documentation. I'm just going to make up an example. We participate in Wake Works Apprenticeship Program. And within five years, we have a track record of promoting or advancing X percent. That's the type of information I would expect we'd be bringing to you all from the company. So it's not just that they... say that they support economic mobility, but they document that they have a track record of doing it. And that's, remember, that's information that you all would be taking into consideration whether or not you even choose to offer the company an incentive in the first place. So you would have that, so that's part of what we're

bring in there so i would i would expect we would have documentation to demonstrate to you all yeah commissioner thomas can i add one more point to that i think what we're not talking about is supporting economic mobility broadly something everyone can agree on hey the sky is blue we all believe in economic mobility i think this is much more defined specific information that we're going to be requesting from companies okay that's helpful commissioner thomas yes ma'am

Do you think the word encourages might be a better word than promotes that could encourage economic mobility in their environment? No, I think.

I don't understand your concern and I'm just trying to... I appreciate that. I don't want to wordsmith. I want Michael Squared to understand what I'm asking and they could figure it out. I don't think. But thank you. I appreciate that.

So can I move on to your second? Please. The unintended consequence. So one of the things that we've said regarding a wage floor is this idea of if companies have to pay a market rate, our concern is an unintended consequence of something like a wage floor potentially could say, okay, well, if that's the floor, then let's just start there instead of some level higher. It's an unintended consequence. I don't think we've run into that. I just wanted to note that as a potential reason why, one more reason why this would make sense to remove this floor.

Okay, thank you. That's helpful.

Yes, ma'am.

Okay, you're good. Are there any other comments?

Sorry, and I'm moving fast. I'm sorry. No, you're fine. I'm looking at notes in the thing, so I apologize.

Did you have a question on things that he already covered? Yeah. Go ahead.

I'm really intrigued with this conversation and understand the rationale for- Microphone. All right. Thank you for that reminder. What I was saying is that I'm really intrigued with this conversation and understand the rationale for changing the percentage from the current to the proposed. It does leave me wondering, and I also heard your response about the unintended consequences of having a floor. What I'm trying to square in my mind is how we don't unintendedly reward folks that are coming in entry level with really low wages. What kind of, and that may get at number three a little bit, but I'd like to just explore more. How do we... ensure that an 80,000 average doesn't allow someone to start off at 40,000, for example, at entry level.

Sure. And again, some of this has to do with these are entry level jobs with no high school degree, potentially, to play it out. we'd want to see in that case, not that these are $40,000 a year jobs with no ability to matriculate up into a better job with job training, to Michael's point, additional training from Capital Area or Wake Tech, but this is a foot in the door, this is the first step in economic mobility and economic opportunity within a company, again, that's gonna offer Benefits on day one etc the things that we have the expectation for and we're gonna have clear information I think this goes to Commissioner Thomas's question that will have clear information about and that you and I have talked about this previously where it's not just Welder one to welder two. Yeah, that sounds like a pathway. But what is the pathway is that a you know some long-term training process or is that something that says hey if we can get this level certification we can quickly move from this to this and then move on i think that's the that's the area of focus for us again so much of what this policy is intended to do is create economic opportunity and mobility for our residents understanding that we want to have and support entry-level jobs that provide a pathway to future success is going to be important for this policy

Okay, well I look forward to continue to explore this and particularly Commissioner Thomas's question because we do have an out clause essentially that says that we could still offer the grants even if they don't meet that minimum wage threshold. if they promote or whatever way we describe that. So I would like to see that part of the policy just a little more tighter so that we don't create a loophole of rewarding those that are not only paying low wages but don't really have a clear path to economic mobility.

Agreed.

Thank you.

Yes, ma'am.

Any other comments before Micah continues? Yes. Not sinning. Okay, Michael.

Thank you. Please continue. So I'll finish my comments on this transformational tier. Again, as I was noting, this is flexibility that we're requesting in terms of both the percentage and years that would allow for the assistant county manager and the county attorney to have the flexibility during that negotiation process. Again, this is flexibility that the commissioners have offered previously for very large projects when it comes to capital investment and significant job creation. Again, I was mentioning that our municipal partners continue to be very creative in supporting these types of large transformational projects. They're able to pull different levers than the county commissioners are in terms of more specific municipal support. And so it's important, again, we're sort of walking alongside our partners. So again, given the scale and impact of these projects, we feel that this tier is critical.

Michael, how do we... Yes, sir. A hundred jobs seems low. How did we land on that number?

You know, a lot of this was from language that we had had previously. Again, what's interesting is some of these, even these very large projects that we're seeing, the job creation is very different from what it would have been maybe 10 years ago when you had seen, you know, projects of this scale. You would have seen... Couple thousand jobs, so that's a little bit of it. Obviously the numbers of be very fair is a bit arbitrary It's just a number to give us a threshold We know that most of these projects at this level will be much higher than that So this again was about flexibility was allowing these projects to be eligible so that way we're not having to ask for special consideration during the negotiation process

Thank you for bringing this forward, Michael. I know we've been talking about it a long time. In the incentive, the TBD, is that something we will come up with a number or will that be based on each project?

I think that'll be a project-by-project negotiation that's being undertaken by the assistant county manager and the county attorney. Our thought would be it probably would be a maximum threshold of 80%, which is something that we've seen previously, so we'd probably peg it to some number that we've used previously so that there's comfort and understanding of that.

I just don't want some company to look at that and think, oh, they'll give me all of it for 10 years. No, ma'am.

And I think you're exactly right. We certainly would not do that, and we will not entertain that type of request for a host of reasons.

Okay. Thank you.

Yes, ma'am.

Mm-hmm. Okay, keep talking directly into the mic. It would be good to have some guardrail stated for that incentive. So I just ditto that for us to consider some explicit guardrail while leaving flexibility by project. And David, I was looking at that 100 jobs too. And a minimum 100 jobs, 50 million investment. When we compare that to the other tiers,

It's 500 million. That's the main guardrail, 50 million. The main guardrail here is the scale of the investment is so enormous that that really provides the guardrail. These are very large-scale, very complex projects. Yes, we've had... Certainly success with these types of projects recently, but prior to the last five years The largest investment project that we had was a hundred and thirty million dollars Yes, somewhere in that range the MetLife's and the bandwidths were the were the largest projects we had previous to this so five hundred million dollars provides a pretty significant significant threshold for this type of project and

Yes, hence transformational. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. And so, you know, I said 50 million, but I'm really comparing it to the other tier. So like tier four, where there's 50 million minimum investment and 50 jobs minimum compared to 500 million and 100 jobs. Just kind of putting those tiers together, it seems inequitable. It seems like these folks are getting... That we're paying significantly more, granting significantly more for these jobs than a tier that has 50 million with a minimum of 50 jobs.

Right. And I guess I'll use some of the examples on here that we're looking at here. Between Fuji 1 and 2, we're talking about 1,200 jobs. Yeah. Amgen, we're talking several hundred. Right. I think, again, this was just a threshold to allow a lot of flexibility. We're talking $500 million or a billion dollars. We're going to be well above that 100 job threshold. Really, I can't think of a situation in which we would have an investment of that scale with few jobs.

And you decided to go with the one. This is, David, your question. You decided to go with the 100. knowing that it's a really low ball and not really, like you said, practical for a $500 million investment. But you went with 100. Tell me again.

Again, I think our main concern here, the tier is structured more on the investment. That's what we care about. That's what our grant's focused on. So our thing is we want to set a very high bar in terms of investment threshold, and then allow flexibility for the commissioners and staff in negotiation. So that was an arbitrary number of 100 was really where we came from. We actually pulled some of this language from some of the previous incentive policy language.

Okay. Thank you.

Yes, ma'am.

I think Michael got to the heart of it there, but I was just going to clarify that when we're doing these deals, we're focusing on two things, the amount of capital investment and the jobs, and Michael's saying that, well, we don't know, but if they make this kind of investment, even if the number of jobs is not super high in the long run, it's still a great situation for us. We're only giving them tax abatement for a limited period of time, and then after that, we get to collect property tax on that huge investment. So that's one of the other reasons why we're interested in these projects. I just wanted to clarify that.

Yeah, I get that point. And still, seeing 100 jobs here, it just doesn't sit with the other tiers in terms of what we're granting out. But if it's not a practical and it's just a wild shot and leaving flexibility, I get that.

Right.

Yes.

So next, we're asking for a decrease in our state match minimum. I think it's an important reminder, the state of North Carolina requires local participation when a state incentive is involved. Again, this match isn't a dollar for dollar match. It is actually participation in some level of good faith support and participation by the local unit of government. I should note that the county has been an exemplary partner in this regard when it comes to these match provisions. So again, a trend that we've discussed previously is lowering, is lowered investment levels primarily for office related projects. the conversation we were just having commissioner jackson was about large-scale operations most likely life science or advanced manufacturing of some kind this really gets back to the heart of projects that we've seen previously that are more office related and office projects again as we've talked numerous times have changed in terms of size and scale over the years there are very few office related projects that would start a new building such as a bandwidth or a met life that they previously did now many of these projects are going to existing buildings and therefore don't require a large capital investment so again asking for flexibility here in this change from five million to two million in terms of investment and it's often the case that our local incentives for these types of projects actually unlock much larger state incentive most likely these are large job creation projects with low investment therefore the state instead of in many cases would be much larger than the county investment if it's a low capital investment high job creation project should also note that office is still a critical tax base for our community we want to continue to support investment in this asset class as much as possible It's been a longstanding policy aim of the county's incentive policy to support the creation, the growth, or relocation of headquarters into Wake County. We're requesting an adjustment to the investment minimum and how the incentive is calculated. Under the current policy, the grant is based on a percentage of the net new ad valorem taxes that are collected. But when these projects, as we just noted, go into existing spaces, the investment levels are minimum, and therefore the grant amount is likewise minimal. As the example here that Michael created demonstrates, these are very low grant payout figures. So the request is to create a policy that makes these grants more impactful and increases the county's competitiveness for headquarters. This new language would reduce the investment minimum as well as use a cash per jobs structure with a shorter payout period. Again, the purpose is to make the grant more impactful and continue to be easy to use and administer. Next, we're requesting a language change from the language of targeted growth area to one of priority growth area. Again, economic mobility and opportunity remains key pillars to the overall economic development strategy, both for the county and for our work in economic development. And finally, I threw a lot at you relatively quickly. So this chart summarizes all the changes that are being requested, the consolidated tiers, the changes to wage investment thresholds, the creation of the transformational tier, the adjustments to the headquarters tier, and the text change to priority growth area. I'm going to recall something that Michael James said to start. These changes add clarity and flexibility in our ability to respond to large, complex expansions of existing companies or companies seeking to grow in Wake County, and they also stay within the broader framework of the policy's overall intended goals to be performance-based, targeted, focused on key sectors, and supporting economic growth, opportunity, and mobility. I'll turn it over to Doug. I'll ask Michael for our next steps in terms of where we go from here.

Thank you, Michael. So that concludes all the changes. So really, we're really at this point just turning it over to the board for any kind of final questions you all have about the changes or if you're ready to give direction on next steps. So as I mentioned at the beginning, we can have ready for you all an item for you to adopt the policy changes next Monday. Or if you'd like to take a different approach, then now would be the time to let us know that. And while you're thinking on that, I will just make one clarification because we have attached in your packet a copy of the proposed policy. And I just wanted to point out we have one change if we were to bring this to you on Monday. There's one conforming change since we're changing the headquarters policy to your structure. There is a question about upward mobility bonus because we typically pay that out as an additional 5% on the property tax revenue. we would propose paying that additional 5% out on the cash payout for the per jobs incentive in this case. So again, for the same rationale and purposes that Michael just reviewed, but I just wanted to make that note since it's a technical change, but that would be different in your packet next week if you all were to move forward. But otherwise, I think it's really your turn to give direction and feedback or ask any outstanding questions.

Thank you, Michael. So, colleagues, at this time, as you indicated, this is an opportunity for us to let staff know which way we want to move forward at this particular time, whether we want to move forward on a consent agenda or whether to table it or whatever the case may be at this particular point. Yes, Commissioner Adamson.

I personally am ready to move forward, but like to suggest that we take it off the consent agenda since this is not regular business. It's a pretty significant policy update.

Commissioner Stallings, then Commissioner Thomas.

Thank you. And Michael, I'm just going to, Michael James, I'm just going to restate something we spoke about a little bit earlier today. And Michael Haley, I'd be curious if you want to weigh into it as well. Are there any implications that we should be concerned about given the ambiguity about property taxes coming down from this constitutional amendment going to be on the ballot? are there any concerns that you would have, any implications? I mean, keeping in mind that the corporate income tax rate that the General Assembly sets is quite generous for the business community, and there's more and more concern about property taxes and our authority and what we can do with property taxes, and there's a lot of ambiguity, I think, about that landscape over these next few months. So just curious if... if you wanted to comment. And then there's also the Blue Ridge loop, the loophole has not been addressed by the General Assembly. And our current budget, I believe, County Manager, you can remind me, about $12 million I thought we estimated that we have lost. And that has not been addressed yet by the General Assembly. So just curious if you had any comments there.

Yeah, thank you, Commissioner Stallings. I think it's an important question. And I'll give my response and I'll let Michael add if he wants to add anything to it. I think it's hard to give you a specific analysis without knowing, one, does the amendment pass? If it does, what does the legislature then come back and do, and what does that look like, and what are the details? I think from a conceptual standpoint at this time, I'd say part of what you're trying to do with the incentive policy is attract more property tax base, which does take some pressure off. of property tax rates. Obviously, when you enter into these agreements, you're committing a portion of that new property tax to the company as an incentive for them to be here. As Michael is doing his job, he's trying to vet competition, his team's trying to vet competition. Part of the reason we talked about this a lot last August, when you're doing an incentive, you are trying to tip the scales in a competitive business location decision. But for that incentive, the company would choose to go somewhere else. And it's maybe not always possible to know that beyond shadow of a doubt, but that's in theory what you're trying to do. And so I think it's important to be aggressive in trying to recruit companies and property tax base and bringing that to Wake County. I think it's more difficult to evaluate what the risk is. The other thing to think about is we're in agreements now with companies that depending on what the legislature does, there's property tax impact for agreements that we already are in contractually obligated to pay out on if the company meets performance. So remember, if you're paying out, that means the company lived up to what they committed to. So that's my response. Do you want to add anything?

I think that was, thank you for the question, Commissioner Staunton. I think it's important in light of the uncertainty that commissioners have to face right now. so i'll say a couple things i'll reiterate a couple things that michael said one is obviously incentives because of the but four clause as michael noted but for these incentives a company would not come and so without that incentive those companies in theory would not be here so there would be zero new tax base added to the county that's important i think secondarily in terms of the blue ridge um uncertainty around the blue ridge ruling you know these are probably a separate category because it's an investment related to a business investment versus multi-family or residential, so they wouldn't be caught up in that. So I think that's also important, and again, this is, for us, the most important thing is adding new tax base to the county is critical. These grants are based on net new ad valorem, so I think that's really important. This is new tax base that's being considered as part of these grants. Thank you for the question. I think it's important. Again, there's a lot of uncertainty, but I think the county's policy and the structure of its incentive policy allows as much certainty to be in place for some of these things.

And I'm aware that the Blue Ridge doesn't specifically apply to this, but just thinking about the general, in terms of property tax revenue that we can collect, it clearly has impacted us by millions of dollars. And if nothing changes, it will continue to impact us for millions of dollars.

Yes, ma'am, thank you. You good, Commissioner Stallings? Commissioner Tums?

Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Stallings. I appreciate what you said about the property tax. And Michael, I appreciate your... answer about the increasing the tax base from a corporate standpoint. I think that helps out a lot versus the tax burden on individual homeowners. My question is, Michael James, you mentioned the technical correction, and I don't understand what you're saying. Can you explain it to me again, please?

Yeah, let me just view it more as an example and not as a technical thing. Thank you. So right now, let's say a company has a $2 million project. The tax office values that at $2 million. The incentive that we pay out is based on that property tax valuation.

Okay.

because we are changing the headquarters payout structure to be based on the jobs that are created by the project. Because that's the primary benefit, really. With headquarters projects, they're typically office projects. They're lower dollar investments from a physical infrastructure space. So we're changing that to be more competitive to pay per job. And so all that I was saying about the technical changes, we realized we needed to add a conforming change. So the upward mobility bonus on that $2 million investment 5% would be very little. So we're talking about instead of, let's say it's 100 jobs, $100,000, so you'd be paying out 5% on that per job payout instead of 5% on the property tax payout, property tax base payout, if that makes sense. I should have put a chart in here, but... That's fine. I'm still, we could talk more.

No, I understand. Thank you. Um, and, uh, chairman, I agree with commissioner Adamson about moving forward. Um, I believe the committee moved it forward to this point, so I'm happy to move it forward to the agenda. Thank you.

Okay. Um, so just, just two questions. One, just to clarification, the job creations, those are jobs that have to be relocated, have to be located in Wake County. They can't be, um, working remotely, correct?

Yeah, I'll go ahead and answer that. So what we do in our agreements, when we actually enter into agreements with the companies, we define Wake County employee and we typically state in the actual agreement itself that we don't accept remote. If you are a remote worker, that's primarily working outside of Wake County. So we base it on where the job is located.

And last question. So are the changes based on feedback that we've received from companies who didn't relocate here?

I'm going to turn that question over to Michael.

Sure.

Thank you for the question, David. So to answer your question, is it based on feedback we've received from companies? Some of it has been. A lot of it's been feedback we've received from you and the commissioners yourselves in terms of wanting more flexibility, less special conditions or special requests, things like that. Is that fair, please?

Yeah, and I would just add on the transformational tier specifically. Part of what we were dealing with is we had these major large-scale projects that we were aggressively recruiting, but we didn't really have a formalized policy that gave the board guidelines as to how to approach the negotiations for these really big, exceptional projects. And so we were trying to put some policy language towards that. But that's really just specifically on the transformational tier.

And the reason I ask, I know we've had conversations about the importance of headquarters trying to recruit headquarters here. And so I just want to make sure the things that you're proposing for the board, we feel like those are some things that are going to up our game a little bit to recruit headquarter type companies here in Wake County.

Yeah, I would say I definitely on the headquarters here, I mean, just looking at the numbers, it's a much more meaningful carrot for a company to pay out based on the job creation because often the investments are so low.

Commissioner Jackson.

I have a couple comments and a couple questions. I have a couple comments, a couple questions. One, I really appreciate the reduced investment tiers, the tiers that allow for reduced investment because that, we know, allows for smaller companies to you know, participate in this opportunity. And I think that's a very positive thing for us. I, to David's question, I think when we take this to, and well, let me say, I also support this being not part of consent agenda and part of regular agenda. And at that time, it would be good when, you know, the presentation is done to be able to have some sort of appropriate retrospective data from what we've been able to do with the previous policy, just as context for some of these changes, where we were limited or where our successes were, just so that the residents that are hearing it can get an insight into what we've been able to do with the previous policy. I think that's gonna be really important. We talked earlier about directing growth to municipalities and cities. And a lot of this work obviously is done in collaboration with the municipalities. Have they, have you engaged and connected with any of them to get insight on this policy?

Great question. Yeah, thank you. Maybe I'll start, let Michael finish. To your point, we engage our municipal partners on every one of the projects that we have, every one of these projects, unless they're going into the Research Triangle Park specifically or in a municipality. So it's very important for us. We're engaging with our municipal partners constantly when it comes to incentive policy. In fact, whether it's our team helping them rewrite their policy or getting feedback on our policy is something that's really important to us. It's a point of continuous conversation because we want to continue to sharpen our toolboxes collectively. Is that?

Yes, it does. Okay. Yes. And we talked about this earlier about having some kind of guardrails on that transformational TBD. So with that, I could support moving forward. I know you'll do some thinking about how to include that. And then the last thing is the headquarters job payment. Have we done an analysis to see where there is like a cut point or a place where $1,000 per job might actually out clips what we're actually bringing in in revenue? Like just run some scenarios on that and should that number be capped?

So I'll say that's a great question and I think it kind of goes back to actually the whole rationale for making this change. So in this case, if you were to move forward with this, the payout on a headquarters project is generally gonna exceed the property tax revenue that's generated. now you said it generally it's going to exceed it part of what we're why we're making this change is the payouts on the because these are such low dollar investment projects the payouts are so low that i i have a hard time looking at you all in the eyes and saying that $10,000 a year or that $45,000 payout over five years really tip the scales and made the difference in this company choosing to put their headquarters here in Wake County. So it's a more aggressive policy on headquarters. So I think the payout might exceed the property tax revenue that's generated, but I think in particular with headquarters type projects where you have a CEO and a CFO of a company that are making their home here, there's other benefits that are more difficult to quantify, but are still benefits to Wake County in terms of the activity and reputation and regional profile and all of those factors. So hopefully that makes sense. We're intentionally trying to be more aggressive on the headquarters payout.

Yeah, make it more appealing. Yeah. And you've considered and don't believe we need to cap the $1,000 per job.

So I think that would be the cap.

The head count.

Oh, like up to... up to x number of jobs i don't know that i gave consideration to that so for example a 500 let's just say a 500 job headquarters project which would be really great for you great for wakening so that's five hundred thousand you know five hundred thousand dollars a year for three years it's one one and a half million dollars to pay out for a 500 job headquarters project that would be very impactful to Wake County. When you consider what some of the payouts would be for like Amgen and Fujifilm and others, that's still well below what you'd be paying out on some of those other large advanced manufacturing projects. Granted, those projects come with a lot more property tax revenue. Go ahead.

This is interesting. No, I know. Sorry, I was talking with my hands. I think one of the things in this scenario, though, if you did have a 500-job project, let's just use that one, And they would have to build a building to do that. When you think about 500 people, that's in the realm of half a million. That's the PNC Tower or something like that. I mean, there's not the scale of those kind of projects. So I think what you would naturally see in terms of these payouts would probably be more advantageous on smaller headcounts. And then the company would logically say, well, we're going to receive more potential benefit with this ad valorem based project at this level, at this tier. So we'd rather select that. I think there's going to be some dynamic like that that we would see. And we've experienced that previously. Other municipalities that do cash per jobs also sort of feel that back and forth. Is that a good example?

Yeah, I think that's great. And I would just add, too, like in that case, they're going to qualify for state JDIG money as well. And so I think that unlocks a lot of it. So we consider where do they fit best in our policy as part of that too.

Okay, well, I'd certainly respect your expertise and the number of times that we've revisited this. Just want to make sure before we all take this to vote. Thank you.

Okay, colleagues, any other comments or questions? Yes, Commissioner Evans.

Well, first of all, I want to commend Michael and Michael and the committee that worked on this earlier in the year. I think you've done a great job with adjusting and putting guardrails and positioning at us to address the various issues that we've talked about in the last few years, and this will minimize the number of times we have to waive our policy, because you've addressed all the different things that were causing us to have to sometimes do that. And so I think it's taken us a while to pull all these pieces together and massage it and everything, but I'm really happy with where we've landed. The adjustments to wage limits, transformational tier, the headquarters, and also, you mentioned it, it's not on the slide, that that's very huge for use of office space, which is something else we're trying to encourage in this area. So I think you've checked all the right boxes based on all our conversations that we've had as we were considering the various projects over the last couple of years. So kudos to that. I think it looks good. I'm happy to approve it. One question I had is when would we say this was going to be effective based on when we approved it? And the reason I'm thinking is there a little bit of lead time And where I'm going with that is I do think it might be helpful for this to be a regular item and us have a chance to talk about it and there'll be a presentation. But I'm not crazy about it being a regular item on next week's agenda because that's gonna be a very long meeting already with lots of public speakers likely and blah, blah, blah. And so I'm wondering is there an impact if we waited and put this on a September meeting?

So I was just going to say, I think that's at the board's discretion. We could be ready for it to be effective upon adoption if you were to vote on it next week. We would be bringing new projects that evening. And so I think we would need to know what the board's feedback is on that as far as how we treat those projects. So I think we need to know from you all what your, do you, I don't know, if you want to add anything on impacts or?

Yeah, I'd say specifically we have projects that would need to move forward relatively quickly.

I'm just putting that out there, but if it, If time is of the essence, then being here until 11 p.m. or midnight is not that much different. It's up to the board.

Okay. Thank you. Okay. So we've got several. Yeah. Commissioner Waters. Did you have a comment?

I appreciate all the hard work, thoughtfulness. I consider you all experts, and I know a lot has gone into this, and I look forward to moving this forward, and I'm happy for it to be on the regular agenda based upon what my colleagues feel.

All right. Thank you. Commissioner Addison.

Thank you for doing this long presentation. But when you present it to us in front of the board whenever that happens, could you add in there about we're never cash negative? Because... pretty much when I do a community forum, one of the things I hear is you give these companies so much money. Well, we are, you know, I explained to them that we are very fortunate in Wake County that a lot of smaller places, counties, cities, have to create infrastructure, you know, put in gas lines, all these things to get companies. We don't have to do that. So the company has to meet the milestone before they get the incentive for the next year's taxes. I think that's really important for our community to understand. And if they don't do that... then we're not out anything, right? I mean, we're out the potential jobs and infrastructure, but we're not going to spend $5 million prepping a site and they never show up and we get stuck with it. I think that's important.

Okay, thank you. So we've got two questions that need to be answered. First, I've heard three or four of you guys indicated you want it on regular agenda. So that's the first thing that I need to get clarified. So how many of you guys want it on regular agenda? Okay, so that seemed to be unanimous. So it would be on regular agenda. Next question is, do you want it next Monday or push it to September? So how many want it for next Monday? Okay, question resolved. So we'll bring it forth then. So it will be on regular agenda for next Monday. Great. Yes, Commissioner Thompson.

Just really quickly, I appreciate what Commissioner Adamson said, Michael, and I would like that to be addressed about what the public thinks on how these incentives work. I wouldn't necessarily use the cash negative moniker, but that's... Thank you. I appreciate it.

So you guys.

I just want to add in the request earlier to include some retrospective analysis from 2018 I think will help to visualize these points that were requested.

Any other questions or comments at this time? If not, we... Come back on my property tax question.

And I appreciate all the work. I really do. There's costs and benefits and everything. But you definitely think the benefits definitely outweigh the costs with this moving forward on sort of the ambiguity with property taxes. Yes? Okay, thanks. Yes, Michael James?

I think so, and I think you all always have the discretion to revisit the policy at any time. If the General Assembly were to take an action that was concerning, you could revisit at that point in time. Okay, great. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Awesome. Thank you, Michael and Michael. Always good you guys to come forth. You all bring good information to us. So now we'll go ahead and transition to our final item, which is item number four, Ben, our Chief of Staff. Well, how long is your presentation?

My presentation will be brief. I expect for the session to last a long time.

Let's take five.

For any decision today, this is really to get you thinking about preparations for the board's changes that are going to come in December, start talking to one another about things that y'all may prefer. And for the things we're going to talk about today, we are asking for guidance by mid-October. And I'll go into more about why in a bit. So two things we're going to talk about today are the board's committees. We'll look at structure, assignments, policy areas, meeting frequency, and the roles of board chair and vice chair, things that y'all need to be thinking about as you expand to nine. And then we'll talk about agenda reviews and your recent guidance to start scheduling three sessions per cycle and how that's going to result in some changes of focus and format. And a question to y'all about rotation. So a few high-level considerations and recaps. At a recent meeting or rules retreat, the board did give staff direction to start planning for what I'm gonna call, for lack of a, for now, a great government committee of the whole. Y'all gave very specific instruction to staff on this. We heard that you wanna hear, you wanna meet twice on this in 27, and that you want the meeting to be remote, and you want us to go ahead and build those times into your 2027 proposed schedule, and we are happy to do that. And then on meeting frequency, just something to bear in mind is staff will work on building in that third review on Mondays. That is going to reduce some scheduling flexibility. I know it has been the board's practice for many years to try and concentrate meetings on Mondays or at least the first working day of the week. It gives you a lot of predictability with your other life events and your jobs. It gives us a lot of predictability. It's just something to bear in mind. So committees, and I don't have a lot of slides. There is a separate handout that you can pull up on your iPad. And these are options just to get y'all thinking about it. So currently, and this has been the case, I believe, for three, four years now, you have five committees, and there's three commissioners per committee. The chair and vice chair do not serve as committee chairs. That is a practice, not a rule. Your current policy areas for the five committees are education, housing, health and human services, public safety, growth and economic development. The frequency is the boards, those committees have been meeting three times per year. And again, you've been using this since the beginning of 24, so really three years. So, some things to consider. Option A is you could cease using committees and hold more work sessions. This is a little bit out there, but we floated this concept with commissioners a few years ago. My recollection is commissioners found it interesting to consider But there was not a lot of interest. I just wanted to share it. You would also have your great government committee of the whole. This would reduce your net number of total meetings. You could assign themes to work sessions if you wanted to. One reason I think we pitched this some time ago is y'all tend to have good attendance at your committees, that even though only three commissioners are assigned, y'all tend to have often five, six, seven commissioners at committees. So that's A. B is sort of reorganize the committees around your strategic plan a little tighter. We could condense it down to four committees. You could assign four commissioners per committee, plus two more meetings for the great government committee of the whole. One possible way to do it is, you know, mix community health and well-being, mix community, excuse me, mix growth and inclusive prosperity, and mix lifelong learning and safer together. These committees could continue to meet three times per year, plus two for the great government. This would be about the same number of meetings on hold for a given year. Because we'd be dealing with odd numbers, there would be a little bit of inequity among commissioners. Most commissioners would serve on two committees, uh... but two commissioners would only be assigned to one and that's just when you look at the number of slots and the number of commissioners you'd have to figure out how to do that one way might be that the chair and vice chair serve on just one committee and the last but not least this is the least change option so just stick with your existing structure five committees but instead of having three assigned per committee you'd have four commissioners assigned per plus your two meetings for great government You could leave the potential policy areas the same, leave the frequency the same at three per year. This would be a net increase of a couple meetings, I believe, really just due to the great government. Again, you'd have a little bit of inequity here just because we're dealing with odd numbers. So most commissioners would serve on two committees, but two commissioners would need to be assigned to a third just to fill every slot. unless y'all chose to have a committee with fewer than four members. So y'all feel free to discuss those, and you can discuss that now, or I can go ahead and go through the agenda stuff too, and then y'all can circle back.

So who wants to go first?

Commissioner Waters, since you're sitting there ready to go.

Thank you for organizing this. So strategically, it's really helpful to see. I'm very interested in, which wasn't on my radar, option A, the increase in the number of work sessions, just because it gives more opportunity for all commissioners to be in the same space more frequently, and I know that's something that we often appreciate, being all together, but I'm still pondering, but that was not on my radar, but it certainly piqued my interest.

I would agree. That wasn't on my radar either, but I like actually option A, partly because of what you said. So many of us show up anyway to committee meetings, and this just provides an in-person space to discuss a number of important topics. I appreciate the thought. but I actually like option A. I know you're not asking for decisions, but that's just feedback from me.

Commissioner Addison.

Just on the surface of it, and from what I thought about yesterday, I like option A, but one of the things I really like about the committee structure is that whichever committee you're chair of, you get input into the making of the agenda, the creating of the agenda and the items presented. And we don't get that into the work sessions. It just shows up what topics we are. So if we go to option A, I would like the theme, occasional theme one sounds good, and I would still like the option in some format to get to suggest topics for the committee meetings since that's input we don't get now.

Commissioner Thomas. Thank you. I actually like option C. So C, just sticking with the five committees instead of trying to consolidate them, which is the other option in B. And also I think with option A, It is, we have a lot, work sessions have gotten a little bit longer, and while I don't have a problem with the time commitment, I do have a lot of additional constituent, nonprofit partner meetings, and committees, I can look at a committee that I am not a member of, look at the agenda, it is a virtual meeting, so I don't have to come specifically into the office and still participate in a committee versus with a work session, we all have to gather here. I think committees allow us a little more flexibility. And also if there's an agenda item on a committee that I am not a part of, I can jump on the meeting for that agenda item to be made aware versus having to come to a work session. And so I appreciate option C the most because it's the same continuity that we've been having the same committees that we've had and then it does just offer four commissioners per committee but it does incorporate the great government committee of the whole which i think was important to the group thanks so on many points i agree with commissioner thomas i have appreciated once we decided to keep committee meetings virtual

the flexibility that that has afforded. And so I'm not married to four committees versus five committees. I could probably live with four, even though in your block you've only got three listed. But I do like the fact that you know, with the committees, even if you're not assigned to that committee, as has been mentioned, you can tune in if your schedule allows, even for part of the meeting, or, you know, not all of it, or, you know, being able to participate. Sometimes I can participate and listen in to a committee meeting that I can't be in person for because I'm kind of halfway committed to something else. Whereas, you know, committing to six more additional work sessions means us here in person, 18 more hours. And so I'm not, I would not be in favor of that, even though in general, you know, it sounds good. I, I would prefer to keep the committee structure separate from the work sessions. Now, one thing I would throw out there, though, and I know we pared this down a few years ago, particularly if we went with five committees, is there a reason why those committees have to meet three times a year? You know, we could meet less often unless something is burning, you know, or even with four committees. So I think we could consider, because I know sometimes when I've chaired committees, there isn't always something that you need to deal with three times a year. So we could have two times a year. We could schedule... More if needed. So anyway, those are some of my thoughts. I'm not as big a fan, as I said, of adding a whole lot more in-person hours. So I'd prefer us to see what we can do with the flexibility on committees. Thanks.

Commissioner Jackson.

Yes. And I, well, actually, before I share my thoughts, can you explain for option A, the calculation of net reduction of seven meetings compared to 2026?

Oh, you're going to ask me to do math on live TV. Uh, let's see if you, so, uh, if you, so how about we just trust that math and then, so you're giving up 15, you're going to go down by 15 committee meetings.

Okay.

but you're gonna add back, and six is kind of my best guess of how many your schedule can absorb without difficulty. But then you're gonna go back up six so that you're down a net of nine. You want to do the great government committee of the whole, you go back up two, and that's where you end up with a negative, I'm sorry, with a net reduction of seven meetings.

Okay. Well, I like option A. But I like option A, C, a combination of the two. Because Commissioner Thomas and Commissioner Evans does offer great points. The ability to join virtually and have the flexibility to join could be something that we maintain. I also very much appreciate what Commissioner Waters said in terms of having more time with colleagues, especially since two are joining. So I see a lot of benefits between and the public. I guess when we change our system and maybe move to YouTube or some available way of having our videos more accessible, I know it won't be YouTube, but some way of becoming more accessible, I really would just want the option that's most accessible to the residents so that there's a habit of like board meetings, work sessions, committee meetings, view them all online. But if we were to just make a choice now, I would say let's work toward option A, bringing in some of the best of what we know about option C in the committee structure. The virtual piece specifically.

Okay, well, I guess as chair. Well, can I just respond to what Commissioner Evans? My thought would be that we keep it in committees. The mindset of Commissioner Thomas and Commissioner Evans having to come in and to go through more work session, I just don't think it's viable because we all have so much stuff on our plate. You know, there's many times that we are out different locations and then trying to get back for a work session. I think we're better off keeping it as it is. Also, I would think that, and I'd be supportive of, especially on the NIMA committees, if we had, because I was going to nine, then I would support also the Chair and the Vice Chair. I think only one instead of having to worry about more committees to serve on because we want to make it available, especially to our new two board members that be coming on the board. So I would support keeping it as it is.

I have a question.

Yes.

The statement was made that we don't do work sessions virtually. Can you share about that?

Allison, it's a legal issue.

oh yeah i can address that um commissioner jackson so under your current rules we only are allowed to have committees remotely that is part of state law which restricts you all from holding remote meetings unless there's some state of emergency like what we saw during covid um so there is a state law your rules are largely silent though as to work sessions i don't think they're mentioned hardly at all um in the rules it's just committee meetings versus regular meetings

Yes, Commissioner Thomas.

I just wanted to add, in continuing this discussion, Ben, I would like to see one of the other reasons for me not wanting to replace committees with more work sessions is all of the boards and the community partner relationships that we are liaisons to I already have multiple conflicts with work sessions. For example, today I had another meeting that I am a liaison to. Coming from that would have made me, almost made me late for this work session. Or there have been times when I've been on a committee, I have standing OSAPAC meetings or whatever the case may be because I'm the liaison to OSAPAC. that I am on OSAPAC and I'm like, oh, let me, I'll be right back, OSAPAC. Let me log on to this education committee meeting. Although I'm not a member, I really want to hear and say what's happening for this particular agenda item. So as we continue to discuss this, I would like to see maybe the times and dates or days of the month that some of those liaisons meet because if we're gonna go to work sessions, which, we have to be in person for, how does that compare to the opportunity for us to still serve our community partners as liaisons to some of these other boards? Thank you.

I'm gonna ask Madam Clerk to assist with that.

Thank you. Yeah, Commissioner Waters.

Thank you, and I think just looking purely at the net reduction of seven meetings, it will be helpful for me, because I know there's some discussion around making it more difficult to attend other events or commitments, what it would look like in replacing those committees, how much time it would actually free up for those that are actually in attendance on committees. Would that actually free up more time? Because I'm thinking of the net reduction. I hope that question was phrased in a way that you could understand.

If I can repeat it back, you're asking how much time would you save with a net reduction of seven meetings. Honestly, I think that's very subjective and probably individual to each of you. If you were going to attend those seven meetings, they typically last about two hours. So you'd save 14 hours or two days.

And would that balance out with what you would have participated in had you had a committee in lieu of just work sessions? So...

Uh, I don't know if it would balance out. Let's see, 14, uh, if you added six and, uh, as y'all have noted, you know, you know, no, it could be a little bit longer. It just, it's, it's very subjective. You know, I, first of all, I noticed we're not making a recommendation, right? There's really, to me, there's no right or wrong answer. It's what works for y'all is a group of seven. uh... you know more work sessions could met out possibly a little bit more time but there's pros to that uh... having everybody together downside is less flexibility you gotta be physically prep yeah so so i i think these are good things that you are pointing out then can i just ask when you say a net reduction of seven meetings that is not

100% accurate in the fact that you don't have to attend committee meetings that you are not assigned to. So are you really getting a net reduction of seven meetings if you're not? Only if all commissioners are attending all committees, even the ones you're not assigned to. I'm just trying to understand.

That's a good point. It is a net reduction of scheduled meetings.

Okay. Okay. Commissioner Adamson and then Commissioner Stallings.

I wanted to say one of the things that's appealing to me about option A is it gives the public more access to us. If you have an issue and we're talking about that item in a committee, there's a possibility it never gets to a work session where you can watch it online but if you come to our work session Chances are you might could chat with us before or after the meeting if you want to talk with your representative and not just email us. So I like having that additional face time with the public.

Commissioner Stallings.

Yeah, just one more thing. I was looking at that net reduction of seven meetings is what caught my eye because we are all so busy. But yeah, I do try to attend all committee meetings. So for me, that would be a net reduction of seven meetings. But I do hear clearly about the flexibility of having... virtual meetings as committee means, but I'm still leaning towards option A, partly because what has already been stated, we've got two new people coming on board. It would be a team-building opportunity to have more in-person meetings. And we could do it for a year, whatever we decide. Possibly we could do it for a year and evaluate at the end of the year, no matter what we decide. But I just, I'm still leaning towards A, but I respect, obviously, however we end up. And we'll decide at the next meeting. at the planning event, is that right? They're our planning event? No, no, no, no, not our, when are we deciding this?

We would appreciate feedback by mid-October because we will start building your 27 schedule in mid-October.

And the only other thing I would add is by adding two more board members, we can diversify the liaison committee too, which we'll be able to share the weight of that responsibility by having two more people on the board too, which may be helpful to some of our schedules as well.

Okay, Commissioner Jackson, and then we'll go ahead and have Ben, that way you can finish up.

I recognize that I voted for AC before recognizing that we needed to be in person for work sessions, and that vote was counted with the Cs, but I want to clarify that if I have to choose, I would go with option A for all of the reasons offered.

Okay, Ben, go ahead and finish up.

Thank y'all, good questions. And if you want more options, simply instruct staff to bring you more options.

Sorry, Ben, before we move on, so we have to let you know by the middle of October, do we email you or are you coming back and we're going to do an in-person vote? I don't want to let the deadline slip.

How is that going to work? We'll bring it back to a work session.

Okay, thank you.

All right. And we can flip back. So agenda review. As we were talking this through amongst our executive team, some things we were talking about as we go from two sessions per agenda cycle to three is we want to make sure we preserve time for your discussion with one another, whether it's for agenda items, appointments, or feedback on priority topics. And also I want to emphasize, it's important that no matter what we do with this, the number one thing we need y'all to do is do that homework. When you arrive to the agenda reviews, make sure you've at least skimmed the material. This is from your orientation packet. It's changed a little bit over the years, but you've all seen this. And when you get your 1,000 page packet, you don't need to read all 1,000 pages unless you want to. But what we do ask is for each one, just look at the first page and at least skim it. If you want more information, keep reading. If you really want more information, look at all the attachments and get your questions ready. But we do try to get the basic stuff on page one to help you all, to help the public, and to help ourselves. Um, so recent practice, and I'm going back to 2020, because we did make some significant changes in the early days of code out of necessity. For each agenda cycle, we have 2 review sessions, 3 commissioners per session. Which, of course, you have an odd number, so that always leaves 1 commissioner out. um and so we developed a rotation not just because of what i called you know the seventh commissioner each cycle but also there were questions of who gets paired with the chair and the vice chair during the review session and so i set out to make all of that as as equal as you can make it when you're dealing with odd numbers the primary purpose of the rotation again an equal number of scheduled reviews for all commissioners an equal amount of time with the chair and vice chair and promote commissioner interaction discussion that we believed it was helpful or has been helpful for y'all to get paired up with different commissioners so you get to know each other's questions and interests and all that good stuff. For some time, it may be forever, we've always had the chair and the vice chair in the second session so that if we need some tiebreaker or some final guidance, we would look to them for that. So given some changes, let's see, we do need to bear in mind board meetings and work sessions generally start at 2 o'clock. We occasionally deviate from that. So what we're planning to do logistically is stack these up at 10, 11, 12. We always have a Monday morning huddle amongst our team. We're going to meet earlier. We might start buying the good coffee with our own personal funds. Those will continue to be remote. uh... for consent agenda what we'd like to do is change that up so that's much like we did today in the second session we we really we we've had a lot of good discussion about other things we didn't have time to go through twenty consent items so we just took questions and so for consent agenda to leave time for other discussion we would like to just go with commissioner questions and instead of going through every item and giving you a summary which you may have already read work work just get straight to your questions uh... if you miss a session sometimes that happens just send us your questions or call so a few questions for y'all to consider uh... you know we've been using the rotation for five or six years but do you just want to have a recurring time slot there's pros to that too it gives you a lot more consistency For those of you who are working on Mondays, you would always have the 10 o'clock or the 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock, whatever it is. So there's some pros to that. You do lose that mix of working with other commissioners. Do we want to spread out the chair and the vice chair and have them in different sessions so that the board leadership is hearing different perspectives? uh... do you want to pair the two newest commissioners with other commissioners in those mixes uh... pair them with more experienced veteran commissioners and then how what you know when changes get made how the chair and vice chair count support for agenda placement so we begin don't have to answer these today but these are things that you need to be think so uh...

one of the things if i could get you all the thing back when you were first commissioners in your first starting is you know it's hard to play catch up when you're in a group with some folks who may have who've gone through this multiple times and so one of the things that i think will be helpful is having the two new commissioners in the last agenda so that way we can spend more time delving into the various agenda items and have them with maybe one experienced person there so that they can get their questions asked and actually ask the questions. They're not necessarily going to feel the pressure to not ask questions. And so that is one of the things that I've been thinking about is we want to make sure that we spend enough time with our two new commissioners that they feel comfortable with the agenda items as they go forward.

Okay. Any other comments? Yes. Commissioner Thomas. Commissioner Evans. Yes.

I can appreciate having the chair and the vice chair in different sessions. That way it gives leadership an opportunity to hear different perspectives. Ben and I have had many conversations about rotation and how exactly the rotation is rotated. But I do appreciate the opportunity for a rotation because then I do get to hear different colleagues' perspectives in agenda review as opposed to if I'm always in the same agenda review, for example, with Commissioner Evans and Commissioner Miles, then I only ever hear their perspective when it comes to an agenda. So I like having the chair and the vice chair in different sessions, but I also really do appreciate the rotation opportunity to be in agenda review with different commissioners at different times.

Yes. Commissioner Evans is up next.

I don't have a strong feeling about whether the chair and vice chair are mixed up in different sessions. I think there's pros and cons to both of those. But I do feel strongly that I like having the rotation. While I recognize there would be a lot of merit for your calendar, But Ben does a really good job of getting these on our calendar pretty early in the year, and you know what's what. But I very much appreciate having different folks in a gender review with me, so I can hear how different people process information and brainstorm. rather than it being with the same folks every time. I don't think we'd have this authentic or robust feeling about how everybody approaches everything. I would at least say I would like to still see everything rotate. As far as the other, I don't have a strong opinion as far as chair and vice chair. And to answer the manager's thing, I mean, there may be some merit to having the two new folks together, but I don't know, I don't know that it would always be the last one of the day, but.

The reason I said the last one is, if that one runs over, which would probably have more potential to run over than the first two, because you've got new people, they may be asking more in-depth questions, if that runs to 12.30, that's not necessarily an issue, but if the 10 o'clock runs over to 11.30, then we're backed up, so.

And I think maybe for the first few sessions that might be helpful for them, but I think they too will benefit from a rotation with different commissioners instead of always being together. So that's my thoughts on that as well. Thanks. Okay. Commissioner Adamson.

Thank you for bringing this forward, Ben. I really like the idea of three different sessions. That way we don't have the odd person like we do now. Everybody will be assigned to a session. So everybody has the opportunity to hear it real time and go over it with staff. I have no preference about how the chair and vice chair is assigned, but I do think it would benefit at some point if the new folks were switched around so they could hear our opinions as well, you know, and get to know us a little better. Or we could start them at like 7.30, 7 o'clock in the morning. so we have a half hour between each of them. We could do that one, you know, because y'all make the big bucks, right? You could get here early, and we could get... I'm just joking about the early. It's late. But, yeah, I do think it might be good to start them out that way, but at some point, put them in the rotation. Yes, I do want to rotate at some point, but I want to rotate.

Okay. Thank you, everyone.

I forgot one of the selling points on this. You know, I do think that by going to three, you know, sometimes when we have something that's urgent and we do small groups, right, and you get a call from a Bon or Tony or somebody saying, hey, we've got to get you in a room with Ruffin or Emily or Ashley or Dwayne or me, and we've got to do it soon. I do think going to three gives us a way to use that so that maybe we'll do fewer small group sessions and we can take advantage of if the agenda's light that day and we know we're going to have some spare time, we'll be able to get all nine commissioners briefed on something quickly.

My only concern is that...

Okay.

Okay. My only comment is that I think that it's good that with the new people coming in that we do rotate them because that will give them an opportunity to learn, each commissioner. My other point is that the chair and vice chair don't necessarily have to be in the same meeting, but I think they need to be in the last two meetings. And reason being is that many times we always trying to figure out what has been said in the other meeting to try to help us make a decision at some time, just like if we move an item from consent to regular agenda, which was moved into the next, the last item on there. So that way we have an idea in terms of what the previous two sessions have already indicated.

And maybe we can have the best of both worlds, you know, to David's point about trying to give those new commissioners a little extra time for when they need it. You know, we could do that for one quarter and then start rotating them in with everybody. I mean, you know, by going to three, it relieves the pressure of having to equalize things because things are going to be equal, right? So I know they're going to have to worry about making sure, okay, well, Commissioner A got 15 meetings, right? Commissioner B gets 14 meetings. I got to have a rationale. We don't have to worry about that anymore.

Yeah, because that takes that out of play since there will be nine of us. So we can have three, three, three. And that way we won't create any issues. Like I said, having possibly the vice chair in the second and having the chair in the very last and then just rotate. Yeah. Commissioner Jackson.

Yes. Yes. I support much of what I've heard. I think it's really important for us to maintain the rotation so that we can all get to know each other and engage differently. I support the chair and the vice chair. Well, if we're doing rotations, I would like to see the chair and the vice chair still be in the last one with a commissioner rotating because we do make decisions together in that last one based on what other commissioners have said and it would be the best place to answer how do we count support. If we decide to split them, I think the chair and the vice chair would need at least a 15 minute huddle after the third session just to come together on any particular topics. I also am a little concerned about the back-to-back nature for staff from 10 to 11 to 12. That's a lot of going without a break. And I would like to see something in there that just creates at least a breathing break, a break. Some kind of break between the meetings. Because our agenda, we have a lot of questions. I mean, you're psych on. So maybe if it starts at 9.15, I don't know. You'll figure out the time. But I would like to see a little bit of space in there.

So a couple things. We've kind of discussed this. And in order to, and one of the things is we all don't have to be in all three of them, right? So if, you know, Dwayne can be in a couple, Emily can be a couple, I can be in a couple, depending on what the agenda topics are. So we can kind of spread it out that way. But, you know, if we want it, we've always tried to keep things on Mondays because it, You know, it's easier for us, it's easier for you all if we keep it on Mondays. With that 2 o'clock work session or 2 o'clock board meeting, if we can finish up by 12, that gives us some time to get out in space and all that. I do want to say I strongly support the chair and the vice chair being in different meetings. I want to get staff out of the business of communicating meetings. what comes out of one board meeting into another board meeting and having board leadership have those conversations and kind of make those decisions. And I think this is an opportunity to do that and pull us out from that a little bit.

Okay, I'd support that and that makes sense. But still, please, 10 minutes. I mean, this seems like it.

Logistically, it would be difficult. So we played with that. Logistically, we can't do an hour, 15-minute break. I mean, that extra half hour actually will create some, it'll create other logistical problems. We are taking an educated bet, and we may adjust this later, that most of these sessions are not going to take the full 60 minutes. Some will, like today. Today's were really long. But that's not always the case. So there is some risk here, but we may have to adjust later.

The shift to asking, addressing our questions versus walking through each item, I think will do a lot to save time.

Because if we need a break, the other choice is shorten them all to 45 minutes. And we didn't want to do that. Because sometimes we need an, not all the time, but sometimes we need the full 60.

Yeah, okay, Ben. What else you got?

That's it. So at this point, take a couple, take a few weeks, talk about it amongst yourselves. If you want other options, please let us know. And so I'll get with David and our team, and we'll look at a fall date to bring this discussion back to the board. Because like I said, October 15th is a rough date. It can be a little earlier, a little later. But we do start working on your calendar for the next year in the fall. That's a very arduous process, and we want lots of time to double check. So that's why we're asking for it in October.

Okay, if there, did you have a comment from the legal side that you want to add?

I don't have any comments, yeah.

Okay, David. So I just want to add on to what Ben said about getting y'all's calendar done. We're in discussion with the school board. We're trying to get the joint school board county meetings within this October, November timeframe so that when you all adopt your calendar, you've got all those meetings on your schedule.

Okay, appreciate Ben bringing this forward, a good round discussion. So at this particular time, we look at concluding this work session today. I know everyone's tired, we've been a long day, and we appreciate all that's been brought before us. And our vice chair is still ready to get out and run two miles. So with that being said, this meeting is officially adjourned.

Thank you.