Board of County Commissioners - workshop

Good morning. I'd like to go ahead and call the Board of County Commission meeting. Another exciting workshop day, May 19th, 2026 at 10.01. And Ms. Jacobin, would you be so kind, considering we have a budget presentation, to kick off the salute to the flag. To the flag of the United States of America. and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you.

Of course. We'll move to roll call, please. Chair Andriola.

Present. Vice Chair Garcia. Here. Commissioner Hill. Here. Commissioner Clark.

Present.

Commissioner Herman. Here. Chief Deputy District Attorney Mike Large.

Present.

And I'm Yvonne Strickland, Deputy Clerk.

Madam Chair, you have a point. Thank you. We'll move to public comment now, please. County Manager.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We're on item number three, public comment, and comment heard under this item will be limited to three minutes per person and may pertain to matters both on and off the commission agenda. Unused time may not be allocated to other speakers, and the commission will also hear public comment during individual action items with comment limited to three minutes per person. Comments which are made to the commission as a whole and virtual public comment may be available when facilities are available. Thank you.

Tammy Holdstill.

Tammy holds still for the record. What you have before you is after I spoke here last week about the sample ballot, I posted what I spoke about on Facebook and I got a response from Washoe County telling me that you can go to the website and you can get that sample ballot. Well, also by going to the internet, as you see, I replied back stating there are a lot of folks, whether they're seniors, Low income, rural areas, internet, computers are an issue. Literacy with computers are an issue. So if you want to go to the next one for me, please. I went out and of course with my phone, the QR code worked fine, but the QR code didn't want to work on my computer. So I went ahead and I did the www. and I put it in the Google bar in the center of the computer. And it took me to the voter registrar's office, but not the sample ballot. So I had to go to the top of the computer and put it in to get what you see right there. Now you see that is my sample ballot. Do you see something interesting about that sample ballot? There are stars on the left and the people are on the right. Go ahead and switch it now. As you can see on the sample ballot booklet and my ballot, the people are on the left and the bubbles are on the right and your instructions are to fill the bubbles, not play with stars. Do you see how confusing this is to everybody? You have really confused them about this situation. On Channel 2's Two Cents, there was a lady that stated the same thing I did, that you were making this confusing. It is not simple. It's not transparent. It's not clear. Then you have this last one. Kate, my phone. To give you even more information about District 5, it really shows you on my little map that There is a lot of area that people live in that are out in the rurals that don't have proper internet that they can pull up something so complex. We need to do something different. This is not correct. I have sent you an email as soon as last week. Only one person from that email replied and that was it. Thank you. Terry Brooks.

Good morning. It's me, Terry Brooks, again. And today I feel the responsibilities to address discrimination against those with physical disabilities. Every day a lot of people experience accidents that wind up leaving them with physical impairments. Some people are even born physically impaired, and ever since they were born, it's been a burden that they have bared. One very impairing kind of disability is the kind that really impairs a person's mobility. So many people spend their lives in a wheelchair, and for them to be discriminated against is absolutely not fair. Even after some recovery, they still need a walker, crutches, or a cane. They're gradually gaining ground but still going through a lot of pain. Some might lose the use of a leg because of going through some harm, and they might learn how to depend on more use of an arm. Or someone might lose the use of one arm and then learn to depend on using their other arm. When someone loses some of their abilities, all their body parts help them to learn more of their capabilities. When something happens that leads to losing some ability, it can then lead to being open to new possibility. So anyone who discriminates against others because of their disabilities is someone who really lacks social responsibilities. Anyone deserves to have a second chance so that they can then learn how to advance. Each part of our body is a separate tool that works with others to prove themselves above any kind of ridicule. I would like to thank you all for putting up with me today, and I look forward to being able to come back with a lot more to say. Thank you.

Thank you. Randy McCourt.

Good morning. My name is Randy McCourt and I'm with the Reno Sparks Chamber of Commerce leadership class. It's part of our civic duty project to come here and make a public comment. So that's all I have to say. Thank you for having me. Kelly McKeon.

Hi, everybody. I'm Kelly McKeon, similar to Randy McCourt. I am with the Reno Sparks Chamber of Commerce leadership class, and so part of our civic project is to make public comment and put us in really uncomfortable situations. So thank you, guys. That's my public comment. Thanks for having us.

Sean Sullivan.

Good morning, Council. My name is Sean Sullivan. Perhaps you have seen my resume. I recently applied for the Library Board of Trustees position, one of the two. I spent a lot of time in the libraries as a kid. Either when other kids were out socializing, I was usually in the library or the computer lab or the chemistry lab. I was involved in chess club, and I think all these opportunities are very important for kids. Now, my kids use the library. I go to the Spanish Springs Library regularly, and they have great facility, great staff, pretty good selection. However, you all are aware there are some budget issues there with regards to the selection, and I would hope to work towards improving that situation. I do have... Some experience working with kids that are a little older as well. I was a lab manager at University of Nevada, Reno. So I have experience with Generation Z kids. Really, I was kind of the best of the best. I was in the material science and engineering department. And they were all great kids. They were all eager to learn, eager to work. And I think they need to have all the opportunities that we all had as a kid. Libraries are suffering from all the same budget shortfalls that many other departments are suffering from, and it's a tough situation. And it requires some dedicated work and some service to the community, which is something I am also dedicated to. I'm an Eagle Scout. I was involved in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers student chapter during my time at UNR in the leadership capacities. and I also am able to take on serious topics like the Nevada road by statutes and fire codes and various other engineering topics. I, uh, got used to it or Matt for seven years, uh, another local company. I'm also, uh, have handled a decent chunks of money building pipelines and, uh, various things like that, uh, for or Matt. Uh, so I think I can handle a budget. I've written budgets for the plant managers, uh, at least my little aspect of the budget. Um, Uh, you may have seen, hopefully you got to see my letter of recommendation. Uh, the gentleman who wrote that for me has known me for a long time. He was a mentor in Boy Scouts and I learned a lot from him. You can see he has experience on many boards and, uh, I think, I hope you all will consider his recommendation as a pretty serious, uh, recommendation. Uh, he's a very serious and busy person as well. Um, My closing statement, my goal is to give everybody access to all the books, whether they're controversial or not. I think controversial books are good for the library, even if it just draws attention to the library and brings in more people. So I want to give back to the community for the kids. Thank you for your time, and hope to see you all later, I guess.

Jacob Claudefelter?

GOOD MORNING. MY NAME IS JACOB. I AM ALSO PART OF THE RENO SPARKS CHAMBER LEADERSHIP COHORT OF 2026. AND LIKE HER, WE GET TO BE IN FUN, UNCOMFORTABLE POSITIONS. I DO THIS FOR MY NORMAL JOB AS PART OF THE NEVADA DEPARTMENT OF VETERAN SERVICES, BUT THAT'S NORMALLY IN A DIFFERENT FORM. SO THIS IS PART OF OUR CIVIC PROJECT TO DO PUBLIC COMMENT AT ONE OF THE LOCAL BOARDS. THANK YOU.

Hi, Laura Wetherington for the record. I love the Washoe County Library system, and I want to tell you all why. I hope you'll forgive me for going big here, but I think the library is a beacon of democracy. I believe we live in a pluralistic democracy, which means there are competing interests in the way we run things. And I think that is a part of what makes us strong. The library is a reflection of this. Their mission is to connect people with information, ideas, and experiences to support an enriched and engaged community, one person at a time. It's that last part, one person at a time, that feels so energizing to me. It means that the library strives to reflect back to the community the diverse beliefs and interests of its populace, one person at a time. For me, this is about the range of books, but also about librarian services. In another county, 20 years ago, I met a public librarian who told me about her job. She said the thing many people don't realize is that librarians are not just offering books, they're in some senses like frontline social workers, helping people with job searches and finding resources in the community. Here in Washoe County last year, one staff report included the anecdote of a person having been released from a long prison sentence and needing to set up an email address. I see our librarians as public servants in the highest degree, and I therefore want to commend you all for all the support you lend our library system. And I realize that being in a pluralistic democracy means there are other people in this community who disagree with me. And while I support their right to disagree, I don't think a more restrictive form of a library system will be as democratic as the one we have now. I want my child, who is learning to read, to have access to all the books that we and our family deem appropriate in our households. I don't think this is a question the government should be trying to solve for everyone, though I do recognize that raising a child is one of the most complex problems many of us face. For me, restricting access to library materials and services is like me going into a restaurant and then objecting to the menu because I'm a vegetarian and there are meat options on the menu. I think the library is a menu and it should have all the options. The library is for everyone. I also want to say thank you to Chair Andriola for the Budget 101 presentation because it's really helped me to understand that there are complex problems in the child rearing. So I commend you all for the hard work that you do and for the transparency and invitation to the public to understand what you do. I'm sorry that I can't stay for the workshop because I love workshops and it looks like you have good snacks.

Thank you. Penny Brach?

Penny Brock, for the record, I'm here to address last meeting agenda item number 14, which is to be a data transparency project. We have an issue. The PowerPoint that was shown is still not on. It's still not available for the public to see. And I've had a few people contact me wanting to look at that. PowerPoint, but they can't find it. And I said, well, it's still not posted. So we have a transparency problem from the beginning. The other thing is, is there a contract? It was revealed that there is a cost to taxpayers, despite Commissioner Garcia question, what would it cost taxpayers? And the ROV told her none. In the Washoe County report, a day or so later, reporting on this, it said there will be a cost to taxpayers because it will involve staff in this project. It didn't disclose the cost, how many staff, so there again, another transparency project. Another transparency project is we don't know what CIS will do with this data. It will encompass more than just the voter data. It will probably encompass election data. What are they going to do with that data? I, as a taxpayer, do not want this organization to have my voter data. And I think that will be how many voters feel. We do not want CIS to have this data. We don't know what they're going to do with it. We know that data... It's a huge commodity these days. It can be sold. So probably the reason CIS is not going to charge Washoe County for it is do they plan to sell the data? The other issue is the commissioner, the commission as a body did not vote on this project. It appears that just the commission chair put it and made it so. And that's not the way this is to work. Another reason, and public comment was not allowed. Because taxpayer funds are involved, it should have been voted on by the commission and there should have been public comment. As we see by just last week, there is lack of transparency and this is a huge issue. The other issue that was brought up is at the end of the meeting, after the last public comment, so I couldn't comment, The chair mentioned that the MIT had come out ranking Nevada number two in elections. That is from the liberal perspective. Kate, would you please put up? This shows that Heritage Foundation ranks Nevada number 47, putting us third from the bottom for worst election.

Alexis Marin.

Hi there, my name's Alexis Marin. This is my first time giving public comment, so my heart's starting to go a little faster than usual. But I'm with the Children's Advocacy Alliance. I'm a new addition to their team. I'm a health policy manager, and I reside in Southern Nevada, but I'm looking to move up here to washoe county in the upcoming months to get to know the northern community i just wanted to let you know that we have three pillars children child welfare children's health and early childhood and we're really interested in creating policy solutions for the state so just wanted to put that on your guys's radar that we're really happy to collaborate and learn about um you know southern nevada doesn't make up the entire pie for the state so really interested in learning how to get more involved with washoe county but also the other 15 counties too that are part of our state so yeah it's really great to be here and learn from you all today and really excited to be here we have nobody else signed in thank you

All right, we'll close public comment and now move to the public hearing. Manager Thomas.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We are on item number four, which is discussion and possible action on the Washoe County tentative budget for fiscal year 2027, which is July 1st, 2026 through June 30th, 2027. And pursuant to NRS 354.596, the estimated appropriations for this budget are $1,133,146,149. We are joined this morning by our Chief Financial Officer and our Division Director for the Budget Division, Lori Cook and Abby Yacobin. Thank you.

Good morning. Can you hear me? Okay. Good morning. Again, Abby Yacobin, Chief Financial Officer, joined by my teammate, Division Director Lori Cook. And so, this is the public hearing on the tentative budget as certified by the State of Nevada Department of Taxation. So, you'll have the public hearing and then immediately go into the adoption of the final budget. This is the statutory framework under which this process operates. I won't go into it into too much detail, but I will introduce the fact that we'll be going at a high level today. The goal of today is to solidify the budget, talk about the changes between the deep dive that you did on April 14th and today, and then adopt the final budget and move forward on July 1st. So we will not be going into heavy detail. We have an appendix beginning at the end of this document that does review the economic indicators and many other things that we normally would have presented and did present on April 14th when you're doing that deep dive, but that is not for today. We remind ourselves of the North Star. Your goals and objectives are how we tailor our budgets. We tailor it toward mental health, senior services, and infrastructure. And we know that we had a great workshop last month. You'll be having one right after this. And then again in June to discuss priorities for the upcoming fiscal years. And we look forward to tailoring future budgets to that new North Star. And our continued goals, of course, maintain services, keep employees working, and use our reserves wisely as needed. And so highlights, there's no change here from tentative. The tentative presentation on April 14th, there may be some language changes, but there's no technical changes from the April 14th presentation. There were no net new positions in any fund, and when we use the word net, we mean that there could be swaps between departments, but no net new positions. In fact, we're seeing a decline of positions overall and in the general fund. For the second year in a row, we are budgeting salary savings across all departments at around 3%, Again, for the second year in a row, if a position upgrade was approved by the Job Evaluation Committee process that was collectively bargained many, many years ago and has been used across the county for about 20 years, those were absorbed, departments are absorbing those. and finding permanent offsets normally through cutting expenditures in other areas. For the first year, the library budget is entirely budgeted in the general fund, so operationally, this isn't a big change, but from a budgetary perspective, there is a change. We've moved from the expansion fund now into the general fund. Increase of the general fund transfer to Northern Nevada Public Health, we increased from about nine and a half million dollars transfer to ten and a half in this current fiscal year and we're proposing for the final budget to change that to eleven and a half for next fiscal year as they have some uncertainty in their financial forecast and their grant revenue receipts. INCREASE THE GENERAL FUND TRANSFER TO THE ROAD FUND BY $4 MILLION. AS YOU RECALL, LAST YEAR WE INCREASED IT BY $5 MILLION. THIS IS AN ADDITIONAL $4 MILLION IN ADDITION TO THE $1.6 MILLION THAT WE TRANSFER OVER FOR ADMINISTRATIVE COSTS TO THAT FUND SO WE CAN ENSURE THE PAVEMENT CONDITION INDEX DOES NOT FURTHER DECLINE FROM YOUR POLICY GOAL OF THAT 73 NUMBER. The remaining ARPA funded positions that are sitting on that grant are moving to the general fund and being offset by the interest that's already accrued on those funds. So there's your offset for that funding. And general fund contingency moving from 1.5% in the current year to 2% proposed to be at 2% in the next fiscal year. And in the five year forecast we have increased that up to the statutory maximum of 3%. And the reason for that is the level of uncertainty that we have going forward in the economy and other inflationary impacts. So changes between the tentative budget that you did the deep dive on on April 14th and today are I'm considering them de minimis in a 1.1 billion dollar budget but I'll go over them just for transparency sake so that when you're voting you're fully informed. We'll have one new full-time equivalent a full-time position in the sheriff's office for the alternative sentencing unit. It was determined between the tentative budget presentation and the final budget presentation that that that new unit needed casework support, so we are proposing to increase a case manager in that area for about $128,000, but note that the general fund is still seeing a net decrease of 2.78 positions, which is a positive. As we trued up numbers between the tentative and final on the revenue and the expenditure side, we're seeing about $100,000 less in use of fund balance in 2027. So, that's a positive as we trued up those numbers as we had 30 more days of data. In the capital improvement funds, and Director Cook will be speaking about this in the CIP portion of the presentation, the parks capital fund there I believe it's four projects that they would like to apply for grants for so as we book that grant revenue we also have to give them the spending authority to spend it but it will not be spent unless those grant revenues are received. So those are the changes between the tentative budget and the final budget on a broad scale and with that I'm going to turn it over to Director Cook to go into a little bit more detail. Thank you.

Thank you. It wasn't on. So, good morning again. Lori Cook, Division Director for Budget. This is the budget for all funds. As you can see, very, very similar to the tentative, and we also show the fiscal year 26 final budget. And so, when we look at what was adopted last year for July 1st, 2025, versus the final budget, recommended budget for beginning July 1, 2026, we can see those variances and that's what the variance column shows. So we do see an increase of overall appropriations of approximately 5% in governmental funds, approximately 12% in internal service funds. So total appropriation increases of approximately 6%. Just as a note, total appropriations include expenditures, transfers out contingency. When we just look at expenditures, not including contingencies or transfers, That number at the bottom, that $987 million is the figure, is the number. And these numbers do not include fund balance. Some agencies present their fund balance, so they present all of their expenditures plus their fund balance as their total budget. It is part of your budget, but they're not your appropriations. Your fund balance, unless you meet certain criteria, you can't just spend your fund balance, at least not in the state of Nevada. So when we look at all of our funds, we see, and we separate them governmental funds and proprietary funds. Proprietary funds are different. They're treated differently from a budget perspective, as well as from how we book the actual expenses. So our governmental funds, of course, our largest is the general fund. That's at the top. We get through, after that on this list, we go through our special revenue funds. So we see health, which is the Northern Nevada Public Health. Library expansion, which you'll see is now zero. So that goal is to and I believe it was last week that we had an augmentation so that we could fully spend down that fund by the end of this fiscal year. So by June 30 of 26 animal services, so on so forth and read them all. They continue to the next slide. And then as part of governmental funds, we also have our capital funds. So we have those three funds that are listed, capital facilities, parks, capital improvement fund. There will be more detail in the next presentation related to those funds, as well as the five-year CIP, which is always kind of exciting to look at. And then we have our debt funds. So we have ad valorem, so that's property taxed. property tax backed or based at operating debt and then sad with your special assessment district debt. So that's the total appropriations. These are our proprietary funds. And at the top, so building and safety utilities at Golf Course, those are enterprise funds. So for lack of a better term, they're treated like businesses. There's no general fund subsidy. They operate on their fees, user fees, and utilities. They have user fees, rate payers. They have connection fees. There's different sources of revenue for those. The largest variance to last year would be, of course, the Golf Course fund that we talked about, having that one-time transfer with repayment from the operator. for improvements at Sierra Sage. And then we have health benefits, risk management equipment services. Those are internal service funds. So they receive charges from our other funds. So that's internal to the county. So health benefits is the health benefits fund. So that's all county employees and retirees also roll through health benefits fund, our risk management fund, and then equipment services, which in this case for us, it's almost entirely fleet. So when we replace sheriff vehicles or CPS vehicles, there's a mechanism that budgets get funded over to equipment service and then they get purchased through equipment services. So those are our internal service funds. a lot of times there's questions of what functions do we support or what functions does the budget support. So for the governmental funds, back to that two pages of list, we have all governmental funds in this list and I didn't do this by number, sorry Kate. I got the, at the end of the presentation when they're done by department I did them by material number so the largest number first but we can see that public safety obviously is the largest with welfare function second the two of those together are 54 percent of our total appropriations and then we can see you know the follow through or the follow-up to those with 14 percent judicial and general government so on so forth so we do see that the majority of the budget appropriations center around public safety and welfare which is not a surprise given board direction and strategic plan and community needs. Here we get into capital improvement. These are the capital improvement appropriations in the capital funds. We also have capital appropriations in non-capital funds. A variance between a capital improvement project and a capital expenditure, a capital improvement project is going to be a project that's $100,000 or more with a useful life of one year or more. The capital expenditure is going to be anything greater than $10,000. So when you're looking at those two numbers, they are not going to match because they're looking at different things. When we talk about other funds, we have capital expenditure authority in the general fund, public health, animal services, CPS. There's a lot of different special revenue funds that do have capital purchases, but they don't necessarily meet the threshold of a capital project. But we have to report it this way to the state, so I'll blame them. the confusion sorry because I didn't know for the first two years I don't know why these things don't match. Here we talk about our proprietary funds so again just going back and showing the obviously the size so our utilities fund which should not be a large surprise is the largest enterprise fund followed by golf and building and safety and then in the internal service funds health benefits which also shouldn't you know be a huge shock is our largest fund there followed by equipment services and then risk management. So what CFO Jacobin mentioned briefly earlier is that we can see, so I pegged to 2008, because that was our highest FTE count, which was pre-recession. We get a lot of comparables. Where were we? Where are we compared? And we're not the same business. We're not the same county, but it is a data point. So you can see we had the 3,179 FTEs. That's full-time equivalents. So that's not positions. It's full-time equivalents. We do have departments that have positions that are not full-time. We have departments, health and library are the first two I can think of. And we also have departments that utilize pooled. So when they're on their books and they're pooled and we get them and they're either part-time or temporary, but they're on our books. We have had election workers that have, whether they're pooled or whether they're contractual, it depends on HR and IRS requirements, but that's like an example of what those FTEs buy. So the department has a budget of $10 And somebody's paid $10 an hour, they get an hour, and that is converted into an FTE. So it's not positions, it's full-time equivalents. But these are all full-time equivalents as comparison. So we can see with the population, so this is per the state demographer. So we go back to that because it's something we can tie back to and it's something we can audit to. What we've seen since 2008 is an increase of population in Washoe County of approximately 27% between 2008 and 2027. What we see in FTE increases is a reduction of 23 FTE or 0.7%, round it to 1% if we want. Employee per capita has also decreased to almost 22%. And FTE support per resident, so when you flip it the other way, has increased 27.9%. So we've had increased services, increased demand for services, we've expanded service delivery, we've taken things like regional homelessness, but we've also been able to do that with technically a reduction in FTE. What does that mean? It means we had to do it some way, and that's to the department's credit, to employees' credit, coming up with different ways, more efficient ways. Our technology services support, human resources, whomever within the county, How we figured out how to do things differently when we say do more with the same in reality that's doing more with less because costs go up so This is in my opinion. This is a testament to being able to not just Maintain, but we've actually been able to expand service delivery without increasing that headcount so as the largest fund, we'll jump back into the general fund. So as we've discussed, we have consolidated tax and property tax are our two largest revenue sources in the general fund. Property tax is actually the largest source of revenue across the entire county. So those are two heavily relied upon or depended upon REVENUE SOURCES FOR THE GENERAL FUND. CONSOLIDATED TAX IS MORE VOLATILE. IT'S GOING TO FOLLOW TRENDS. IT'S GOING TO FOLLOW ECONOMIC MUCH MORE ON A LEADING ECONOMIC INDICATOR BASIS. THE PROPERTY TAX IS MORE STABLE. IT'S EVEN THE SILVER LINING TO ABATEMENT. WE TALK ABOUT THAT A LOT. THE SILVER LINING TO ABATEMENT IS IF ASSESSED VALUATION DOES NOT GROW AS FAST. if we are eating into that abatement, I say it, that's my term, my non-technical term, is that we can still see growth at a higher percentage than what the assessed valuation growth is. So this just shows the sources, the uses, and then obviously the variance between those two is the budgeted use of fund balance. This is the exact same information, just in more of a table format. And just as a reminder, we have some one-time items in fiscal year 27. We have miscellaneous one-time for fundraising, so that's our estimate for fundraising for the Children's Behavioral Health Center, as well as that ARPA transfer in that CFO Jacobin talked about earlier for those positions, so it's pre-funding those positions moving. So there's also some one-time transfers out, 3 million of that is related to the golf course which will be receiving payment back through the operator and approximately $400,000 of one time for the capital improvement fund. So those are just highlighted as one time. They're not necessarily anomalies but one time. I did not superimpose the FACES ON THIS. I CAN DO IT AT A FUTURE DATE IF YOU WANT, BUT I DIDN'T WANT TO SQUISH IT. THERE'S GOOD INFORMATION ON THIS SLIDE. SO THIS FIVE-YEAR FORECAST HAS BEEN UPDATED. SO IT'S BEEN UPDATED BETWEEN WHAT YOU SAW BEFORE WHICH WAS THE TENATIVE AND THE FINAL RECOMMEND. OBVIOUSLY WE SEE A SLOWER RATE OF GROWTH OR ANTICIPATED RATE OF GROWTH OF REVENUES AND SOURCES COMPARED TO EXPENDITURES AND TRANSFERS OUT. Better than anticipated fiscal year 25 results provide us an opportunity to prepare for 27, right? So we have some time to look at it. If that were to happen in 26, that would give us the same thing and we buy some time is how I say it. Unassigned fund balance remains within the board's policy level of 10 to 17% through fiscal year 29, but you can see it's declining and you can see that that structural deficit grows in those outer years. And but just as a reminder that this forecast represents a baseline projection assuming the continuation of existing service levels and revenue structures so it's kind of the we don't do anything we know we can't we know we have to do something or some things rather and so this is this is part of that conversation is that this is a kind of I don't say do nothing but nothing changes scenario. The assumptions that are related to this you know it goes into the soup and it comes out are on slide 32 of the presentation so it's in that appendix or supplemental information so if you're curious you know what's driving certain certain things those assumptions are provided and then obviously when we get actuals in and we see things changing or we know about things that are going to change then we update the we update the forecast. A large portion of the general fund budget are transfers out. These transfers out support expenditures and other funds. So when we look at the indigent services fund, the homelessness fund, the capital improvement fund, right? And these actually are in order or largest to smallest, so that's the way this one is. Not priority order, anything like that. So we have indigent, homelessness, and those are related to welfare, so when we look at that welfare budget, this is where that 24, 25% is coming from. Then we talk about road maintenance. That's our roads fund, health district. We've talked about a little bit our debt service. So that's transfers over. That is both our property tax-based and our other revenue consolidated tax-based. So that's everything going from the general fund to support debt. SENIOR SERVICES, GULF, THE COMPUTER-AIDED DISPATCH RECORDS MANAGEMENT SYSTEM, SO THAT'S OUR REQUIREMENT TO TRANSFER OVER THERE FOR OUR PORTION OF THAT REGIONAL SUPPORT, AND THAT'S ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE THINGS THAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT, REGIONALIZATION OR EXPANSION OF SERVICES, RIGHT? THIS IS ANOTHER COMMITMENT, AND THIS IS AN INCREASED COST. SO THE TOTAL IS $96 MILLION. as our largest use of funds as personnel, and we're looking at that and... Okay, I'll hurry up. I'm seriously almost done. One slide. So we have, in the general fund, we have a negative 2.78 FTEs. Again, FTEs versus positions. There are 34 changes for reclassifications, evaluations, title changes. Title changes do not result in pay grade changes, they're literally title changes. Then when we have other funds, we see a negative 6.9 FTE. And as a reminder, board direction, only a funded position is an authorized position. We don't want a bunch of unfunded positions sitting on the books. So if we have funding, in this case, the district attorney is a good example where grant funding was not provided or not renewed. And those positions are vacant. These are not people being laid off. These are vacant positions. We take them off the books or we remove them. and then we also have these 13 recommended valuations, reclassification and title changes. So, our budget's many things. It's our legally approved appropriations and there's certain statutes that we have to follow to change those. It's the financial plan, the operations guide, on June 1st we have to submit the final budget. We'll be doing an updated, reviewed, revamped, whatever you wanna call it, Budget 101 and review of the Washoe Checkbook in July, August, so in the next couple months. We also have to submit to the Department of Taxation the five-year CIP, which is the next item on this agenda, the Debt Management Policy and Statement of Indebtedness, and those two items are slated for approval to come to the Board on June 23rd. Okay, I almost made it.

Thank you so much.

This is an actionable item, so I'll call for public comment at this time.

We have no one signed in.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and great presentation, both of you again. On the indigent tax levy, can you just remind me of the history of that tax, Lori? I know you're an encyclopedia over there. So I'm like, please help me remember when that went into place and what exactly it is taxing. And is that the total tax? So I'm seeing operating transfers out $27 million and then total appropriations $49 million. Is that when we add in our homeless services funds? Thank you.

Sure. So the indigent tax levy fund is an override. So it's a legislative override. Okay. There's not, it does not sunset. It doesn't expire. It is, we can have between six and 10 cents, but because we're at the cap, we, if we increased it, we would have to reduce our operating rate.

Right.

We're required to make a transfer. So that $20, $25, $26 million is a transfer. Plus there's the $0.06 of property tax. Plus there's anything with an indigent that they get for whether it's, say, Medicaid admin billing, grant revenues, anything that's related to that fund lives in there. So they have various sources of revenue, but the two largest are the general fund transfer in. and the property tax and then of course as we've discussed there's all kinds of things that we have to pay out nursing home match yeah that you know um unmet free care the hospital yeah yeah we don't pay the hospitals directly i know that sometimes is a question that we get but we do that unmet free care does come through uh the indigent funding uh burials indigent burials so there's all kinds of different programmatic areas and then the indigent fund does send or transfer money to the homelessness fund. So then within homelessness, you see transfer some indigent transfer from the general fund, as well as revenue sources like Medicaid, admin billing or other grants.

And then indigent, we do we use that for any children at all? Or is it just adults that we're using that tax for?

I don't know. I don't know if

Thank you. I think the indigent burial is one of the factors there. I hate to say that that would be one of the categories I could think of off the top of my head. I'm getting a nod from our former human services agency director, so thank you.

But I don't think specifically.

And then year 1985, was it? long time ago. I mean, right.

And remember too, with the indigent fund, it used to be indigent medical. So it was limited to indigent medical. And then through the legislative process, it was expanded to indigent services. And I do, I don't have it right in front of me. I should with a state doc, but I think that for children's services, indigent transfers to CPS rather than having the expenditures hit in the fund. So they transfer over to the CPS.

But most of that is for adults. I'm assuming.

They also transfer to senior, so there's senior support situated in that fund as well.

Okay. I don't have any other questions, Madam Chair. I just wanted clarification. Thank you. My mic keeps on going off.

Any other questions by any of the commissioners? Commissioner Clark.

I'd like to go back to page 14, please. And we'll certainly salute the employees for doing more work with less and a larger population and smaller number of workforce. Do we see any time in the future a point of diminishing returns when there's a break? Is there a breaking point for the employees when we can't get any more? work out of them, for lack of a better word. How do we get to a point where this is manageable in the future? There's a point in time where each of us only have so many hours in the day, so many days in the week. When and where does this... reality hit and things are going a different way where people just can't deliver the workload that we're expecting of our employees. So that's kind of a general question.

So Commissioner, through you, Madam Chair, to Commissioner Clark, thank you for the question. That's part of the reason that Director Cook had the great idea a couple of years ago of changing the budget process to be more collaborative and having departments work together through the Budget Congress. So I think it is a good question. I think at some point that will happen. We can't out-technology our population growth, if I can say it that way. And the collaboration and working together is going to be what's going to make the difference.

So I'm just wondering when do you see that happening in the future and when might be the time where that happens? I mean, we can use AI for lots of things, but we can't use AI to give us extra days in the week. How are we going to make sure that the services delivered to the citizens and not to the point where our folks at work here are being deluged with with extra loads of work, extra workloads. When could that happen? How can we combat that other than just collaborating amongst divisions? How do you see us? There's a point in time, I think, where we're going to have to add staff to this. When do you think that might happen? Can you project that? And again, I'm not going to put this in stone when you say this, but for future boards and future management, they need to look at this. When do you think that might really happen?

I don't have a technical answer for you, but it's going to be about leadership listening and understanding the workloads and looking at key performance indicators and seeing those go up with staffing levels staying the same and technology not helping as fast as the numbers and the key performance indicators are going up. So I don't have a year for you on that, but it is going to be about listening and working together. And at some point you could be right.

You recognize that as something that we're looking at. We don't know when, but somewhere down the line, the county will be looking at that in a different light than we're looking at it now.

Yes, sir. And when Director Cook refers to the five-year forecast as being a status quo and we'll need to make changes in order to remain sustainable, once we see that beginning to happen and those cracks starting to form, we will have to change our five-year forecast.

Very well. My second question would be about on page 19. It's come up before. It comes up pretty regular. And I'm just wondering why we've segregated indigent services from the homeless fund. For most folks, they use indigent and homeless pretty much interchangeable. Why do we divide that group? Again, I've heard it before, but I just want to make sure we're on the same page today and let folks who haven't listened to these discussions in the past understand why we're taking what appears to be two very similar, if not identical situations and why they're segregated the way they are.

So based on recent history, so the Homelessness Fund is one of the most recent special revenue funds created. It was to track the expenditures associated with supporting homelessness initiatives within the county. So prior to this, there were various initiatives and they might have lived in the Indigent Fund, they might have lived in the Child Protective Services Fund, they might have lived in the General Fund. We did have General Fund positions that supported these initiatives. So the homelessness fund was created as a and I'm not probably going to say this like with correction and Ryan can jump in and tell me that this isn't correct but indigent is a larger umbrella. There's different and there are people say people there are indigent services that aren't necessarily only directed towards homeless services. and not all, and I don't wanna say this wrong, but from my understanding, right, we have like working homeless and some of those people might not be by standard definitions considered indigent, they just don't, you know, they have a lack of options for housing. And so the idea was to create the homelessness fund to really focus on and be able to identify and, FINANCIALLY SHOW WHAT THAT SUPPORT LOOKS LIKE IN ITS TOTALITY RATHER THAN HAVING IT IN, YOU KNOW, NINE OR TEN DIFFERENT FUNDS AND OR DEPARTMENTS. THE INDIGENT FUND HAS MORPHED OVER TIME, AND AS MENTIONED EARLIER, IT WAS INDIGENT MEDICAL. SO, AND THEN IT WAS EXPANDED THROUGH A LEGISLATIVE PROCESS FOR INDIGENT SERVICES. AND SO THAT HAS CHANGED A LITTLE BIT OVER TIME. But the indigent fund precedes the homelessness fund, and the homelessness fund was created. There were a couple of commissioners at the time that were very vocal and wanted that level of transparency for those. So there could be crossover population, but they are not intended to be the same thing.

So I understand with public safety, we certainly have some clearer lines with law enforcement and public health. Those are things that are still public safety, but there are a lot of differences there. I mean, with this indigent services and homeless fund, I mean, somebody could be for breakfast, be in the indigent club and by afternoon be in the homeless fund. And so it seems a very blurred line there for me as far as, you know, when do you cross that line? It looks like these two are intersecting on a regular basis. And you could certainly be in both categories probably within the same hour. And I just wanted to .

And there are program areas within those, and I don't have them right in front of me, but I can, you know, provide that breakout. So for instance, in the homeless services, we have a sheriff's initiative. So they are deputies that have outreach and outreach program. We have the homeless shelter, so the Cares Campus Safe Camp, that is another area. We have coordination of care. We have the human services, so that is the Our Place. It is TADS. So there are definite program areas. And then with an indigent, there's also these different program areas. So there's some specificity to it. I just don't have those numbers in front of me, but I can get them for you where it's broken out.

Sure. I didn't mean to put you on the spot. That isn't where I'm going with this. But all the programs you just named, the CARES campus, you're there for homelessness, but you could also be getting indigent services there at the same time. That wouldn't work that way at all? You wouldn't be getting some extra?

Like if you had case management services, you would be going through the CARES campus and you would be going through that model. And so I don't think those would overlap or intersect in that manner. But again, I'm not the subject matter expert in that one, but that is more of a, from my understanding, the resource center and that case management is more standalone.

Would you mind, I don't want to interrupt Commissioner Clark at all, if you'd like to keep on going, but I do think the county manager may have additional information that might be helpful to your question if you'd like to hear it.

Sure.

Okay.

No, it's a good question, Laura. You did a great job. The other thing, I think about indigency with public defense and things like that. So NRS, and I'm not trying to play attorney, Mr. Large, but NRS defines the care of indigent patients and refers to people who meet specific criteria, insurance coverage, program eligibility, income thresholds. You're not covered by a policy of health insurance. You're ineligible for Medicare, Medicaid. You have certain income levels. So you're not always homeless. So indigency, there's a determination of indigency for us to determine whether or not we provide public defense, the court makes that case and such. So perfect answer as far as being able to say really quickly, because we do get asked. We took over homelessness in 2021. It's about the time the fund was created. How much have we spent on that? It's an easy way for us to access that versus trying to peel it out of that indigency. That's a tough one to say, which is a larger bucket, if that helps.

Thank you.

Any other questions?

Vice Chair Garcia. Thank you Madam Chair. There's several members of the public that are here and really passionate and concerned about the future of our library system. So as we know WC1 did not pass. in 2024 and we just passed an augmentation last week to spend out the remaining of the library expansion fund balance by June 30, 2026. So what can we expect in terms of operation? Many folks are are not aware that, you know, we don't oversee the budget and the director and all the day-to-day operations here at the Board of County Commission level. And so there's a little bit of a distance between what is discussed at that board and what is discussed at ours. So just a brief overview on what we can expect in the year to come.

Good morning. Thank you, Madam Vice Chair. So, from a budgetary perspective, there's a big change. We moved from the expansion fund into the general fund, but Mr. Solero spent quite a bit of time in the past year doing a heavy duty operational study to make sure that all the operations were optimized. And so, to make sure that when we made the proposal of moving that budget into the general fund it was the right thing to do and so from an operational standpoint there won't be that the library will be simply treated like all of the other departments from a budgetary perspective and from an operations perspective they just don't have a special revenue fund with a two cent tax associated with it but that two cents went into the general fund for for your discretion but for those operations

Commissioner Hill, did you have anything you'd like to add?

I mean, always. Thank you, Madam Chair.

You had that look.

Well, to Commissioner Garcia's point, I think just to lay it out, no one is getting additional money this year. Including the libraries, we'd love to give everyone additional money, but sadly, we have a budget that is losing money because of our broken tax system. So no one is getting additional money, but we're not cutting the library as well.

Through you, Madam Chair, to Commissioner Hill, certain departments did receive above-base request recommendations, and when you vote on this budget today, you will be approving those. But the library was treated just like other departments. Certain expanded above-base requests were approved as we could, and certain were denied based on how connected they were to your strategic plan and the operations of the county.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Most of the above base was because we were moving the Department of Alternative Sentencing or we are changing those kind of things, correct?

Yes. The So to jump in, the items really that were approved related to above base, they did not fund positions. They were mostly related to operational increases that were submitted by departments that they needed to have to operate. So it could be or those things that they wanted to try for technology. So an example, and this is in the public defender's office, there's a one-time above base for a technology solution that they are going to try to use and see if they can use it. If it works for them, then maybe it could work for other, whether it's the alternate public defender or other judicial, maybe the district attorney. I'm not telling them how to run their operations, but do the work. THAT A PERSON NORMALLY WOULD DO. SO WHEN WE'RE TALKING ABOUT TIMING, SOME OF THE ABOVE BASE WERE APPROVED AS ABOVE BASE BECAUSE WE DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THEM TO MAKE THEM FOR BASE. AND THEY REALLY ARE SERVICES AND SUPPLIES ORIENTED OR CONTRACTUALLY ORIENTED. NORMALLY WHEN WE'RE LOOKING AT THE ABOVE BASE REQUEST, THE BULK OF THOSE ARE IN TERMS OF FTEs AND PEOPLE. and what those costs are, and those were not approved. But your statement, we took the budget that would have been the budget in the expansion fund, we moved it to the general fund, so it wasn't a reduction in positions, it wasn't a reduction in budget authority, it's accounting for it in the general fund with that tax offset.

Thank you.

Any other questions? I just want to actually thank you. It proves my math skills, which I love math works. Unfortunately, the 27% was not what anyone wants to see in terms of growth. And then more doing with the same, I think, but it's really more doing with less. And I do agree that the technology piece can only go so far. And so I really want to commend everyone on your team for looking at continuing to look at what we're going to call a hybrid and priority-based budgeting. And that, I think, is going to be a tool and a resource that will help in driving what you all have been doing, but how we move forward. Because the numbers that we've already had you share, and we were missing, those are the NOAA emojis, just to give the National Oceanic Administration, those are NOAA's emojis that you didn't include. But Those are alarming numbers, but that's only if we continue doing the same, and we're not continuing doing the same. So I think as we move into that, as we see what final numbers come in, I hope you can keep us informed. I also think in terms of the county manager and your team and the Budget Congress and looking at that process and having everyone equally feel the responsibility to understand what the constraints are and how to work through those. So I really want to thank you for that. And then I think as we move, especially on the FTE piece, I think the county manager is dedicated through HR's direction on really making a process more transparent for all the departments to follow. Not that it hasn't been followed, but that there's a real clear picture because some folks may understand it be one way. Another may understand it to be another way. And I think that, if that is a policy slash document that everyone can follow I think it will help and the planning of how things work. So and then lastly I would be remiss if I didn't thank you for doing in advance talk about doing more with less. The budget 101 and the Washoe checkbook and I really appreciate and I know we all do because we're all committed to transparency so thanks for that. This is an actionable item and so I'm going to entertain a motion unless there's any other comments by any commissioners. So I'll look for a motion at this time.

So moved.

We have a motion by commissioner held. Okay. Garcia.

I say, Oh, second.

Any further discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Um, please note that commissioner Clark is not in the room for the vote. I'm not sure, but maybe we can ask him. when he comes in. All right, we're gonna go ahead and close item four. We're moving to item five, which, county manager, please, if you wouldn't mind.

Certainly. This is discussion and possible action on the county manager's recommended capital improvement plan, or RCIP, as it's known, for fiscal years 2027 to 2031. It directs the county manager to submit the CIP to the state of Nevada and others by August 1st of 2026, as required by state law. The fiscal year 2027 total appropriations for this budget account or for the CIP rather are $123,236,701. Again, we have our CFO and budget director here to go over. I think we just have a brief 10-minute presentation on this one, so we'll jump right in. Thank you, Abby and Laurie.

Okay, is it here? There we go. Good morning again, for the record, Lori Cook, Division Director for Budget. As county manager opened, this is the five-year capital improvement plan. We are required by statute to submit a five-year capital improvement plan. It goes to the Department of Taxation. It also goes to the Debt Management Commission of the county, so far as it would be Washoe County Debt Management Commission. It is the planning tool for the next five years towards the end of the presentation, but I'll say it here and then I'll reiterate it again. the budget that was just approved or adopted by the board a minute ago is for year one. There are no decisions in years two through five. There's no budget for years two through five yet. So we adopted one year budget, but we have to submit a five year CIP. So again, as for it to be a capital project, it's an estimated cost of $100,000 or more with a lifespan of one year or more. Normally we see purchases, construction, building improvement, sometimes it's purchasing land. large equipment. We can also have technology systems, so newer upgrade technology systems like case management systems. We're working on an ERP modernization process right now, and then maintenance of current physical assets. So sometimes you'll see those bids come forward, and we're redoing HVAC at one of the housing units at the jail, those types of projects. This is the infrastructure scorecard. This will be updated again at the end of this fiscal year, so as of 6-30-2026. This shows the overall grade for the current state of our infrastructure. When we look at fiscal year 24 on the left compared to fiscal year 25, we see most conditions stayed flat or stayed the same. The sewer collection slightly decreased while sewer treatment plants slightly increased, and those are through the utilities fund. Those projects we funded through the utility son Just as a reminder that the baseline and again This is going to continue to grow as costs grow, but the baseline for maintenance repairs and this is infrastructure This doesn't include like technology is 18 million annually and right now. We are at a base transfer of 14 million so one of those assumptions that's in the general fund forecast is that increases a million per year until we meet our the annual required contribution. Sorry, I'm on the wrong page. This shows the different funds. So we have the Capital Improvement Fund, the Parks Capital Fund, Capitals Facility Tax, the roads, the other funds that we mentioned, so General Fund, Animal Services, the Utilities Fund, as well as the Equipment Services Fund. and the these recommended projects are the cip committee is composed of the assistant county managers the chief financial officer our chief information officer the comptroller division director of budget and the community services director so it's not one person in recent years we have not had departmental substitute submissions due to arpa projects and other time sensitive projects whether it's grants or whatnot coming online and we're going to have to fiscal year 27 was the same. We had infrastructure submissions, technology submissions, we did have some submissions but it wasn't blanket submissions from departments that might you know have needs in their office or things like that we'll have to the CIP committee will be discussing how we're going to proceed with fiscal year 28 but for fiscal year 27 these recommendations are based on what was submitted and the funding available without individual department submissions. When we talk about the This is the these are new projects on top. So these are not all projects. These are the recommended new projects. And these are the same as what was previously presented in April. But they are notable. So we have the register of voters. That's the ROV building automation systems upgrade, which we're pretty excited about that ERP modernization project. There's funding for that. and then we have existing project carryover that's estimated right now at 10.735 million so that could have been a project from two years ago or last year that will carry forward all of those individual projects are listed in that five-year summary for that goes to the state but that's where the capital improvements fund fund 402 if you want to look at those is 32.4 million and this is just a way to show it broken out in a different way, so we have voters, facilities or building projects, technology, infrastructure, which includes P25, so the P25, the public safety radio, that shared radio system, and then other projects within the other funds. We have the Parks Capital Fund, and these are the recommended new projects, are the two that are on top, so the Hawkins Amphitheater and North Valley's Regional Park, the projects that have the asterisks by them, those are the ones that we had to add the budget authority between final and tentative and they are pending grant funding, other funding sources rather than the parks capital fund. The utilities fund actually has the most of these very large projects and on this list if you'll note it sites or provides the source of the funding so when we have these large capital projects And they have, right, they're named, there's a continuation of the South Truckee Meadows Water Reclamation Facility, STEMWRF. I think that's what it stands for. But you can see where it's funded. So it's either rates or we have connection fees. So right, you've got different funding sources within the utilities funds for these projects. We have also, some of these projects have also been funded with SRFs, the State Revolving Fund loans, which technically are bonds. but it's through the state and we get some pretty advantageous interest rates on those. So then we have the roads fund, and I can hand it over to CSD at some point, but we still have some pending, the areas for the slurry seal for fiscal year 27. Next week, there's an item coming forward for a bid for slurry seal that's related to fiscal, or at least the budget in fiscal year 26. We have equipment services capital, so that's heavy and light fleet. So equipment replacement, some of those are like for roads type vehicles. Some of those are patrol vehicles, other vehicles that are on the replacement schedule. And then the other fund projects were, you know, those items that are meeting the capital purchase threshold within the special revenue funds and the general fund. CAPITAL FACILITIES TAX. THIS AMOUNT, THIS BUDGET IS NOT INCLUDED IN THE TOTAL CIP BECAUSE THESE ARE NOT CAPITAL PROJECTS. THIS IS A FIVE CENT PROPERTY TAX THAT IS COLLECTED AND IT GOES INTO THIS FUND AND APPROXIMATELY 72% OF IT IS TRANSFERRED OUT PER STATUTORY REQUIREMENTS. So about 60% goes to the State of Nevada Highway Fund. That's at 7.6 million. Then about 11.25% goes to the cities. So that's total for Reno and Sparks, that 1.4 million. And then we use a portion of the remaining amount to transfer to the roads funds. So all roads activity and budget lives in the roads fund. So again, we don't have, we're not trying to track down split expenditures. And there's some small services and supplies associated there. And obviously, as it's an important topic for the board and you've had separate workshops related to it, our long-term capital needs, this is the list or whatever you might want to call it. There are, and these are the largest that, I mean, we know they're likely smaller, but these are some fairly large items that are outstanding. We don't necessarily have identified funding sources for all of these. We are making some progress on the first one, the IT infrastructure. That's the ERP modernization. And sometimes we can do small projects that help some of these larger needs. But the majority of these the last time that we checked and it's probably more now because costs are higher. We're between 400 and 600 million dollars. FOR THESE PROJECTS. SO THE ABOVE DON'T HAVE ANY FINAL DECISIONS YET AND LIKE THERE'S NO, THE BOARD ACCEPTING THIS IS NOT APPROVING MORE DEBT, IT'S NOT APPROVING FUNDING FOR THESE PROJECTS IN THE OUTER YEAR. IT'S, YOU KNOW, THIS IS JUST WHAT'S ON THE PLAN BASED ON WHAT WE HAVE. We do know that if we have to issue debt, we'd have to look at that because we have to be able to, even if we have capacity, we still have to have the ability to pay it back. So we have to have a repayment source that's not being used for something else. So that's all I had.

Thank you. This is an actionable item, so I'll call for public comment at this time. We have nobody signed in. Thank you so much. I'll call for Commissioner comments. Commissioner Clark.

Microphone is on. I'd like to go to page 10, please. And just curiosity, payments to the state highway fund. What percentage of that money is used strictly in our county? Do we have any Any idea of what that matter?

It would be great to have that information. And I've actually, there are some funding sources like GST that goes to the state general fund and we cannot get an accounting on that. It doesn't mean that we can't try again. But when it goes to the state highway fund, it But to my knowledge, there's not a requirement or report that says of the 7 million, 5 million stays within the borders of Washington County. Just curious. Yeah.

And the next question is, how does that compare with Clark County? Do we know, is it possible to find out what Clark County remits back to the state?

I can find out. Clark County also has supplemental GST, so I'm not sure how they're...

the funding structure like if they have something similar to this just because of the sizes but I'll look I'm just wondering yeah you know we know it's disproportionate the population and and everything else that's involved but be interesting to see if those if those track with the percentages that that we might be sending to the state yeah thank you yeah any other questions oh sorry Commissioner Herman

Am I on? You are. Okay. I've been hearing to the grapevine that we may have a slowdown in our economy and whatnot here in the near future. And how can we protect ourselves from, I mean, I know we have to budget for what we know and all that, but which way would it affect us? I mean, how... How will that change what we do?

Can you hear me? Okay. So Madam Chair, through you to Commissioner Herman, thank you for the question. This is one of the reasons that we find the five-year forecast to be so important, because we're not seeing revenue decline in property tax and consolidated tax, which make up between 80 and 82 percent of our total general fund revenue, but we're seeing slowing in the growth. And so that's why we present to you the current budget year and five years of forecast, so we can make informed decisions and work with all 24 departments to do that. So we're trying to be as nimble as we possibly can by giving you that forecast and looking at it routinely ourselves and bringing ideas to you. So yes, we are noting that and we noted it when Dr. Larmore presented to you in January that we were seeing, I think she said the predictor was broken and what helped us predict the five-year forecast in the past was no longer going to work. So we need to get creative and we need to be nimble.

Right. Thank you very much for explaining that. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Hearing none, I'll entertain a motion at this time.

Move to approve the capital budget.

We have a motion by Commissioner Hill. Do we have a second? Second. Second by Commissioner Herman. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you. We'll move now, if you will, to a quick break. We're going to take a five-minute break, and then we'll come back and hear everything about growth and infrastructure and housing. all right we're gonna open up the meeting again for 1128 and we'll move now to item six manager Thomas thank you we are kicking off our

second strategic planning but third workshop and this is an update for the board for the purpose of the strategic planning providing the board with information to receive guidance for a unified vision of success and expected outcomes today's topics of discussion include clarifying Washoe County's role the role of our partners in building housing capacity concepts to be aware of and that are important on constraints for future growth and concepts for possibly prioritizing residential growth areas, including incentives, funding, benefits, and trade-offs. The CIP discussion was a perfect lead-in to this with our big picture discussion today on housing growth and infrastructure. I think for those that weren't able to participate in the last two workshops, I'd love to quickly stage that if I can, Madam Chair, that this is the second of three on strategic priorities, strategic topics as the board explores areas that we want to move forward from a strategy standpoint. And we had our first immersive budget workshop. We had an upstream discussion last time for our strategic planning workshop. And this is the second on infrastructure. We'll have one more on June 2nd. to talk about another big and important topic around data governance and so forth. But today we've got some important members of the community that are here to discuss the topics with us. But I just wanted to make sure everybody understands this is not an action item. It's a lot of really good brainstorming and input from the board. So we're looking forward to the conversation. I'll turn it over to Mr. Solera.

Good morning. As Manager Thomas said, I'm Dave Solero, Assistant County Manager. Here with me today, we've got Dr. Hilary Lopez with Reno Housing Authority and Dr. Jeremy Smith with the Regional Planning Agency here in the Truckee Meadows. So I'm going to just very briefly kind of step us into this first topic that kind of flows between all three of our topics on Washoe County's role in regional housing, planning for constrained growth, and then prior to our discussion around what we're calling prioritized development areas. So Jared, if you wouldn't mind moving forward one item there. Oh, maybe two. Let's give it a third one. So, commissioners, as you will recall, there's been a lot of topic of discussion around housing, kind of Washoe County's role, where we stand through the housing continuum that you see at the bottom of this slide. As a region, we have had a discussion around housing for quite some time. and all the local jurisdictions really understand uh you know that what the needs are and where the gaps contain are contained uh we also know that not one entity can actually solve this problem it's going to take a whole slew of people uh to to work through that and so uh you know as i mentioned uh we've got a couple of experts here uh today to help us through that and really kind of stage set what else is happening in the region uh outside of washoe county You know, we had the Truckee Meadows housing study in 2026, 2020 or sorry, 2016. I'm trying to jump ahead here, you know, that really identified some of the needs. And this commission has gone forward with some of the things outlined in there. You know, one of them is really setting up the Washoe County Housing Trust Fund. So that was a big step in the region of trying to, you know, spur some of the growth and some of the solutions that we need to provide. There's also a discussion, which we're going to get into later today, related to the public resource investment. Like, where do we invest our funds in the infrastructure to make these things not only, you know, lower the infrastructure costs, but actually lower the cost of maintenance over time, right? So you'll hear some pretty good discussion there. And then by board direction, we've adopted the Envision Washoe 2040, as well as our current Washoe County strategic plan that has set the tone for the unincorporated portions of Washoe County. So the things that we can influence from a development perspective. And so I really want to take the chance right now to say what we're doing today is specific to how we can influence housing in unincorporated Washoe County. And this is not a discussion around homeless services alone. and emergency sheltering or permanent supportive housing. This is really the right-hand side of the housing continuum, those things that we've put into place, those things where we're headed for affordable rental housing, market rental housing, as well as home ownership. Just a recap of the Washoe County strategic initiatives that we've put into place over the years. All of the things that this board has given Washoe County direction through our strategic plan and that have been or are nearly realized. I think there's an item next week. But these are some of the things that we've been able to do really in trying to do our part in the housing study, that missing middle housing, really diversifying the housing type that's in an unincorporated Washoe County, those things that allow the tools for our developers to be able to come in. Because, you know, it's not only just government entities and the residents, it's also the developers that are a partner through this whole process, right? So we do quite a bit of work with the residents, with ourselves, with the developers. with our whole community in trying to define and create the toolbox for all of these different solutions. And so with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Dr. Jeremy Smith as a stage setting for us on really what the regional planning is and how we fit into it. Take it away, Dr. Smith.

Well, thank you very much, Dave, and thank you all for having me here today. Appreciate the opportunity. I'm Jeremy Smith, the director of the Truckee Meadows Regional Planning Agency, and probably the principal function is to create and administer the regional plan, and that's the cover of the document you see there on your slide. In terms of when the Regional Planning Agency was first formed, it was formed by state statute back in 1989, so through the legislature, and it's updated every five years substantively. And in 2019, we did a major overhaul. Many of you serve on the board and were there at that time, so you're aware of what happened. But what it's intended to do is to help foster collaboration amongst the three jurisdictions here in the Truckee Meadows with regard to master planning. And so that is really the goal of the regional plan. It's to be a collaborative effort, bring everyone together, including also what we call affected entities, which are organizations such as the school district or the RTC, and to make sure that we're all aware of the same kinds of planning initiatives and where we're all heading so that we're in alignment, which is really key. In terms of the map there, you can see, I kind of wanted to point out our jurisdiction, the shape on the left there, the middle of the slide. You might be familiar with that as Washoe County. So, I mean, our jurisdiction really does go all the way up to the Oregon border. But most of what we deal with is focused in what we call the TMSA or Truckee Meadows Service Area. And that is that gray blob that you see at the bottom of Washoe County. Or if you move over to the topographic looking map, that shaded relief map, you can see a black outline. and then lots of colors inside the black outline. Those colors really represent the intensity of development. And that is from, I believe I did it from national land cover dataset a while back. But the point being that there are different intensities of development across that Truckee Meadows service area. And in fact, some areas that currently are undeveloped, but inside that boundary. And it's defined as the boundary within which you could expect to have municipal type services, either adequate and available or within a 20 year timeframe based on planning for infrastructure. That is where about 99% of the population resides as well, is inside that boundary, 98% to 99% of the population. So that's kind of our focus area, and that is the focus of the regional plan, but we do sometimes get into the rural area, which I'll show you another map in a sec. Just quickly, our organization is made up of really three levels. At the very top is the Regional Planning Governing Board, and that is... You all hear a part of that or have been or could be. And that is elected officials from the three jurisdictions that come together to preside over amendments to the plan, budget, the administration of the agency, and any appeals that occur. Most of the technical work gets done at the level right below that, which is the Regional Planning Commission, made up of three members from each of the local jurisdictions' planning commissions. And then there's a... Five to six person staff we're kind of surging with interns right now So it's really actually happening over there and regional planning, but it's a small staff, and we try to do a lot With what we've got So basically in terms of our regulatory role in case work there are there are just a few things that trigger our formal regulatory process Those are master plan conformance review so anytime this body or this jurisdiction or any of the jurisdictions or affected entities want to change their master plan or facilities plan, That requires a conformance review versus the regional plan. So that's most of the work that we do. But there are also cases where the master plan does not need to be changed, but the project is of significant size. It's called the project of regional significance. And that will also create the need to review it against the regional plan. For example, a threshold on housing units is 625 or more units. So if you're doing a big subdivision, that would trigger our process. And there are many, many triggers. And then, of course, regional plan amendments. If we're going to change the plan, we have to go through the process and make sure everyone agrees it's a collaborative process. What I've got here are these three pillars. We've done a lot of work on... So the regional plan's at the top. That's the policy document. That's how we address the changes in the conformance review. But underpinning it You know, we have several sections in there. We've got a natural resources document and data warehouse that really helps create a foundation for our natural resource policies. There's narratives about different natural resource topics. We have a public infrastructure document which talks about some of the stuff that came up in the last item that we'll talk about in a bit, but who does what in the region in certain infrastructure domains, and then also how are we spending and where are we spending. And we're working on that third pillar, which is all about population and housing, and it's all part of our mandate from state law to do these things. So that's kind of the regulatory structure. In 2019, when we revamped the plan substantively, we came up with this regional form map. This is map two of the regional plan. And in an attempt to stay regional and non-jurisdictional, we designated in collaboration again with all jurisdictions and entities. Our tiering system, or what we call regional land designations, and there's five of them. So the very darkest blue area in the center, that's the mixed use core. That's where we actually see minimum requirements for housing density. We don't want to put large lots downtown, right? We want to see the density where we have already built it. Then we have the next one out, which is that next tier of blue there. It's Tier 1 lands. That is basically the McCarran Ring area and also the old transit-oriented development corridors along Virginia, north and south, all the way out to the Stead Airport, all the way down to the Summit Mall and Redfield area. That's an area where we want to see growth, where we see no minimum, no maximum. You can really leverage the investments we've already made in terms of infrastructure in those areas. Then the lighter blue is Tier 2. That's kind of a suburban tier, limited to a maximum of 30 dwelling units per acre per the regional plan. And that's where you can expect to see a majority, especially of the single-family housing that we have in the region. Then we have the gray area, which is Tier 3, and a lot of that corresponds with unincorporated Washoe County. And so these areas in Tier 3 are either built to somewhat low density or at this time lack the necessary infrastructure and service provision to support growth. And so there's a process, which I'll go over in a sec, in order to change that tiering through a regional plan amendment process, We're good ideas, right? Good ideas that meet muster, that meet the criteria, that can be, we can figure out how we're going to serve it and how we can afford to serve it. And then finally, everything outside the TMSA is what we call the rural area. And that's really five acre lot minimums, Northern Nevada public health requirements for well and septic control, that some degree, so large lots, ranches, that kind of thing. I will point out that we are not in authority in the Tahoe Basin or on tribal lands. Okay, so I wanted to give an example of these tiers. So since we established in 2019, we've seen about maybe 1 to 2 percent change of the tiers. The tier system, the regional land designations are really based on three things, data analysis of where we have density, where we have infrastructure, where we're planning for infrastructure, what do the local jurisdiction master plans say and what are those designations, and then also negotiations between the jurisdictions to achieve that. Well, but what we wanted to make sure of is that we had a path, a criteria-based path to actually change tiers when good ideas come up. So this is an example from a few years back. It's the chocolate drive example, which took place in unincorporated Washoe County out in Sun Valley. When we established the tiering system, you can see there in the map, If you look at that first map on the left, there's a kind of a medium blue color. That is Sun Valley up at the top there with an orange thing on the left side of it. And that's the subject site for Chocolate Drive. And we had drawn a buffer along Sun Valley Boulevard of like half a mile. And that's how we created the tier one. geography. But then this project came through, and this project was seeking home funds, and it was an affordable housing project. And we thought, this is a really good idea, and this is where we want to see density, and this will actually help. The facilities and services are there, and this can help support what we're trying to achieve in terms of housing choice in the region. And so through collaboration with staff here at Washoe County, we initiated this tier change process and we were able to move through the criteria and actually achieve the change to tier two, which enabled 240, an approval at least, of 240 affordable housing units out there in Sun Valley. So pretty exciting. And that's exactly what was intended with this process to have not an arbitrary, previously to the 2019 plan, I'll just point out that this wouldn't have been possible. because through the settlement agreement, through regional planning, legal things that occurred, Unincorporated Washoe was limited to a maximum of five dwelling units per acre. Well, this project is six dwelling units per acre. So it just would have been diminished. We wouldn't have gotten as many affordable units, but through creating a criteria-based process, we all working together and we can support good ideas. So that's a great example in my mind. And speaking of affordable housing, At the same time we were updating the plan, we were participating in a joint effort, a community effort, which ended up being called Housing Our Future, which is a regional strategy for housing affordability, working with Enterprise Community Partners, a nationwide nonprofit that is an expert in affordable housing methods, protocols, and strategies. Also with the Chuckie Mills Healthy Communities and all the jurisdiction partners and just a huge community and put the banks, put a bunch of money into it. It was really a great effort. And it really gave us a community profile. So in 2017, 18, we understood median incomes, home prices, what the needs were, and also gave us a list of strategies to protect and preserve affordable housing. And finally, also created a set of action items over 30, I think it was, well over 30, that we could do as a community with different folks, different agencies identified to lead those actions. So for example, one action was for TMRPA, us, to create a map of where do we have these affordable housing properties in town. And so we have done that, and that's that picture up on the top right. And many of these have been accomplished. Some maybe weren't appropriate in the end or are still something we want to try to achieve. And so with that in mind, I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Hilary Lopez, who's with RHA, the Reno Housing Authority, to talk about kind of where they're heading in that vein. Thank you.

Thank you.

There you go.

If you can just hold on. Oh, sure. My chair has a question.

Absolutely.

We'll open it up for questions really quick for you. Thank you so much. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to get too far along before I forget my question. I took some allergy medicine this morning, so my brain. No worries. So back to the tier, tier two, tier three. Yes.

This map here? Yes. Yes.

Okay. So you said that the tiers were established in 2019.

That's correct.

Okay. And when you were looking at Sun Valley, I represent Sun Valley all the way down to Wooster, Keystone, over to East McCarran, so a lot of the development is in my district, and so I'm keenly aware of the... struggles that many of my constituents face. So when I, you know, I was in Hidden Valley yesterday and, you know, when you look at the infrastructure in an unincorporated part of Washoe County, you know, the wider streets, no sidewalks, no lighting, you know, the culverts and ditches, it just makes more sense in those kinds of areas. But We have the same situation up in Sun Valley, but we have 20,000 plus people. And so those baseline county infrastructure amenities, I wouldn't consider them the ditches amenities when your kids are trying to walk from their house to school. But at what point do you as an organization look at the population increase from 2019 when this was originally being discussed and approved in Sun Valley to what it is facing and feeling right now in terms of traffic, in terms of population increase, like you made the move, this was prior to me being on this board, to increase the density and designate it as a place that had no minimums and no maximums as somewhere we wanted to target but I'm feeling some heartburn over the changing of the colors of the maps in particular areas of this region because I think it's geographically constrained. We have old or no infrastructure based on how this was an unplanned development unlike many other parts of the Washoe County. So I think that history is unique to how Sun Valley came to be. There's very few places in the county where you see, you know, these multi-jurisdictional, you know, you've got NDOT and the county roads and then private roads and then all the serial parceling that happens in between. So my question to you is, is there a point where we've reached, like, it's too congested, it's too chaotic in terms of traffic flow and peak hours. We don't have any stormwater drainage. And so we're looking at improving if we're able to get that $25 million in gap funding from the federal government to improve Sun Valley Boulevard. There's just so many balls up in the air right now. And I just worry about, even though we've designated this as tier two and the changing of the map one by one is just, it's progressively putting more and more constraint on the existing very poorly rated infrastructure. So at what point do we say enough is enough?

think it's a great question and I believe that you're absolutely right that there is a limit to density right because you can overwhelm existing infrastructure and service systems that that are there I think in the case of Sun Valley I can think back to 2019 that the thinking was that it is relatively close into the core is served by transit it already serves a maybe to some degree lower income populations, and there is already density there. And I think this is potential. This is potential for density. It's not required density. But through the development process and investment into those kinds of higher density projects, you can get some of the improvements that help, I think, ameliorate what you're discussing. So I think that was the thinking in terms of not trying to go out but go up. it is a thought process that led to, I think, that designation. But again, it is not a requirement. It is a change from, you know, what would have previously been an arbitrary limitation of $5 trillion per acre in that whole area, which might be appropriate, but doesn't necessarily bring the level of investment that would lead to some of those improvements, I think, that are needed.

Yes, and I agree. I think personally and Commissioner Herman, too, have really wanted to shine the light on the possibilities and the potential along the commercial corridor of Sun Valley Boulevard. What I'm talking about are the housing developments that are putting more and more strain on the very stressed infrastructure system out there, and I just wanted to, A, shine the light on that, on what the day-to-day experience is, and I just wanted to know what the process was for it to ever go back to a Tier 3.

It could go back, yeah, if that was initiated by your staff.

If I may jump in really quick as well, Assistant County Manager Dave Solero, the regional plan is an enabling document at this point. It enables Washoe County, yourselves, to make those policy decisions. We did not go in and change any zoning or anything associated with any of the land uses around Sun Valley or any other parts of Washoe County where we had a tier change, we'll call it. So they're kind of two different things, but certainly we've had many conversations as a staff around what does it look like if we want to intensify certain areas. And I think part of that discussion is going to come up this afternoon or at least a little bit later, as we talk through some of the constraints that we've got and some of the tools we've got available. So for all intents and purposes, the majority of the area is still, we'll consider it tier three, just because we have not gone in and updated our zoning and master plan and some of that at the county level. So this is really just an enabling thing, some of those tools that are out there. Thanks.

Thank you.

Any other questions? for Dr. Smith just before we turn over to Dr. Lopez.

Excuse me, one more question. We recently had a very controversial agenda item regarding a development that was within the TMSA boundary and a lot of the constituents, including myself, had never really even looked at that dotted line in the master plan on what the TMSA boundary was. Does that boundary ever change or is that pretty static?

It's pretty darn static, but it can be changed. We entertain amendments to the TMSA once a year in the October-December timeframe. Since I've been involved, since about 2011, we've seen very little change, a little bit of expansion to accommodate a school, and one development in Sparks, and then actually some removal of TMSA out in one of the island things out in Spring Mountain area. So it's pretty... Pretty static.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you. Well, welcome, Dr. Lopez.

Yes. Is it on?

Okay.

Perfect. Good morning. Thank you all for having me. As mentioned, I'm Dr. Hilary Lopez, and I'm the Executive Director of the Reno Housing Authority. And I just want to also mention that here with me today are our two Deputy Executive Directors, Heidi McKendry and J.D. Klippenstein, who are in the audience. And I really do appreciate the opportunity to talk with all of you today, share more about the Reno Housing Authority, or RHA as you may know it, and the many ways that our whole team is working to serve the community. I do want to go back for a second to what Jeremy said about the regional housing strategy or roadmap as we call it. And just let you know that we have also recently reviewed that document and are looking to determine kind of which of the designated strategies that were identified for RHA have been achieved, which are still valid. and which may need revisiting. It's been a number of years. Our community has changed during that time and so there may be some that need revising and so for the recommendations in the report for example as I go through my presentation you'll hear one of the things we were tasked to do was increasing our capacity to undertake development and we feel like that has been something that we focused on and has been accomplished and we're also poised to facilitate conversations if the community is interested in revisiting the remaining strategies. just to touch on that for a minute. And with that, I welcome the opportunity to just tell you more about our agency. Oh, wrong way. So RHA was created by the city of Reno in 1943, but since that time, by resolutions, our service area has really grown to include all of Washoe County. So further, in collaboration right now with the county and city managers, we are working to implement state legislation that transforms and transitions our governance structure to provide for more formal regional representation, and I'm very pleased to also say that just recently Commissioner Garcia was appointed to our board and will be joining us as a commissioner starting and starting later this month. So through the Reno Housing Authority and our subsidiary, Washoe Affordable Housing Corporation, we serve approximately 11,000 Nevadans annually. And we serve as a bedrock for local housing solutions. And through our MTW designation, which was received in 2013 from HUD, we serve as a national housing policy lab. And we are always seeking ways to evolve and maximize our impact. You have a slide that shows our affordable housing overview and though most people associate us with our traditional public housing and housing choice voucher previously known as Section 8 programs, we really do so much more. And so in addition to these programs, we have used various federal, state, and local funds as well as programs to acquire and develop over 900 other affordable housing units which are spread throughout the county. The majority of our developments house extremely low-income or very low-income seniors, veterans, disabled households, and families who would otherwise struggle to afford housing. And because of RHA, our tenants and clients have access to attractive, high-quality housing that meets their needs, and that's whether they reside in the North Valleys, in South Reno, East Sparks, the Northwest suburbs, or anywhere in between. In terms of our funding, while the Housing Authority always works to serve as many families as possible through its voucher programs, the reality is the demand for those services greatly outweighs the supply of our vouchers. Currently, we have about 10,000 unduplicated households across our wait list. And although staff is constantly working through applications, it can typically take anywhere from 18 to 24 months or longer for a family to receive voucher assistance. At the federal level, insufficient funding for the emergency housing voucher program means that RHA has had to shift and prioritize moving these vulnerable households to our regular HCV program or housing choice voucher program. And the effect of this is that we really have needed to slow the release of our turnover vouchers to new families. So families will have to wait longer on the wait list before we could provide assistance. Additionally, in most years, the federal government prorates our housing choice voucher administrative funding, meaning that we must use unrestricted funds or our reserves to fully operate the program. Public housing has also been underfunded for many years, through many years, and though we maintain high quality public housing, we've had to strategically start repositioning the properties, which really enables us to undertake holistic rehabilitation to preserve these critical units and still ensure the financial viability of the properties moving forward. Given the significant need for more affordable and attainable housing throughout the county, the authority has recently taken a larger role in preserving and developing housing. Recent funding and land acquisition opportunities like the state's Home Means Nevada initiative and the city of Reno's fee waivers really helped push this effort forward. However, as these funds are drying up, and our reserves are limited, we really do need to seek other ways to fill funding gaps and or reduce project costs. So some of the ways that local governments can help us sustain this momentum are through allocating local funds to the Reno Housing Authority, donating excess land, reducing regulatory fees or barriers such as zoning requirements. And all of these are ways that local governments can work to support the housing authorities projects. So as I've mentioned, we've really tried to take a larger role in terms of preserving our public housing and then undertaking new development in the past years and feel like this has really helped move the needle on affordable housing while also infusing approximately $200 million into the local economy where we've leveraged over $68 million in private equity funding and have also provided local construction and property management jobs. This economic development is slated to continue through our pipelines projects, which are shown on this slide, like Hope Landing, which will break ground on 15 new community-driven permanent supportive housing units later this month, and Reno Avenue, which, when we receive full funding, will create 42 apartments in a high-opportunity neighborhood in Reno. But we all know that tackling our region's housing problems requires more than one strategy and that our agency alone cannot do it all. So to best leverage the Housing Authority's human and financial resources, we routinely partner with the three jurisdictions, the local continuum of care, local nonprofits, and other stakeholders to ensure that we're making the greatest impact in chipping away at the affordable housing crisis. So I've provided a sample of some of our more recent partnerships on the slide that demonstrate the breadth of our program supported through RHA's funds, our project based vouchers, our resource and referral efforts and the development of community driven housing. and you could see that recently with Washoe County we've partnered to provide funding towards the housing and homeless services. We recently took on property management of your new CARES Campus Permanent Supportive Housing property and then we're also working with all of the jurisdictions on changes at the continuum of care and then other variety of other projects. So how is RHA different from a regular affordable housing developer? So I've mentioned that RHA is committed to community driven housing and so by that I mean that as a mission driven regional public agency, our goal really is to work with the local jurisdictions, their elected bodies and RHA's board to undertake demonstration projects, development and preservation that best meets local needs and fills the void within the local housing market. We are public stewards of high quality, permanently affordable housing and focus on serving those with the lowest incomes, including seniors on fixed incomes, veterans and households with disabilities. As part of our mission of providing stable, affordable housing, we see that as the foundation that enables those that we assist to move towards economic self-sufficiency through participating in programs such as RHA's Pathways to Prosperity, where we provide educational enhancement, workforce development training, nutrition and wellness, and other skills to help our clients transform their lives. And I had provided a couple of handouts on some of those programs ahead of time so that you would have some more information. And I'm happy to come back at another time and provide more information on that part of our services as well. And so just looking forward, RHA will continue to be a regional leader and partner in advancing housing solutions and policy. And we anticipate doing this by continuing to reposition our critical public housing for long-term sustainability. really acting as a convener to bring groups together and facilitate regional discussions and solutions to our community's housing challenges, increasing the supply of much needed permanent supportive housing and other income targeted housing, working to secure key parcels and working regionally to either self develop or partner with others for new community driven housing and finally by being innovative in developing new streams of funding, utilizing cutting edge construction practices, expanding our resident programming to support our mission, and overall making housing more attainable for Washoe County residents. With that, I really do appreciate the time today as well as the county's partnership and willingness to discuss ways that you could support the Reno Housing Authority and our efforts to make housing more attainable. And my team and I are happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

I would just like to take an extra moment and introduce Cameron Ornato. Did I pronounce your last name correctly? Honorado, thank you. With on strategies, I apologize that we didn't recognize you. Thank you so much, right? I mean, it's about everybody working together, but I'll open it up to questions at this time if you'd like.

So one other item for you as well. Yeah, no, no, no. That helps kind of spur, right? So we've got some experts here. But one of the things that we're really trying to work through with the board yourselves is, you know, what are the community concerns that you're actually hearing on housing capacity? Not infrastructure and those other things. We'll get to that here in a bit. But really about the housing capacity in our community. Kind of, you know, mostly, again, trying to separate homelessness with unincorporated Washoe County. So we're really trying to dig in to understand what you're hearing from your constituents in unincorporated Washoe County. related to housing capacity that will really help us kind of drive the next phase of our strategic plan. So just as an item to think about while you're asking questions. Thanks.

So while you're pondering that question, Commissioner Hill.

Thank you, and thank you both for coming and joining the board. And Dr. Lopez, I just want to give you and your team big kudos. You've been a great partner with the work that I've been trying to move forward in Incline Village and Crystal Bay with ensuring that lease to locals program, and you have been a fiscal agent and supporting that program. Thank you so much. And all your slides are saying we're doing more with less, and you're doing more projects in other parts of the county with less. And I just want to thank you. And then I'm so excited for the opportunity to work with you at the old elementary school. And I don't know how much I've been keeping the board updated, but that it, um, our, um, manager wrote a letter of support for Reno housing authority, helping, uh, develop a workforce housing project, um, through RFP. If the, um, the federal highway administration will support this. So, um, It's going to take a few steps, but we're moving forward potentially with some workforce housing up there, which will be a game changer. And so I just want to thank you so much. And for me, what I hear from the community to answer your question, follow the rules is I hear folks say, hey. I get it. I moved to this community because it's so amazing. So I get why people are moving here and why it's growing. My beef is that it's growing and we have no other infrastructure. So it's growing and we don't have sufficient flat fields for my kids and I to play. And we're having to compete with all sorts of families. It's growing and we're stuck in highway traffic or unsafe traffic. And I feel like... we're not moving forward with ensuring that we we're keeping our community safe with the growth so that's what that's what i hear from my community members um and then there's community members who also have a concern about we have housing but it is it needs to be unlocked so that's some of the work that we're doing in incline because we know that these Some of these housing units are not even being used for years by the owners. And some of it may be tax sheltering that's happening in Nevada. And some of it is folks who are using it for short-term rentals. And we've put some restrictions on that, but it's tough to really restrict the use of people's private properties. And so like figuring out how to unlock housing, and I don't think Incline is... I think it's more of the extreme piece of that, but I think there's more of that that's happening in Washoe County proper as well and figuring out how we can say, you know, folks who are investing in housing from outside this community and are not using the housing, how we incentivize them to rent their properties or maybe not want to invest in their properties so that real families have access to the housing. So those are the pieces that I've heard from community members.

Any response or just move on? I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I don't want to deprive you of the opportunity to address the multitude of points that were brought up.

For the record, Dr. Hilary Lopez with RHA and thank you for the kind words where we're happy to be able to partner and do these types of projects. In terms of the infrastructure issues, just wanted to note that when we're looking at where to locate projects, part of what we are doing is looking at either infill sites or other parcels where they're already located near public transportation, near amenities, near employment centers, near existing community resources and infrastructure so that we're capitalizing on that as part of the developments that we're doing.

Yeah, and Jeremy Smith with the record, I think in the next section you'll see some of our efforts to try to synthesize what we understand about how infrastructure and services are provided, at least in the domains that Team RPA is involved in, and what kind of investments are we doing And who does what? And in an attempt to bring together many disparate jurisdictions and organizations that all provide a role in providing those services into certainly a high level, I think, to Ms. Shalera's point that You know, we're the regional, we're not top down. We are really more about collecting the information and the consensus at the bottom and memorializing it at the top so that it reflects our collective vision. But the nitty gritty really does belong still at the local level. But we are trying to synthesize that into a picture in terms of infrastructure that addresses how are we or how are we not, you know, keeping up with both maintenance of our existing quality of life and accommodating growth.

Vice Chair Garcia. How did you know? Because I just had a feeling.

Thank you both for being here. And, you know, I didn't realize the Housing Authority had been around as many years as it has been. What did you say, 80 years? 80 plus years. So quite the history. But I think one of the things that I love most about what RHA does is, you know, it provides obviously the roof over the head, but the wraparound services for the folks, whether they're, you know, little ones all the way up to our elderly folks, You really understand how interconnected housing and things like education and health care, all those social determinants of health are critical to the success of people being able to stay in their homes. And I think that you've all dialed that in really well. So compliments to you and your team for understanding that holistic perspective of housing. So to answer your question, Dave, without talking about infrastructure, because that's the only thing that I want to say, but just in terms of what I hear, you know, when I talk to constituents is just having a more diverse portfolio of housing types, the diversification of housing types. I think You know, I came to Washoe County in 1998 for college, and it pretty much seemed then that the only thing you had for options were single-family homes or apartments, multifamily, right? And not a whole lot has changed in almost 30 years where, you know, there was a huge push and the valleys have filled up from north to south, east to west, with a lot of single-family homes. And we've seen some things hit the market like condos and townhouses and things that can provide a different footprint for families and different needs of families at a different price point. But I know here at the county we've been really pushing things like duplexes, fourplexes. those cottage courts. And I know I've talked to Dr. Lopez about even leaning in more into multi-generational housing types. So I would like for us to continue to push that narrative. There's a lot of families out there that would love their aging mother or father to be able to comfortably go towards the back of the property and still have that connectedness to prevent the senior isolation that often happens with our constituents. So that's what I'm hearing is just we need more options. Our recent college graduates, it's just nothing is within their reach. They're not going to have $120,000 or $130,000 to put down as a down payment. It's just not feasible. You know, I had to buy my first home with my brothers and that was in 2007 before the economic downturn there. And so it's just, as all the jurisdictions move forward, just really prioritizing different types. And I don't know what the builders say, like are certain types of homes more expensive or more difficult to build than others. Like, is that true? Townhouses, condos, does it not pencil out as easily as single family homes? I think that's just where I need some education and some professional development, perhaps, because if I'm always pushing condos and townhouses, but the builders are like, we can't do that. It's too hard or it's too expensive. I think we just need to know as policymakers, like what is actually happening in the market today.

Take a stab at that. Jeremy Smith of The Record, great question. And we absolutely agree. And it's been a while since I've looked into the pro formas for developers of different housing types. But that was a focus during our housing study back in 2016 and then on to the strategy. And I think that... I've heard this sentiment often that developers go with what they know. And I think that to some degree has fostered the single family aspect. But there are these costs and these trade-offs in terms of what you were talking about earlier with if we want to achieve a missing middle that's higher density, is the infrastructure investment there to serve it? We ran a model from our consultant from Portland had this model that ran, you know, what if we took all the zoning restrictions off of, and this was, of course, back in 2016, 17, so things have changed, but We were looking at about 21,000 parcels that seemed to be what you might even term like shovel-ready, like they were within sort of like a suitability zone where they could happen, and certain housing types built. But then we took everything, all the zoning off, and we let this guy's model run, and it built something like 300,000 units of garden apartments. Because that was the thing that at that time was sort of the economic win, you know, based on that one model. But I think that kind of work that tries to unpack what are the real costs of different development types and how can we understand those typologies and have that sound like guidebook to help us in our decision making when we want to try to rehabilitate an area, open up a new area for development would be a really good idea. And I think... we have moved away from the single family product since then. That is in the data.

Thank you. And going back to my earlier comments about Sun Valley, you know, I benefited from the tier two change. I purchased, you know, a higher density townhome in Sun Valley. And so when you look at the map, you can see the changes in the color. So I think from what our constituents tell us is they will support products that people can purchase and buy and have that pride and ownership. And I think those are easier to get across the finish line because there's this assumption that if you're going to invest in it yourself and you're going to be in it for the long term, that the the neighborhood and the quality of life around that development will stay high. And I think just for so many years, almost three decades of having multifamily, when you hear high density, you think high story, multi-story, high density, multifamily or single family. And I just feel like we just need to fall more in the middle more often. I think our constituents would be really pleased. And I think the thing that keeps me up at night is when you look at the population projections for our seniors over the next 20 years, I mean, our housing inventory is not going to keep up with the needs and the demands of our aging population.

Again, for the record, Hilary Lopez. So just in terms of responding to part of that, our village at Hawkview project, one of the things that we're really excited about and proud of is that it does, while it is rental, it does contain a variety of different rental housing types. So it does have a larger building space. larger multi-story building, but it also has garden style rental and townhomes as well. So it's laid out to have more of kind of a community feel about it and provide for a range of different housing types that best meet those residents' needs. And then just also, I would mention that one of our goals that we've talked about with our board is undertaking a homeownership project development that would be for first time home buyers and lower income community members and so we are currently looking at some potential to move that forward in the north valleys and looking at what makes sense in terms of either a town home design or something that allows us to maximize the density on those parcels and then as you kind of also having conversations about what is multi-generational housing look like and being able to meet kind of those needs within our community going forward. One of the things that I will say that is a challenge is typical funding for affordable housing is really geared more towards the rental housing market. and towards a certain type of product, multi-family housing. We recently at the state level had the enactment of AB 540 which was the governor's housing bill which has now made some funding available for moving forward some home ownership and other types of affordable housing projects and so that has kind of opened up the opportunity to do some of these other types of projects and we're kind of happy to to dip our toe in and try and see if we could get a project to move forward in that direction.

Any other questions? Well, I have a couple things. One, I think that it's very hard to play by the rules. Because I want to talk about infrastructure, but I'm really excited to see the next part come, and I think that there'll be plenty of opportunity for that. But I do think that there are some forces that are in play, and those are economics 101. I mean, market-driven, if you're going to build something, it's got to pencil out. And 40% approximately increase in construction costs is a deterrent. And so I think there's a balance, and... I'm just going to share that I always remember the January workshop where we had Dr. Laura Moore, and she specifically spoke about what we have here, and I'll use Washoe County proper, is a demographic that is much higher moving in than the national average. that was 18 to 35. Those needs are different, obviously, than some other age groups. It was really surprising to me. That's why I keep on remembering that, because I would have guessed it to be folks retiring, moving here, and quality of life that we all have and enjoy. But I think there's a balance, and there's market forces that you can't control. That's how our economy is put together. But you can in terms of incentives. And I think that You mentioned a little bit of this, Dr. Lopez, and I think actually, Dr. Smith, you did the same thing in terms of streamlining the process. If we can streamline the process and look at cutting the costs, not at the expense of the quality and the process and the legal requirements that we have for compliance for anything that's approved. There are legal requirements, and I can't wait until you get to this next part because I know you highlighted a lot of that in the next part. And I've looked at this, obviously, before today. And my point is that it seems that, to your point, Dr. Smith, about builders build what they know, but they also are driven by market forces. And anyone who's in a business, whether you open up a lemonade stand or whatever it is, it has to pencil out. No one is going to invest a dollar if they're not going to get a return on it. And so I think one of the things that seemed to be missing to me is that, and you know I serve on your board, and thank you for the small but mighty team and you too, small but mighty team. But the reality is that I think if you could touch upon how you really have a team of jurisdictional representatives that look and talk to you about this at a regional level. I really would like you to talk about that framework. But in that, I'm also hoping that we could look at the possibility of looking at the economics. For instance, look at what Dr. Larimore, and I'm sure you guys do that, but I do think it's important to look because if there is a market-driven opportunity, there's also a decrease in folks having children. not that we're not going to build what the market demands. So I think that the incentives for government to get out of the way, and I don't mean that in a bad way, but I do think if there's opportunities, and we've seen that at Washoe County, and kudos to the team for doing that with pretty soon one of our last packages to AB 540 and even addressing AB 241. But the reality is is that It seems sometimes that is a silo approach instead of maybe a more connective, interconnective approach with both economics. Because if there is going to be a market and it's not being addressed, somebody will find it. Somebody will look. That's the way I believe Economics 101 and what our country is based on. So I'm hoping, Dr. Smith, you could talk about how you put the group together to look at what all the jurisdictions are doing, what they're looking at, and then how, from a regional perspective, you address that.

Thank you for that question, Jeremy Smith, for the record. I think you're right. I mean, obviously, our point is to work together. In advance of the 2019 regional plan, we had a group called the Regional Plan Update Working Group, which was made up of local jurisdiction planning staff, to some degree engineering and public work staff would be involved, and also the affected entities. Through our recent regional collaboration efforts, we've now instituted that as a standing So we're going to start having quarterly meetings of that group where we can raise these topics. I think the other thing is that we are working on that third pillar, which is seeking to look at more of the economics, more about what are the wage, you know, sort of considerations versus housing prices. What's the community need? How do we match it, right? And what kinds of products will do that? And then also, I think, So so we're going to have conversations. We're going to build that document together and we're going to continue to and working with RHA, I think, to to keep it updated. I mean, that's key because things do change. And what's a market opportunity right now? may not be in five years. And I think we have some of that built into our system because a lot of what has that's out there, which often gets referred to as paper lots, may be 20 years old based on old market assumptions for products that have been approved that cannot be removed from the legal perspective that do not meet today's needs. And how do we look at those? Maybe they're bereft of infrastructure, and I can talk soon about how we've tried to get in front of that a little bit with our approvals now. How do we get back in time and how do we look at those areas and say, could this be better for meeting the challenges of now? So that's a topic that we're looking to address as well.

Thank you. And I don't know if you have anything to add, but certainly I, too, want to say huge appreciation to all you do. And congratulations, Vice Chair, for being on the board. That's a welcome opportunity you'll have right here. I think she wants sidewalks. You probably know exactly what she wants. Did you want to add anything?

I didn't really have much in terms of that except to say we We really do welcome the opportunity to work with the jurisdictions. And I think that we've continued to kind of strengthen those partnerships. We really appreciate the county team and the work that they've done with us. And at the federal level, as federal funding continues to change, I just think it becomes more and more important for all of us to kind of look regionally at how we kind of work together to maximize the resources that we have to really address the needs of our community in a variety of ways so that is kind of where we're all starting to or continuing to move and especially as we've been getting more information on the federal level about changes or potential changes to funding to make sure that we can continue to serve the community as best as possible.

Yeah. And then just to follow the rules, I'm going to stay away from infrastructure, but it's coming up. But I mean, the bottom line is, is that it is attainability and it is, that's what constituents traffic. I'm going to stay away, um, to the next, um, category that we hear. But the reality is, is that I think we just I hope the message is maybe we need to think differently about how we do things. And I think that you both are leading in that charge. And I just want to recognize you for that because I know you are. And I think that we as a state, even at the legislature and through the governor's guidance, need to also look at how we do things differently and investing. And that's what AB 540 did, invested into our state. And so I think the last thing I'll say is I do think that we look at some of the, and that's outside of your scope, I suppose, but you can always be an expert in terms of giving testimony if it comes to the legislature. But I do think that some of the out-of-state purchases that are made For folks who don't live here and are raising those prices, and we're not seeing the economic multiplier, because when you live here, you're supporting our community in various capacities. And maybe there's an opportunity for the county when it comes time to look at having out-of-state actually pay property tax that would be at the market value and not for the benefit of those who actually live here. That's a statement, not a question. But you never know. You might get called at the legislature if something like that comes up. Commissioner Clark.

Dr. Smith brought up a point that I've brought up in the last several meetings is we've got approved subdivisions that have been approved for a number of years and continue extensions and those subdivisions that were approved might not be viable in this market. So that's why I've asked and I hope it gets on the agenda sometime in the future to have a moratorium or at least a time limit on One, two, three, you pick a number of extensions versus this continuous cycle of extensions for a project that may no longer be viable in this market. Why keep them on the books? Why continue to grant extensions for something that may not be ever built? And that's my point, and you brought it up as well, is maybe it's time to shorten those renewals that we offer. and make sure that something gets built. That might help the actual inventory if people are put, their feet are put to the fire and they have to build a project instead of just owning it and sitting on it and continually asking for questions. So again, I'd ask for that to be on the agenda for a discussion in the future about How many extensions are enough extensions? And let's get to busy and do this project or find somebody else to do the project, but make it come online faster. And then when we talk about the difference between single-family homes and multifamily homes, you know, if you're a condo or... Townhome, there's another component of the financing of those. That's principal interest, taxes and insurance, and homeowners association. So people have to qualify for those properties. And it might be an affordable sales price, but when you factor in the homeowners association, costs for the buyer, that changes the whole equation. You get to buy less and pay more when you have to pay for your homeowner's dues. So those are just considerations that people need to look at. And lastly, I want to say, if you drive around this town, you'll see what entry-level homes used to look like. There's certain areas in older parts of town that have one car garage and smaller homes and maybe one bathroom. And those are just not available anymore. I mean, it's the same thing with the automobile industry. You know, you used to be able to buy a basic car. Now everybody has to have leather interior and all the fancy gadgets. And, and the more, the more you can upgrade a house from a builder's standpoint, the more profitability and everybody's in it for the money. I mean, that's what, that's what capitalism is. So it's hard to justify, you know, building entry-level homes that are basic, nice quality homes when, when you can add on some extra carpeting or granite or different things and drive the price up. So that's another factor that takes place. And in this community is to make affordable housing. It's just hard to find. You've got to drive to Fernley or Elko or some other place to find those things that used to be available in this community. So those are just some comments I wanted to get on the record. Thank you.

Thank you. Well, thank you so much for the opportunity. Thanks for all you do. Thanks for actually changing the landscape, right, for our community. And we're going to transition, right? And Mr. Smith is staying.

Mr. Smith is staying and Mr. Smith is coming.

That's what I was just going to say. You know, I was going to say we're doing a Smith. Thank you, Dr. Lopez. Thank you.

Mr. Smith.

Mr. Smith. You open this up?

Well, for the record, Dave Solero, Assistant County Manager, I will just open this up very briefly. We've had Mr. Dwayne Smith, the County Engineer and Division Director of Engineering Capital Projects, join us for a discussion around infrastructure. So here we go. I do think that this is a good opportunity to hear those things that you're hearing, and Dwayne's got a few thought-provoking or some provoking thoughts to go through with you as well.

So I will turn it over to Mr. Smith.

Yeah. They can flip and decide which one.

Well, I think, let me just jump in. And for the record, good morning, everybody. This is Dwayne Smith, Director of Engineering and Capital Projects. And I also serve as your... Louder.

No, you're good. Louder.

As your county engineer.

And so we're looking forward to this part of the discussion. I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Smith to get things going. But we wanted to put up a few provoking thoughts up on the screen first. So as we're going through these slides, these are the kinds of things that we're going to be focused on. There's going to be I think some good discussion around some of the challenges that we have. And then we're also going to set the stage for the next folks that will come up after that. And so with that, I'll just quickly turn it over to you, Dr. Smith. Thank you, sir.

Thank you very much, Mr. Smith. So I'll try to move through these pretty quick. And remember, we're regional planning. We're the high-level team. We're not the boots on the ground per se, but we are trying to put it all together into a regional picture and make sure that we all have shared common goals and we're moving in a similar direction. And so that's what we've tried to do with what we call our public infrastructure document or plan. It's not a plan that we've created per se, but it is a – of the different plans, CIPs, and visions of infrastructure provisioning for the future among a long list which I will share. And so we have created a couple of things with this, a document which is available on our website, tmrp.org, that talks about who's doing what in terms of service provision, again, at a high level, but then allows you to be guided to more information at that entity or organization's website. We have a mandate from state law. It's actually 278.0274, which is the contents of the regional plan. And it really indicates that we need to be involved in certain aspects of infrastructure. And, again, it's in service of regionally coordinating our decision-making around infrastructure and service provision. Here's those five infrastructure domains as we interpret them from looking at that NRS statute. And so it really comes down to potable water, schools, stormwater and flood control, transportation, and wastewater. And those are really all big topics, and we try to bring quite a bit of information together on it. But if you want to see, it's really in terms of in lockstep with growth. How do we allow and account for the orderly management of growth? How do we ensure that we are all making the right decisions in alignment to support what we say we want to do, where we say we want to do it? And again, we're not driving this bus. We're collecting the information, putting it together so that we can collectively assess, are we doing it or do we need to make some changes? Here's all the groups that we work with on this particular project. And of course, we move out beyond this on all kinds of stuff. But this was for the public infrastructure plan. All of these folks, all three jurisdictions, Tumwa, the school district, Sun Valley GID, the airports, the Western Regional Water Commission, and even the flood authority in that stormwater category. We've created a dashboard where we look at information from both annual comprehensive financial reports that are already, we're always trying to not add work, but just take work that's been done and bring it to the surface in a different way. And so every year, all of those organizations have to create an annual comprehensive financial report which talks about capital improvement assets that have been added to their depreciation list. And so in those categories, we have worked with staff at each of those entities to pull out those capital improvements, Further, there's the CIP process, which we saw today, and that has to happen every year. And so that's also already a requirement that we wanna tap into and understand where are we planning to put stuff. So those are the two sources of a lot of this information that we've put together on our dashboard. And I just, before I show you some pics of the dashboard, We have two main categories that we assess those either existing capital improvements that got added or the planned improvements, and that is reinvestment versus growth. And so reinvestment is everything like rehab, maintenance, replacement, all the stuff that ensures that the quality of our service and our quality of life around that aspect of our community is maintained at the same level or maybe even better. And then there's a chunk that is designed for the new stuff that's coming in, the growth areas that we see happening. And so those are the two divisions that, you know, lenses we use to look at this. So if you go to our website at teamrp.org, and then there's the pip dash dashboard, we've been doing this for two years now, and we're going to keep doing it. We're starting again for year three right now. And what it does is it, Right now, we've got a pretty good handle on the spending. We are working currently on the spatial locations because that really has that... That's the overlay between where we have growth areas planned and where we're investing for infrastructure. And so we're working on that. But in terms of the dollar bills, we've been able to track in those five service domains what was added the previous fiscal year and what is planned over the next five years. And so if you go to our dashboard, you'll see that. And if just quickly you can get a takeaway here from this slide, red... in those pie charts is reinvestment and gray is for growth. And so on the order of 75%, give or take, depending on the domain you're looking at and what piece you're looking at, we're reinvesting into our community. to maintain service levels. And the growth, often maybe it gets cast or there's this assumption that we're spending all this money to accommodate growth. And there is a chunk of that. But really, the lion's share is to maintain, and I think you'll hear that that can create some sustainability challenges, but that is really where a lot of the investment is going. I want to just touch briefly on this. In 2019, in addition to adding the regional land designations, we added this concept of the public region wide public facilities and services standards. And I think what we were trying to do there was to get in front of what Commissioner Clark and I were talking about in terms of. these languishing projects that get approved and keep persisting, and often one of the reasons that they don't move forward is the cost to serve, that initial cost, right, to get the infrastructure there. And prior to 2019, regional planning at its decision point did not have... There were methods, like we would rely on the local jurisdiction's concurrency management programs that basically said, at the time of CFO, there will be sewer service. You don't have to worry about it. You know, it's going to be fine, which is true and good. But at the time we enable a master plan change, you know, it's at the end of that, maybe, review process, but it's at the beginning of the development process that we're enabling now an area to become something it wasn't before. That's the time to at least have a conversation about how can we serve this? Can we serve it? Yeah. Okay. How? And let's have some high-level consideration. And so we've created standards for each of those five domains that must be addressed in our decision-making process so that it's not a mystery. as to how the water's going to get there and if it's available. It's not a mystery if the sewer treatment facility can accommodate the units or not. Again, high level, and Dwayne's going to go into the reality of how to do it, but we think this is a win for our region by putting this in, and at the point that we're enabling these changes, we're having a better consideration of how they will be served. And then just really quick, during the regional plan update, we took a look at this concept of scenarios. There are many ways, right, that the future can unfold. And it depends on market dynamics. It depends on politics. I mean, it depends on all sorts of things that can occur that can change our trajectories. It depends on what we decide or you decide as the leaders, what you want to see happen. So we looked at four potential scenarios with the same number of housing units across the region, but built out in different ways to try to understand differential impacts. And one of the things that stuck with me through that process was, yes, if we build out, that's going to create certain impacts. If we build in, that's going to create certain impacts. But also there are certain impacts that will be felt no matter how we build. And we better make sure that we're on top of those, first and foremost, then get to the point of, okay, now, how are we moving and how does that affect how we want to plan for these differential impacts? And the final slide here, which will be the turnover, is that in order to create those different scenarios of the future, we looked at sort of underlying assumptions of what potentially can drive growth or where new development will locate. And we were looking primarily at housing. But, I mean, it applies to non-residential as well. And what you've got up there is that weird TMSA shape that hopefully now is becoming more familiar to everyone, my favorite shape. Over on the left there, the colors represent what we call suitability, but really it's sort of like how well do all the factors we're looking at stack up in terms of the desirability or ability to accomplish development in the area. So blue being high, in this case red being low, and depending on what you prioritize, And again, this is regional, but depending on what you prioritize and you're thinking of how you want to see the future go, you can get very different patterns. And so on the left, we had the infrastructure-based surface, if you will, that looked at where do we have the roads, where do we have the... the pipes, you know, where does all the things come together that we can say, okay, we could build in this way. And we came up with a scenario called smart greenfield, which kind of emphasized density and preservation of open space, but even at the edges where we had already invested and we can optimize those investments versus on the right, that surface is driven by a more amenities based and transit oriented sort of approach where we lean into the courts, a classic infill kind of a scenario where, And so when you think about prioritizing growth areas in unincorporated Washoe County, and again, this is at the regional sort of high level, more conceptual concept or idea. But thinking about what are your underlying assumptions for why you want to target one area versus another? You know, is it about infrastructure? Is it about creating community? Is it about leveraging investments we've already made or some combination therein? So with that, I would answer questions or turn it over to Mr. Smith.

Thank you, Mr. Smith.

Mr. Smith, it's yours.

Good morning again, for the record, Dwayne Smith. So I'll jump right in and thanks, Jeremy, for kind of setting up the regional perspective on critical infrastructure and kind of outlining some of the form of the way our region is approaching growth. I wanted to spend just a few moments with you this morning talking about the public infrastructure challenge. Anytime that we're talking about infrastructure, there are always a lot of costs associated with those investments. And I wanted to really kind of hammer home some of those issues that we're facing. So just to kind of set the stage, I've said at the podium in front of you more than one time that development pays for development. And while this is true, what I need to do is start emphasizing with you that development pays for development. But once Washoe County accepts that infrastructure, it becomes Washoe County's responsibility to operate, maintain, repair, and replace that infrastructure. That's the expectation of our community, but that carries with it certainly costs. So this first slide, I just wanted to kind of hit on a few high points, and I'll speak kind of quickly this morning, but certainly I look forward to questions. Public infrastructure carries a lot of responsibility. You know, from an infrastructure and planning perspective, We're responsible both as we consider both existing developments and new developments is to protect the existing level of service that this infrastructure provides. So think roadways, think level of service on roadways, think sewer lines and capacities within sewer lines, think stormwater infrastructure and the ability to safely convey stormwater infrastructure. We have the responsibility to verify when that development comes in or when we're working with our regional partners that that capacity exists or that there's a plan for that capacity. Otherwise, if we weren't doing that, we would be faced with service degradation, increased failures. We would run into regulatory hurdles and challenges. So I just want to really focus on that capacity-based planning I'm going to say the terms. It's not anti-growth. It's really responsible asset management. So when we think about our responsibilities with infrastructure, we really have to think about how those decisions as we move forward are responsible and it's really capacity-based. The public expects this, right? So every day the public is – going to work, going to school, using the roadways, using the infrastructure. They have a high expectation that we're going to continue to maintain, that we're going to continue to reinvest in our public infrastructure, meeting their requirements, meeting their expectations. There are certainly minimum standards for public infrastructure. I want to assure you that as engineering and capital projects and our operations and our facility groups, we spend a lot of time when that new infrastructure is built and dedicated, making sure it complies with those standards. One of the other things that we really focus on, and you need to know this, is that we want to maximize our existing infrastructure first. We want to utilize our existing roadways to full capacities. You all hear it from your constituents. They come in and they say, traffic is getting horrible. Well, I want to assure you that there will be increases in traffic. The roadways will We'll see more traffic on those roadways as new development or growth occurs. But we also understand that based on best practices and standards, that there is a capacity availability in a lot of our roadways. So we need to really focus on how to maximize our existing infrastructure first before we start going out and building new infrastructure. Public infrastructure is a long-term commitment, carries all the benefits and responsibilities in our community. We need to focus on actual capacities, and we need to make sure that as we're looking at new development, where that new development is occurring so that we can leverage and utilize that existing capacity in those areas. Of course, you can't talk about responsibility without talking about some of our ceilings, our resource ceilings. And so, you know, I just identified three of our resource ceilings. First of all, those physical elements. We talk about water, sewer. We talk about recycled water, roadway, stormwater. Well, those things have certain levels of capacity, and we need to work within those existing before we start building new fiscal elements. There's always a... financial ceiling associated with the ability for Washoe County to take ownership of that new infrastructure. So we have to be very sensitive to, and you heard Division Director Cook kind of speak through some of those challenges with our current budget. Don't forget, staff is another resource that we really need to understand, and we need to recognize that there is a a ceiling for staff that we have only so many staff to do a lot of things to support our community. And I've heard it said around this table already this morning, we're doing a lot with less. Well, I think that that is absolutely true, and we need to respect our staff that are going through those heavy lifts. So sustainable growth is not just about... taking on new infrastructure, but it's making sure that we have these ceilings identified, make sure that we're respectful of those physical elements, those financial elements, and those staff elements. I just want to throw in a couple of numbers here. Everybody was talking numbers. I'm not going to get down in the weeds too much. But, you know, we recognize construction costs are going up. That's not just impacts to new development, but that is also impacts, as you heard Lori speak to, in our CIP budgets that our costs to either build or provide for our community is increasing along with all of our operation and maintenance costs. I'll quickly mention that our pavement condition index, our PCI for Washoe County's roadway network, it's down to 68. So this is a big deal. You know, it hit home for me as I was putting together some of these slides and thinking about that relationship between New infrastructure taking on that responsibility of that infrastructure and our commitments and some of those commitments include like the Lake Clarity program up at Lake Tahoe. This is a very important program. We and the California jurisdictions have been part of this for almost three decades now. About 10 years ago, we put together some cost projections on what the increasing maintenance cost for that infrastructure that we've built to obtain those clarity credits is. That projection, we ran it out 40 years, and it was almost a million dollars. I was looking at that not too long ago. Right now, our operational costs just last year in maintaining that infrastructure was almost $300,000. That's right there in alignment with those projections that we were making last for that 40-year period. So I'm telling you that these increases in our operation and maintenance costs are real, and these are real considerations that are in front of us. You, we, we all get a lot of calls regarding pedestrian traffic safety, calming, those types of things. I was kind of blown away just a few years ago. A traditional speed hump, about $7,000. Now those things are $15,000. So we're really hitting it home, right? We're starting to focus and really understand that our infrastructure carries this huge benefit and responsibility to our community, but also has that significant benefit cost for maintaining that infrastructure. I wanted to be real clear though, because I've talked about new development and what new development does. And so on the left side there, that traditional build and dedicate infrastructure, these are things that we typically see developers build and dedicate. This is not an all-encompassing list. But I just want to hit a couple of the high points, you know, the stormwater infrastructure, roadways, sewer and water. Those are the types of things that are being built and dedicated to Washoe County or in some cases like water to other enterprises. But don't forget, even with all of those responsibilities that come with that infrastructure, we still have our facilities and our jails and our parks and all these other facilities. So we're really competing for these infrastructure maintenance dollars now. You know across the board You saw the infrastructure scorecard we've talked about this in in the past I just want to quickly draw two points I spoke a little bit about the lake clarity challenge up at Lake Tahoe fantastic program But it's costing a lot of money to maintain that infrastructure at that level our roadways are represents about a $1.1 billion asset. And look at some of those numbers. If we don't keep maintaining our roadways, if we continue to let that PCI drop, these are real issues. And you can see, just look at the color codes up there. Those are the ones that are really expensive for us to maintain. Look at the ones down below that equipment services and down. I just want to draw your your attention to those from equipment services on down, those have dedicated funding sources. Those other items don't have dedicated funding sources. So this is part of that struggle that we see. These are forever costs. We don't get the choice of accepting this infrastructure and not maintaining it. Well, maybe we do. Maybe there's a discussion about levels of service, right? So maybe the roadways are an example of that. When we start thinking about all those potholes and those wide cracks, there is this balance about budget availability and what that level of services that we're providing. Roadways are a little different. Sewer systems, those types of things where we are bound under other considerations, we don't have as much latitude in those types of infrastructure. We talk a lot about the fiscal side of it and all the things that we're responsible for and that we do. But I just wanted to bring up, and you heard at the last board meeting, and you'll hear again next week about the North Spanish Springs flood detention facility. This is a great example where when the community reached out to us, we put a program together, we put a plan together, and we built infrastructure to reduce that impact from that repetitive flooding issues in North Spanish Springs. So we bonded for that infrastructure. What we didn't anticipate was the downturn in the economy in the 2008 timeframe. Remember, we all remember what that was like. Well, when we had built that bond debt repayment structure it was based on connection fees. We were not seeing new development. New development was not bringing the dollars in the door to pay that debt servicing for that infrastructure. So we had to shift gears. We had to go out into the community and in front of in front of you and ask for a rate increase. We took those rates all the way up to $9.31 per month. We've now gone through the process of paying off that debt. We're able to lower that. But the point that I want to make is even when we're talking about infrastructure and different ways to go about Funding it, we have to be cognizant of some of our examples and our experiences. So we have to really think about how, as we're moving forward, how we're funding for this long-term investment called infrastructure. I just wanted to... Kind of point out that last bullet point. I'm kind of jumping over a couple of those pieces. I'm happy to go back. But the service expectations, one of the other things that we're seeing is that we're getting a lot of phone calls where, you know, as Washoe County has expanded, you know, those... those areas that used to be more rural are now becoming more urban. And so we're seeing a lot of folks that are now living in areas where roadside ditches were the standard of the practice, right? Larger lots. We had no sidewalks, no lighting. We had none of that type of infrastructure. So now as our area is expanding, These areas of development are moving into these areas. Well, infrastructure is always on my mind. We're thinking about things like the stormwater infrastructure. People are asking us, when are you going to pipe that? I want to reclaim that area in front of my house. They're talking about sidewalks. Hey, I go to visit my neighbor and we go walk the dog on a safe sidewalk. But at home, I have to walk on a busy roadway. I was just down on a site last week. We were down on Fawn Lane. And these are the types of things that come up in that discussion. But I want to caution us that there is no funding sources to go build new infrastructure associated with existing developments. And it's very difficult to go out and try to find ways to capitalize on new development to bring that infrastructure in. So not only are we faced with that challenge, but again, the more infrastructure we build, we have to have sustainable funding sources for that so that we can continue to meet the community expectations. of that infrastructure and what it does for us. I'm sure you're thinking about a lot of things as I'm speaking quickly. You probably are thinking about development fees, RIF fees, regional road impact fees, or connection fees, or those types of things. Again, I just want to caution us that development fees are there for new capacity, expanded capacity, not for ownership, operation, maintenance, repair, and replacement. I was down at a legislative subcommittee a number of years ago with a partner, Charlie Donahue, with State Lands, and it was a discussion about dedicating significant money to Washoe County. for the Lake Tahoe Clarity Program, and that was very welcome. When I got up, I spoke to that we need to not only identify that funding for that infrastructure construction, but we need some funding to maintain that. Those are hard conversations because the expectation is that local government, that we're maintaining that infrastructure. Again, I want to go back to the point that there is funding out there sometime to build capital, but we have a big lift in front of us about how to maintain that capital as we're going. So the bottom line, we're struggling with... We're struggling to address what that means when we approve development. We're struggling to identify ways to pay for that ongoing infrastructure commitment, those sewer lines, stormwater, roadways, et cetera. We're exceeding some of these available resource ceilings that we have. I talked about funding. I talked about staff. We need new approaches. to help make sure that this is a sustainable approach. I spoke about some of these challenges with our roadways and that big number facing us out a number of years. And I spoke to the Lake Clarity program and those big numbers. I could talk to you all day about what this means, but we really do need new ways of approaching things, how we focus in on where the existing infrastructure is. how we make decisions about development. Development is not a bad thing. Smart development is the direction, right? That's the direction that we're going. Smart development, how we focus on infill, redevelopment, where existing sewer lines exist, where existing roadways are, where existing infrastructure is that has existing capacity before we go spend hundreds of millions of dollars investing in other things that maybe the time isn't right or maybe isn't necessary or needed until we can actually utilize the existing capacity that's available. So I just wanted to put those provoking thoughts back up on the screen for a second. And I just wanted to quickly run through that. I hope that is a little bit helpful in our discussion.

The thought-provoking thoughts?

Sure. For the record, Dave Solero, Assistant County Manager, I really think the question here at the bottom is really where we're trying to, you know, is there anything here that you've heard that surprises you? Is there anything that's new? Are there any thoughts, you know, from your chair as you're out in the community? Again, you know, we need some input from you so that we can kind of help craft things. Now, the next The next discussion is around some of crafting some of the potential solutions. Uh, but certainly if you've got some thoughts around, you know, is there anything in this presentation that surprises you about kind of the state of where we're at? I think, uh, you know, uh, uh, Dwayne Smith, uh, put to get, you know, uh, the, the, the thought around service levels, right? That's a discussion where we're having, and it's not just necessarily to infrastructure. It's all the services Washoe County puts across, you know, to our community. You know, that's certainly one area where we can make adjustments. And I just lost train of thought there on the other item, but it may come back to me. So I'll turn it back over to you.

We're not going anywhere for a minute. Any questions? Commissioner Clark?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'd like to go back to the page. They're not numbered, but it starts off with Washoe County Critical Infrastructure Juncture. Some numbers for perspective.

That one.

Yeah, that's it. So, first of all, I want to salute your help from last week, you and Assistant County Manager Salero. going out and meeting with me and the folks on Fawn Lane. We went out to talk to, I thought, one person and ended up having about 35 or 40 people on a roadside discussion for about two hours out there. And it was about these very same things. These folks live in a quiet country lane, been there, some of them, 67 years on the same street, and that time limit. And then we've got a big, massive, billion-dollar project at the end of the street So the trucks and the traffic and the roads deteriorating and the speed and the dust, everything else that's taking place here. And so it was interesting to hear their perspective of taking it from a country area and what's taking place and the damage to the roads that we own, that we need to maintain, and the trucks and whatever's taking place. But I find it interesting... It used to be called speed bumps. Now they're speed cushions. Is that the euphemism for speed bumps now? Cushions? Okay. A little different, but yes. Okay. Similar idea. I thought it was an interesting name change. But anyhow, it was very nice to have you out and hear the real-life concerns of real-life citizens in our county and explain what... You're basically explaining to the commissioners here today and the public here for this meeting. So thank you for the good work you do. And the public appreciates that. And they just need to hear how this is going to impact their peace and quiet in their neighborhood. And in this particular case, it's not. And we need to make sure that we keep their thoughts in the top of our mind about how how we can do this without having a tremendous impact. We had one lady who said that she'd been there for a year. Had she known it, she would have never bought there. And, you know, we don't want that either. So it's important that we explain this. So, again, thank you for your help last week.

Commissioner Hill.

Well, I love the presentation because I think it's important that the community understands that there's a real lack of sustainability happening. And I agree with you. We have to speak a little different about, yes, technically growth pays for growth, but not really. Because growth pays for... sustainability of old growth or of old development, because if you're only paying, you know, $2,000 a year in property tax and someone else is paying $15,000 a year in property tax, who's supplementing who, right? And figuring out, um, and I know that these are the next slides, but figuring out how we can speak to this, because I think that's where there's this perception that we're addicted to growth and in this region and I think in some ways we are because it's we don't survive without growth but then growth creates bigger problems for us long term and yes Washoe County owns and maintains it forever but what funds Washoe County to to do that and so figuring out how we speak to that to the community and I I hear what you're saying of um more rural parts expecting A higher level of service because they've come from another community. But also, I think they're expecting it, too, because there's more traffic on those roads, too. And so they're like, I don't feel safe because at one point you could, you know, have a safe walk in the community without a sidewalk. And now it's not as safe. And so. I think figuring out how we best describe that to community members, but I really appreciate your outlining it in this way so that the community can understand the struggle that we're in as a county to try to maintain all of these these things.

Commissioner Herman, did you have something?

Can you hear me?

Well, actually, we can't. We have to... Can you now?

I don't know. It seems like we've kind of lost the balance that we should have. And I don't know if it's a tax problem or whether we just... allow too much development you know do we need to regulate it so that that we can afford it and that's been my my idea all along that somehow you know when you're budgeting your family you have to plan certain way we can't have 10 kids because we're we can't afford them So we can't afford 10 housing units or big subdivisions if we haven't prepared for it, if we don't have the money to pay for it. So, I mean, that's kind of where we are. Like I say, some of our tax structure thing, and sometimes we get too generous. Yeah. We can't afford to just be that entity that makes developers richer. We've got to stop doing that somehow.

I think the surprising thing for me today was seeing that the TMRPA is monitoring the domains in the way that you are. I thought that was very enlightening. And I think as policymakers, we also have to understand that there's two other major arms that we're considering, which is fire and law enforcement. it's really, you know, when you add it all up, that's seven major domains that we're having to monitor and carefully manage. And we are stewards of the taxpayer dollar, and you do hear, you know, if we don't grow, we die, and all those commonly used phrases, but we grow too much and we also die. We're shooting ourselves in the foot. And so I think that was really kind of the takeaway for me. Question about the different models on scenario planning slide. You had a classic scenario, McCarran, smart green, and infill. You said that in the little red bubble, survey results showed the highest preference was for the infill scenario. Who was surveyed? When was that survey done? Is that still relevant to today's perceptions?

That's a great question. This is Jeremy Smith with The Record. It's an older slide that still has that on there. That was doing our 2019 regional plan update, so it was around 2018 or 19 that that sentiment came through. It was several thousand folks responded to an online survey that we had at the time from the general population. All of the scenarios present opportunities and challenges for sure. And in fact, if you go to the regional plan, there's sort of like a little vignette after chapter two that lays out different statistics, about 16 different metrics for each scenario. And to kind of germane to our previous conversation about housing, you know, to achieve the infill scenario, we have to turn on. more core lots with smaller units in a different mix of housing types to even achieve that. We forecast 50,000 units over like a 20-year period at that time. So it's really interesting. If you want to go take a look at land consumption, housing mix, housing price variability, stuff like that. And that's something that as part of that third pillar I was mentioning that we're looking to create a more sustainable way for ourselves to keep up with what we've put upon ourselves as well to keep those metrics updated.

Are you going to say something?

Well, I was just going to say, and for the record, Wayne Smith, Jeremy, I appreciate that comment. And about the infill, I was kind of going over some numbers and thinking about how infill and redevelopment could even help us save um, dollars on, on when staff are traveling out to more distant areas. Um, and, and, you know, that efficiency, that loss of efficiency and, and really focused on the inner areas. And if even from a utility standpoint, if we could experience more infill capitalizing on existing infrastructure, um, And maybe we only save 5% or 10%, but in today's world, 5% or 10% is a huge benefit for our rate structures and our operational costs that impact our rate structures. We've made a commitment as part of the utility to not raise rates. I made this commitment to you earlier. two years ago, two and a half years ago, to not raise sewer rates for 10 years. These small things about infill and leveraging existing infrastructure and making sure that the capacities within a sewer pipe, or it could be a water line or a roadway or whatever, are being really maximized, really could speak to those small numbers. But you add those small things up, that can be

very meaningful i just wanted to yeah can i can i just maybe comment on that as well it's a really great point and i used to use the word optimization a lot which is sort of like you know the optimal use of the investments we've already made we've already made an investment right and we're already maintaining it so how do we how do we max it out but i will point out that in the precursor to our four scenarios was the housing study that david mentioned early on And we worked with Echo Northwest, a firm out of Oregon, to really do the fiscal piece that you're speaking to, Commissioner Herman, with regard to, unfortunately, not the maintenance side, but the capital investment side. We took that on at that time. And just moving the top two, the blue and the red, really represent these two scenarios. Moving 25% of the anticipated growth into the McCarran ring saved over 20 years an estimated $780 million. And that was in 2016, right? So now I think it would be even higher. So I think, yes, how can we, to your point, how do we get to an understanding of the fiscal implications, both for capital investment side, but clearly for the long-term maintenance? And the last point would be, As part of our public infrastructure dashboard, we have tried to tease out all of the, you know, how much money is represented by the facilities like roadways, pipes, and whatnot that developers build and dedicate. And so that actually is included as a metric in each of those five sections.

I just feel like I should do a shout out to all the work that you've done on the dashboard and watching that progression, and so thanks for all of that. There's more information than I think one could even imagine. If you are bored and you'd like to analyze, I think you might be able to recruit some other folks if they're really interested in that. I don't have any real surprises other than the fact that I do think this is really probably the best thing that could happen where people truly in our community understand a couple points. One, we have a systemic problem. challenge and how funding in our state works. It's a systemic challenge. It's outside the scope of what we as commissioners can do, to be honest with you, in many cases. But what we can do are some of the things we're going to see coming up, I think, which are exciting. Trying to tee that up, Mr. Solero. But I do also think that that I remember the first time you said that, Mr. Dwayne Smith, about utilizing existing capacity first. And I think that's the pinch point of pain for folks, is because while you're experiencing that, And they're like, there's not enough capacity, there's not enough this, there's not enough that, but there is, because you're actually, there is that capacity. You might be getting close to that capacity, but legally there's also the balance of how you can approve those projects if there is capacity, because you can't deny someone in some cases, depending on the circumstance, because they think there isn't capacity or the community doesn't think that there's capacity or the community thinks... that we've overbuilt. And I think that's the hard part. And so I think what you've done is highlight that we have a systemic challenge of balance, highlight that we only have the ability to work within the confines that we have, but also the fact that there are different ways of thinking too that are going to be coming up. And so thanks for all of your hard work on this. And I think people also understanding the regional and have the regional connection to all the jurisdictions. And it isn't a top down. It's actually all together in one community. That's what it is. It's not regional telling the jurisdictions. jurisdictions or the jurisdictions telling regional it's actually working as one community and I think that is something that you've also highlighted here so I'd like to thank you Dr. Smith and thank you Mr. Dwayne Smith and thanks for the Smith brothers right we could have had a little something but thank you so much for the opportunity. So I think we're going to go ahead and move to some solutions and thought-provoking opportunities here with prioritizing development areas.

That is correct. For the record, Dave Solero, Assistant County Manager. I'm actually going to turn the table over to our assessor, Mr. Chris Sarman, as well as Eric Crump, our Community Services Department Director, and Kelly Mullen, our Planning and Building Division Director.

Thank you. And this is Public Works Week, so we should not forget about Public Works Week. You're welcome. Thanks for everybody and what they do.

Eric Crump, Director of the Community Services Department. Eric Crump, Director of the Community Services Department. So this is pretty exciting. We were hoping this would come together like it did. I think a proper stage has been set. And just kind of recapping some of the things I've heard today about, you know, different approaches and some of the challenges we face. And so I think this is going to be a great segue. So we really appreciate the opportunity. I'm going to kick us off and then I'm going to kick us over to division director Kelly Mullen and then our assessor Chris Sarman will wrap it up. So you've obviously, we started, you all have heard about the great work that Washoe County and some of our regional partners have been doing in that housing space. And then the proper doom and gloom has been set by the Smith brothers. So that's gonna stick by the way, I don't know why. But there is some different things that we can do. So one of those is this concept of prioritized development areas. It's actually not a new approach. You heard Dr. Smith talk about the TMSA. You talked about the tiers that we have. So that's really the basis of identifying prioritized development areas. But what the county can do is it can get far more granular. WHAT'S IN THE REGIONAL PLAN IS OBVIOUSLY A REGIONAL APPROACH, AND IF SUPPORTED IN LOOKING AT AND REVIEWING PRIORITIZED DEVELOPMENT AREAS, WE CAN GET FAR MORE GRANULAR, WE CAN BE SPECIFIC TO UNINCORPORATE AREAS OF WASHOE COUNTY, AND WE CAN ALSO INCLUDE INCENTIVES FOR GROWTH OR DEVELOPMENT TO OCCUR IN THOSE SPECIFIC AREAS. SO, NEXT SLIDE. You know, the concept of prioritized development areas is really it's a fiscal discipline tool that the county can do. And we can start influencing, you know, some of those costs of that very costly infrastructure that both Director Smith and Dr. Smith talked about earlier. That rising cost of forever is real, and it's related to not only repairing and maintaining but replacing that expensive infrastructure, and it's the gift that keeps on giving, and it also escalates. As you get farther away from existing services and existing infrastructure, we have pockets in our community that we live that every day. It's very expensive for us to serve certain communities based on just pure geography. BUT ONE WAY TO DO THIS IS TO ACTUALLY DEVELOP A SYSTEM THAT INCENTIVIZES DEVELOPMENT IN AREAS WHERE INFRASTRUCTURE AND SERVICES ALREADY EXIST OR THEY'RE PLANNED FOR IN KIND OF CLOSE TIMING. you know, this obviously reduces the number of miles, it reduces storm drains, sewer lines, lift stations, and all the services that it takes to maintain that infrastructure. This ultimately leads to better delivery of service and actually leads to better quality of life and has a bunch of other benefits as well. So, When we would consider identifying potential prioritized development areas, we'd be looking at, there's a whole host of criteria that we could consider. This slide kind of represents just a partial list, but we could come up with a system where those considerations could be weighted based on a variety of factors like community benefit or the cost of cost of service, return on investment, or infrastructure capacity, and really allowing us to make more data-driven decisions around where development occurs. So, setting the stage on how we might do that, I'm going to kick it over to Director Mullen, and she'll talk about incentives.

Thank you. Can you guys hear me?

No. How about now? Yes.

Okay. Thank you. Kelly Mullen, Washoe County Planning and Building Division Director. So now that you've heard a little bit about some of the challenges that we're facing in terms of infrastructure, Now that you've heard why we need to make some change in order to ensure that our infrastructure is sustainable in the long term, I'd like to talk a little bit about how we might be able to encourage and focus development in prioritized areas, what Eric had talked about. And I want to drive home, too, that we're not talking necessarily about just encouraging new growth. We're talking about where we can try to prioritize where that growth occurs. I think that's an important distinction where we can focus where that actually occurs. And I'd like to start with, I think, a pretty important caveat first about what we're going to talk about when we look at incentives. What you're going to see today is a list of potential incentive options. So some of these are going to sound pretty mild. Some of them may sound pretty extreme and they may appear or not even be feasible. But what the intent here really is just to show you a range of possibilities to kind of spur some thought and further discussion on the idea of incentives. We're not going to dive too deeply into any individual option. We're not going to ask you to select any at this time, but we will ask at the end if you have any particularly strong thoughts about any of the options listed here today. If the board wishes to move forward with... with investigating prioritized development areas, we're gonna go back and we're gonna start doing some additional research. This is just a starting point on the conversation where we will come back after doing some additional research and provide some recommendations on moving forward. Now, getting into the slides themselves, we've categorized the incentives we'll talk about today in four major categories, land use, development fees, tax incentives, and kind of the miscellaneous bucket.

Next slide, please.

And then what you'll see on this slide and the slides moving forward, you'll see a couple icons at the bottom and peppered throughout. That orange light bulb icon means it's an idea of something that we may already be doing today. We know how to do it. We might be doing it in other areas. That green thought cloud is an idea we'd have to do more research on. It really is just an idea. But we would want to go back, if we were looking at pursuing something like that, we would do additional research and try to understand what the feasibility is, what the legal implications, what the financial implications would be. The options on the slide, they're gonna appear familiar probably for you because we've considered using some of them or have used some of them on some of our housing work that we've been doing over the last couple of years. So first one up there you'll see reducing or eliminating public hearings. That is an option that of course it saves time for developers and time is money as you know. And that's something that can be a very strong incentive. Offering density bonuses. Again, similar to what we're doing on our housing items, that is a strong potential incentive. And just to kind of get back to the concept of density bonuses, every single parcel has zoning that's applied to it that has a maximum number of units that could be allowed. Let's say if it's seven units per acre with a density bonus, maybe they'd be able to develop it 10 units per acre. or 15 units per acre. So it allows for additional units. Might be able to make a project pencil when otherwise it would not be able to. Similarly, when we talk about parking, parking can take up a lot of space, a lot of land that can be costly. So when we look at ways to incentivize development, one of those levers to potentially pull is eliminating or reducing minimum parking requirements. And then similarly, when we talk about an option like priority processing, Dwayne had talked earlier about the cost of sprawl, the cost of developing further out, and how there can be infrastructure benefits to building closer in and at higher densities. And so it may be something that we also wanna start looking at, prioritizing in those prioritized areas, providing incentives for higher density development. And certainly priority processing of applications is one way of getting at that as well. And then lastly, potentially offering increased flexibility in some of our development standards specific to infrastructure.

Next slide, please.

Development fee incentives are another bucket of potential levers that we could pull. We have development fees with every new project that comes in. That could be building permit fees, regional road impact fees, sewer connection fees, park construction tax. Those are all types of development fees. And one of the things that we could look at is reducing or waiving those fees in prioritized areas. And similarly, instead of waiving those fees up front, we could also offer some sort of a performance-based incentive where we are looking at potentially refunding those fees or partial fees after some sort of condition is met, after the project is completed or certain components of it are completed. And then the next two bullets on this slide, they're kind of two sides of the same coin creating different or tiered fees so that fees are lower for developing at higher densities or in priority areas compared to developing outside of priority areas or developing at lower densities. And that's one that might feel a little bit more extreme. And that may be because, you know, that would essentially equate to some sort of subsidization almost of other users or fee payers who are helping to subsidize development in the prioritized areas. And next slide, please. This next general bucket, we're looking at tax incentives. Most of these would fall under the category associated with tax increment financing, creating a TIF district in those prioritized areas. And I think most folks are probably aware one of those most important features of using a tax increment in that category That power of it is the ability to collect that incremental property tax, and it could be used to help fund various infrastructure projects. But, you know, one of the things that we could do to help incentivize development, focus it in those areas, is creating those TIFs. potentially offering the property tax reductions or rebates just for developing in those areas, potentially offset infrastructure investment dollars in those areas, or matching infrastructure investment dollars at a certain rate. Next slide, please. And then we've got our bucket of just kind of the other potential incentives that we could offer. Using county bonding power is one of those. We do that now with the county's allocation of private activity bonds for affordable housing. That is one potential lever to be able to pull. And then also, I know recently, I think we've adopted a policy related to special improvement districts, but in those prioritized areas, potentially fully supporting the creation of special assessment districts and special improvement districts as a way of helping developers to be able to fund and finance the infrastructure development that they need to do to bring a development online. And then one of the options that again, it may sound a little bit more extreme is introducing scarcity for developing outside of prioritized areas or for undesirable uses. And that's not something that we at Washoe County are doing right now, but just to provide a little information on the context, if you're familiar at all with how development is done up at the lake with Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, they use the concept of allocations and the development that occurs each year, it has to be assigned an allocation and there's a limited number of allocations that are available. And that's just a concept that it kind of controls how much development that can occur in each particular area and the rate at which it can occurs. And again, this is an idea that may sound a little bit extreme. There may come a time where something like that might be necessary. But introducing scarcity in a similar way, and that could look like limiting the number of units annually in a particular area if it's outside of a prioritized area or maybe within those prioritized areas, there isn't a limit. That's just another example. And then finally, one potential option is really providing a higher level of assistance to developers in those prioritized areas. Right now, we do have what's called a business facilitator who helps some developers kind of get through the general processes. development processes within Washoe County but we're talking about going to the next step where potentially hiring somebody who is an expert a financial expert in all of those different funding sources for big dollars associated with infrastructure the grants that are potentially out there loans or state and federal incentives and helping developers to navigate that piece that is another potential incentive that we could offer for folks developing in the prioritized areas. Next slide, please. And then finally, let's talk a little bit about how some of that could get done. If we offer that suite of incentives or a suite of incentives, the way that we make that happen and how we use those, of course, we can slice and dice that a bunch of different ways. One potential option is simply selecting incentives that we wanna offer for development in those areas and then just laying them out there and they're available for anyone who wants to do residential development within the prioritized areas. We potentially also could create a scorecard where, say, desirable characteristics of a development, you know, if it has affordable housing or it's balanced mixed use, something like that, that perhaps that is able to achieve or unlock a higher level of incentives than otherwise. We could potentially also limit those incentives that are offered only to highly desirable uses within the prioritized areas. And what's considered desirable may vary depending on the area that we're talking about. And then finally, I know that this was brought up by some of the commissioners earlier and part of the conversation about, you know, we can't just do this alone, that there's benefit and power in partnering with other agencies. If there are other agencies that may also receive a benefit from development occurring in certain areas, we could potentially partner with them and see if they're able to offer any incentives as well so that it could be a packaged approach to make it more feasible to develop in certain areas. So, again, some of these options, they may seem, some of them may seem mild, some may seem extreme, but that list really is just to get, to spur some thoughts for you today, spur some discussion. And then I am now going to pass it off to our assessor, Mr. Chris Sarman. He's going to talk a little bit about some of the benefits and tradeoffs of incentives in those areas.

Test, test, test. There we go. Okay. Eric, are you going to click for me? Okay, yeah. So good afternoon, everybody. First, thank you for I think everybody sitting down here and going through all this information, right? It's a lot of information for you guys to sit down here and go through and think about and to discuss. So I'm going to add to that, but it won't be that much. At this point, as Eric kind of summed up, right, we've had a lot of information with regards to the concepts and the variables that are tied to development and growth, current costs, future costs. And really just to kind of put it into terms of where we're going here is how are we going to do more with less? And, you know, let's call it smart growth, right? Let's dive into that. How are we going to define what smart growth looks like? The structural deficit, you know, it's a simple but very complex equation, right? So we're talking about the cost. We've heard a lot about the cost today, whether that's just maintaining infrastructure or maintaining future infrastructure and even incentives, right? There's a cost to the incentives that we gotta think about. But I think if we're strategic and it's cost effective, then we can really guide development for the greater good of the community. And so why am I here? Well, I want to bring some awareness to what the funding might look like, right? The revenues that could be potentially tied to this as well. Certainly, of course, if there's legislation or local governments want to increase taxes, that's one way to increase funding. But is there another way to expand the tax base, increase values, and ultimately increase the quality of life? Maybe this is a solution to do that, right? I've been talking to you about changing those slides, huh? So let's go to slide number three. We're already seeing the state has done this, right? Now it's not specific to tying it to a prioritized area of growth necessarily, but certainly through economic abatements and tax caps abatements, affordable housing initiatives that we deal with in our office every day, developer discounts, some of those things already exist, right, to incentivize that growth, economic growth. uh local incentives of course we know that the cities are doing that uh redevelopment districts right now and and where does washoe county sit with doing incentives where do where do we sit with that what are those considerations and so um i think a key obviously is that any future tax growth has got to be tied to exceeding what that incentive is going to be it's got to outweigh of course the the future service costs that we've been talking about and you've been hearing And we've got to make sure, as Kelly kind of mentioned, as partnering with other agencies, that there's not overlap, right? Because, again, the state's doing stuff, the city's doing stuff. Where do we fit into that equation? So to weigh that benefit appropriately, of course, we've got to look at the different multipliers that exist. You know, maybe we're talking about increased sales tax to an area. Maybe we're talking about additional private projects. investments, and maybe we're just talking about increasing the property values in the assessment. So, what are the drivers of the property values as it relates to this concept of prioritizing growth in certain areas? And I'm just going to read this. So, property values are strongly influenced by how land is being used, right? What is it allowed to become, and what is the quality of that new development on a subject parcel or a subject area? In general, higher and better use of the property tends to support higher assessed values, and over time this is going to result in additional funding. The relationship between market value, actual use, and authorized use is important as it relates to our taxable values, assessed values. When the land or improvements are being put to its highest and best use, again, we're going to see those assessed values being higher. We talked about zoning, right? So when zoning allows and there's more intensive use taking place on our property, whether it's a single-family home versus a multifamily unit, right, there's a higher use being placed on that property, therefore higher values, right, higher revenues. The quality of that development also is a part of that. Is it vacant land? Well, of course, we don't know what that looks like, but is it residential? Is it commercial? What's the quality of that development? And again, that's going to be a higher quality result than those higher assessed values. There are two ways in which this concept can be applied. It can be, we talked about new growth, but it can also be looked at through the redevelopment part of this equation. And the revitalization and redevelopment, they're important because it can really materially shift value by improving that quality that we're talking about, making a certain supply more attractive. And that improved supply can increase, of course, demand, which can lead to a stronger market performance and reduce that perceived risk for those developers or investors, you know, anybody for that matter. It boosts investors' confidence. So, in either case, I think the public perception public perception as we look at this is going to be need to be considered right and some form in that they want to see a return on the investment. So, with that, I think that if we focus growth in areas where infrastructure already exists, what can be. maintained or even expanded efficiently then we're looking at growth in a sustainable way which strengthens our county's financial position and bringing home i think the quality of life that's being improved so i'll leave it at that unless you have any other questions uh slide six i guess is kind of the summary of that but um there's certainly value that needs to be looked at when we're looking at prioritizing these different areas and hopefully sometimes can get us there.

I think the next slide has thought-provoking questions.

It does. And if I could, we have kind of two key points that we'd really like input here, but I would like to put a caveat on number two, recognizing that, you know, obviously we didn't provide a lot of detailed information on incentives, just kind of a flavor. So it's not specifically, you know, Does one incentive look better than the other? Just like a general kind of feeling around incentives. But most importantly, that number one is kind of red light, green light on this alternative approach to planning the development in our community based on all of the things you heard today.

Thanks. I'll open it up. Okay, we had a tie going. Do you want to flip it? Okay, thank you.

I think I need some context because I've only been here three and a half years. I know collectively with Dave and many others, there's decades worth of experience here in Washoe County in terms of how Washoe County has played in this world of incentives. So can you give me a brief lay of the land? Is this new to Washoe County, this talk about potential land use incentives, development fee incentives, tax incentives? Have we already been in the sandbox for a while, or is this kind of new frontier for us? I'll go ahead and take that.

For the record, Kelly Mullin, Planning and Building Division Director. So using incentives, true incentives on the planning and development side is relatively new. We just started offering those with all the housing efforts over the last few years. And certainly the real incentives in terms of like the Density bonuses that are going through the process right now That is the first set of real incentives that we have offered now We've certainly you know gone through the effort of trying to streamline processes make things easier Reduce public hearings that kind of a thing we have done that you know in the past and kind of ongoing There's certainly there's always you know more opportunities for that but for true incentives where you're getting bonuses Absolutely, that is newer for us

Okay. I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned from the other jurisdictions is what I'm hearing. You've mentioned the cities and other jurisdictions throughout the state. I would like for us to do it right the first time, which means collectively getting all the stakeholders together before we start spouting out what we think, because we're not subject matter experts. We've got to get the folks that are building, the folks that are on maybe even the advocacy side of increasing housing stock and making sure that the quality of life issues are maintained. I just think it would be smart of us maybe to be that regional leader and convene the groups to get a litmus test of how people are feeling. county should go what direction we should go because I mean I value my colleagues opinions and everything but all of those menu of options that you just offered us we can't speak to those because we a don't have the details and b we haven't talked to the subject matter experts.

Mr. Hill.

Thank you Madam Chair.

I would just offer another development fee disincentive. Using the regional plan work that Dr. Smith has done, how can we increase development fees when it's away from infrastructure? So that may be another way that we can tie in what we'd like to see versus what we're not as excited about. Cause let's be real. It's on who owns the land when they've got the capital, when they're coming in. And honestly, this is a perfect time to be considering this. And I'm totally with commissioner Garcia on making sure that we convene the stakeholders, our development partners on this, um, to hear what their thoughts are. But, uh, because, uh, we're slowing down with growth. So let's make the changes while we're in the slowdown. That way we're ready when, uh, things start to pick up again. Uh, but making sure that we're using that data because the way that you've, uh, higher development fees for lower density than higher density, I'm on board with that. And we're looking at that actually in Tahoe, um, and seeing if we can do in Tahoe, it's a bigger issue of these, you know, uh, billionaires, trillionaires buying four parcels making a giant compound and how we can disincentivize doing that and how we can do a fee on that. So I'm all about that higher development fees for lower density than higher density, especially because to many commissioners' points, people's home families are different We're not having as many children. We don't need the square footage that we've got in our house. We saw that from Kat when she did that presentation to us. So that makes sense, too. But how can we use the data that we've got to increase those fees when it's away from the infrastructure? They're already going to have to pay for the infrastructure, but also making that layer of, like, do you want to buy that property? Yeah. It is going to be more expensive to do business in the county. And then on potential mechanisms, what I've been pushing, especially in the Tahoe area, and I'd like to see us limit incentives to highly desirable uses. So attainable housing, balanced mixed use, that's what I'd like to see if we're going to do property tax incentives because... We don't have enough property tax to pay for things, period, today. So if we're going to do it, let's do it for the things that we really want to see, especially with, you know, we don't have enough home credits every year for all the people who want them. So maybe there's a way that the county can incentivize more of the things that we want to see, especially if there's flexibility, because understanding that workforce housing is – For higher area median income and you don't necessarily you can't necessarily get those state credits or federal credits that way. Maybe there's a way. And that's what we did. We've done in Tahoe as well as see how we can create those incentives on that piece. And maybe we do that. We can do that both in the Trekkie Meadows and in Tahoe because we're the ones that control the tax incentives for Washoe County, even in Tahoe. But those are my thoughts. But I love all the suite of options. I want to talk them through in detail when we're at that point. And I think that it's really cool that... the team has come together to present this to the board and these are all different departments coming together to find this solution of a big problem of sustainability of growth in the region. So thank you for all of you for your leadership and bringing this to the board and making sure that we have the best information to make the best decisions.

Any other comments, Commissioner Clark?

We've got the assessor here, and we keep hearing about the slowdown in growth, and I just wanted to hear what he sees. He's closer to the ground than we are as commissioners. What do you see as far as slowdown of development in our county? Sure.

Yeah.

All right, here we go. I did it right that time. You know, there has been a slowdown, but from our perspective, Commissioner Clark, it really hasn't slowed down. I mean, the values have gone up still through our valuations. The permits are still there. We still had a lot of permits to work this year. The subdivisions, from a standpoint of creating subdivision maps out of our office, that has slowed down. But there certainly are subdivisions out there that are not built out yet, right? That are still being built. And so we haven't necessarily seen, I wouldn't call it dramatic slowdown at this point in time. Maybe stability is a better word. It's certainly not. We're not going gangbusters or booming like we once were for sure. But yeah, that stability is, I would call it stable right now.

What are your thoughts about the interest rates now versus three or four years ago with stability and movement of the market and growth and development? Do you think that that has hampered the fast pace that you had a couple of years ago, just the doubling of the interest rate over the last several years?

Well, I certainly think that, I mean, if you want to talk interest rates, right that everyone locked into a low interest rate and as those interest rates climb that everyone's sat on, you know, there was a statistic at 1 point in time where I think it was 70% of all people move and like, within 5 years. I don't think we see that anymore, right? Nobody wants to move away from that 3% interest rate. Now, as far as purchasing power, right? Because that's really what it comes down to. What's the purchasing power that someone can afford this house on a monthly payment and YOU KNOW, THE INTEREST RATES HAVE CLIMBED, OBVIOUSLY, JUST OVER THE LAST COUPLE WEEKS, ACTUALLY, IT'S GOING BACK UP, BUT THAT PURCHASING POWER IS CERTAINLY HINDERED, BUT I THINK ALSO TIED TO THAT IS THE COST OF THAT HOUSE, RIGHT? I'VE HEARD A COUPLE OF THE COMMISSIONERS NOW SPEAK TO THE POINT OF, WELL, YOURSELF INCLUDED, YOU KNOW, WHAT WAS AN ACCEPTABLE MODEST HOME AT ONE TIME WHERE, YOU KNOW, IT WAS 1,600, 1,800 SQUARE FEET. with a one-car garage or two, now you see the product being a much bigger home with a much bigger garage. The amenities within that house are dramatically different than the house I grew up in, right? And so maybe that supply of inventory is so grand that it's only available to a certain few that can afford it. I mean, if we were talking about some of these incentives, maybe the incentive is to produce a house that is more economically affordable for somebody, right? That 1,600 square foot house, it's hard to find anymore.

Sure. And you can go around neighborhoods here in this town within a mile or two of here and find subdivisions when they were built 30, 40 years ago were 1,200 square foot, 1,100 square foot homes. So the entry-level home is missing in this market. in my opinion. And that's traditionally how the market works. You get an entry-level home, you build some equity, you move up, and that's how it moves. But now it doesn't seem to be that way. It's like you've got to buy a brand-new Escalade to get a car. You can't get a transportation car anymore. You've got to get one with all the bells and whistles. Thank you for your thoughts on that. I've got another question for Mr. Large. Legally, when we talk about... penalizing folks that buy and are trying to build a bigger house or put properties together and form some sort of a compound or a bigger lot. Do we have the ability to penalize people? And how would that open up the county to lawsuits if we charge higher fees to people that are trying to do something different? And I'm looking to get a legal opinion on that.

This board has, Michael Larch for the record, this board has a lot of discretion in regard to the fees that we charge for development. In regard to each of the, whether or not we are going to be crossing the line legally in terms of those, we need to look at the specific ordinances that would be put in place. We need to look at certain regulations and make a legal determination. Until we see it in writing, it's really difficult. Hypothetically, can you do something? In some ways, yes. Could you cross the line? Yes, you also could. So we need to be very careful in terms of how we – we're not doing this as punishment. We're doing this as an incentive and those type of things. Once you have a property right, it becomes much more difficult. But if they're trying to obtain a property right, this board has a lot of discretion in regard to how we make those determinations.

Sure. And a follow-up question with that, human nature being what it is, if one developer or one group of developers gets some type of incentive and other folks feel that they didn't get the same consideration, how is that leaving the county open to treating everyone equally if we offer incentives to one entity and Not to the other or at least the other person the other entity feels that they weren't offered the same incentive Does that open us up to any type of legal consequences?

It might open us up to an equal protection challenge It might open us to due process challenges, but we'd have to make a determination based on ordinances Thank you Anything else I really Think this demonstrates

What a brilliant group of people that we have at the county, really. So thank you for realizing the inevitable in terms of budget constraints. This isn't new. Realizing how the systemic model of how government is funded can't be changed here, so what can you do? I really like the fact that some of these, I'm glad you mentioned, Kelly, that we didn't have to necessarily go through all of this, because I do think it's really important to get a real broad group of stakeholders, broad, because I do want to point out that I thought Dr. Smith The other Smith brother, when he mentioned that a lot of times developers have a comfort level with what they develop. And you can say that about any product, quite frankly. You don't have to even say developers. That's just a natural. There's efficiencies and economies of scale. There's all kinds of economics that go into that. But I do think I'm only bringing up that point when I say a broad scope of stakeholders. And I think some of the best practices and the research that you'll come up with because you have brilliant folks here. Thank you, Mr. Sarman, too, for always trying to think how we can do things better and how we can essentially meet the demand. But again, I'm always cautious of regulations that start tinkering with market forces. And so I really like the fact on the tiered connection that one size doesn't fit all as an example. And I also have attended several meetings where somebody said, nobody at the county, and said, we should just have TIFs everywhere, they said. If we had TIFs everywhere, we would solve everything. And it was really an interesting, it just hit me, right? But thank you for your work on the SIDs. I was really proud to lead that charge. And I think the stakeholders that we saw that were a part of that really saw that opportunity. I think the SADs, SIDs and the acronym alphabet soup that we're now in that I should stay away from is really important. But the bottom line is, is that I'm going to follow the rules. And one of the questions is, should we move forward? Should you move forward in getting feedback from us? on this prioritized development. And from my perspective, I say move on as quick as you can, you know, because we have things that are coming down the pike that we've already as a body approved and we're in the ninth package soon um that will be coming is it the ninth package okay okay i'm not pushing it i'm just saying the ninth package but the next package and then we have other things that are coming down the pike including way down on the bottom of the list when i had asked and the commissioners were kind enough to support us increasing notification Right. That's on the list for development. But having said that, it might sound odd with this next statement. But I also think your point on one of the slides about looking at what you didn't say it this way. I'm saying it this way in terms of streamlining and looking at what can be done administratively, especially when you have the legalities and the framework to work within that framework. And I think if we can look at that, that saves time. One of you mentioned, right, time is money. And there also is the balance of the staff that we've already spoken about, the 27% of growth and 22% of the folks that you're having to serve at a higher level than you've had in the past. So I think if there's the balance, I'm eager to see what this, I know we're all eager to see what this looks like. Thank you, Mr. Sarman, for your creativity as well.

You're welcome.

Yeah. This is why Washoe County has the best staff on the planet, right? You guys are literally, what is that, 6.1 FTEs are serving, I can't remember the number off the top of my head, 22% more because I did the calculations when I read that. I was like, wow, we've grown 27% and you're actually serving more than 22% in terms of what you used to. So I don't think there are any other questions. And thank you so much. Boy, when can you come back with all of this? This is very exciting. Next meeting. That's May 26th. All right, well, if there's not anything else, I think that we are going to close out our item number five, right? I mean six, and we're gonna move now to public comment.

Thank you, Madam Chair. This is our final public comment, and comment heard under this item will be limited to three minutes per person. It may pertain to matters both on and off the commission agenda. Unused time may not be allocated to other speakers, and please make your comments to the commission as a whole. There's nobody signed in. Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Thank you. So we'll now go ahead, and if there isn't anything else, we're going to close a workshop at 2 p.m. on the dot. Thank you.