Board of County Commissioners - Regular Meeting

Order on June 23rd, 2026 at 10 oh four. Thank you all for coming and we appreciate your patience and us being just four minutes late as we just finished one meeting and now moving into the next. So thank you. Well, Mr. Brooks, we're starting a tradition. So would you like to do a salute to the flag? Thank you, we'll now move to roll call please Chair Andriola present vice chair Garcia Commissioner Hill here

Commissioner Clark is absent. Commissioner Herman, are you on the phone with us?

Yes, I am.

Thank you. Here. County Manager Kate Thomas. Here. Chief Deputy District Attorney Mike Large. Present. And I'm Yvonne Strickland, Deputy Clerk. Madam Chair, you have a quorum.

Thank you so much. We'll go ahead and close Item 2, move to Item 3.

Manager Thomas. Thank you, Madam Chair. Item 3A1 is an invocation, and we are joined this morning by Heather Perkins, who is the Director of Communications for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Our beloved Heavenly Father, we are so grateful to be here today in this setting with all of these good people. We are thankful for the many blessings and tender mercies that Thou dost bestow upon us as Thy children. We are grateful for thy beloved Son, Jesus Christ, for his infinite atoning sacrifice that allows us to repent of our sins, to be comforted in times of need, to be strengthened when we are weak. We pray that thou might bless all of us here today that we may feel of thy love. We are so grateful for this beautiful world and for all thy creations. We're grateful for these public servants who are willing to share their time and talents to serve and bless thy children in this county. We pray that thou might bless each one of them with the gift of discernment, with wisdom, and with a wise and understanding heart. We pray that we all may follow the example of thy Son, Jesus Christ, in prayer. being kind and loving our neighbor and working together with respect and patience. We thank thee again for all of our many blessings and pray that thy spirit may be with us and that we may all strive to be more like thee. And we say these things in the name of thy beloved son, Jesus Christ. Amen. Thank you.

We'll now move to item four. Thank you. This is a general update from our Truckee Meadows Fire and Rescue Chief Edwards, who is here, and I know we're looking forward to hearing information on the incident that occurred over the weekend. Welcome, Chief Edwards.

Meadows Fire and Rescue. As I begin today, our region has started to experience an increase in wildfires. So our fuel levels, the fuel moistures are starting to decrease. Our humidities are really getting low. We've had some wind. We've actually had a couple of fire weather warnings already issued for the region. And so yesterday, in alignment with our state and federal partners, we adopted the first level of fire restrictions in the region for the season. These restrictions include the following activities are prohibited until further notice or until these restrictions have been rescinded. Smoking outdoors, welding or operating an acetylene or other torch with an open flame, operating a chainsaw, or related equipment powered by an internal combustion engine without a spark arresting device, operating or parking a vehicle or other motorized equipment over or on top of dried or cured vegetation. In addition, building, maintaining, and attending or using a fire, using wood, charcoal, or any other material, campfire or stove fire except a portable stove using gas, jellied petroleum, or pressurized liquid fuel outside of a developed V-cap ground, picnic area except by permit is also now prohibited. A barbecue on private property and an established barbecue or campfire ring, clarifiable vegetation is still currently permitted. So your backyard barbecues are still okay. And a big reminder as we come into the 4th of July holiday, all fireworks, all tracer ammunition or exploding targets are illegal year-round in Washoe County. Please continue to follow our social media sites for updates on wildfires and more fire restrictions should they change. Our website tmfpd.us also has an updated list of these restrictions. And I really encourage all of our residents to get the My Smart 911 app. This is the best way for us to communicate with you about emergencies. And then also know about perimeter. In our social media feeds, as we put out incident information, we'll also provide information to perimeter. And perimeter shows you the outlines of where those emergencies are occurring, evacuation routes, shelter information, and so forth, which are extremely important during time-sensitive emergencies. I also want to touch on an incident Manager Thomas referenced last Friday, a unique incident for our region. On Friday, June 19th, at approximately 4 p.m., we experienced a unique thunderstorm event in the region, and the neighborhood of Hidden Valley was inundated with a significant amount of rainfall in a very short amount of time. That downpour resulted in very large, dislodged boulders, a significant amount of mud, water, and vegetation that overfilled a catch basin at the top of that hill and then used Pembroke and the neighboring streets as kind of a river to guide all that mud and debris throughout the entire neighborhood. An initial 911 call was placed for flooding. An initial arriving engine company from the city of Reno arrived on scene and recognized this was something much larger than just a flooding call. And then upgraded that to a full first alarm rescue assignment that also brought units from sparks NTM our water rescue teams and so forth This was quite a significant incident Fire companies rescued a family from a home with an active gas leak That their meter had been dislodged during the debris flow and they were trapped in their home so firefighters actively rescued those folks from their home and got them to safety and The initial priority through this entire emergency was life safety, and that really focused on search and rescue, making sure that we could account for all the residents, make sure they were out of harm's way as quickly as possible. Miraculously, I'm happy to report that no human injuries or deaths occurred as a result of this incident. And if you saw the pictures, that is a miracle. I mean, there was a lot of opportunities for people to be injured or killed in this incident. Sadly, one cat did perish in this incident. And this was truly a team effort in the response to this emergency. No one agency was going to be able to mitigate this on their own. So we're very grateful for our partners at the Washoe County Sheriff's Office, their search and rescue teams, the Washoe County Emergency Management, NV Energy, REMSA, Washoe County Regional Animal Services, and Washoe County Community Service Division as well. And for more updates, it's important for folks to continue to watch and monitor emergencywashoe.com. And at this time, I'd also like to invite up Kelly Echeverria from the Emergency Management Administrator for Washoe County to provide a brief update on the recovery efforts in response to this emergency.

Thank you, Chief. Kelly Echevarria, for the record. I was able to respond to the incident directly on Friday afternoon, and I think, you know, our first responders have a tendency of being modest in their efforts, and there's no doubt that lives were saved because of both fire and law enforcement that day. So, grateful to be working around and next to such amazing responders. That being said, recovery. is both short and long. In the short term, CSD crews are out in the field every day, have been, including Father's Day, and have removed 4,600 tons of rocks and mud from the neighborhood. They've done safety assessments, completed emergency access clearing, and are working on right of way mud and debris removal, infrastructure integrity checks, and restoration of that infrastructure as well. In addition to the impacts that we saw in the Hidden Valley neighborhood, there was also some movement of land and rocks into the Truckee River at Vista. So the river right there is about two-thirds of the way blocked from what it normally is. And so separate from the river activities, we've activated our VOADs, our Volunteer Organizations Active in Disaster. The Red Cross was out in the neighborhood on Saturday handing out cleanup kits, doing damage assessment, talking to residents of the community and making sure that we're accounting for their needs and we can try to fill those needs. As far as damage assessments go, our first responders did windshield assessments, which is the very first step. They passed those over to emergency management. Red Cross went in the next day and did a little bit more detailed damage assessment, and we married those numbers. Now we have our community services division out adding additional information from someone who's an engineer. And so they're able to add that additional detail up to the level that FEMA's looking for. And we've also put in a request for the state to send their damage assessment teams, which is just the process. So far we've identified one home destroyed, six that have major damage, seven that have minor damage, and nine that are affected. We have put in a request with Team Rubicon to come and assist our community members with clearing the mud and rocks from their homes. We're also working with BELFOR and TMCC and a number of other partners to get the residents what they need to be able to clear out their homes and properties. It was significant and it will take a long time. I asked the community that if needs arise, please call 311. They're forwarding those requests to emergency management and we're coordinating, helping to fill the gaps that the community needs. And I think that is the end of my report. Unless you have any questions.

Thank you. Well, I definitely want to thank you and the entire team, Truckee Meadows Fire, along with public safety, law enforcement, and others, but really collectively, how quickly you stood up the shelter, Kelly. You stood that up right away with the American Red Cross, and so I'd like to make sure that you and everyone understand when you have an emergency and you are the professionals in it, but It is managed chaos, but it is really a testament to what you do in the training before and how you have the relationships and the communication and be able to activate just like that. And that's what happened at Hidden Valley. And I can tell you, I know because I was getting calls and and certainly involved in doing what we could. And I do also want to give huge kudos to the collective communication from everyone. It was a very managed communication that appeared honestly in a very effective way because sometimes in emergency situations you get conflicting information and that's really difficult to discern as a resident. So I really was super impressed with the level of the expeditiousness and the response from CSD. I shared at an earlier meeting, and I'll share it today again, that the response from residents from Hidden Valley have been extremely appreciative to how quickly you moved, how quickly CSD was out there pushing mud, getting rocks out of the way. There is still work to be done, and so yes, your request Kelly, for those to go through 311, there's a few. There's a few that I know I have initiated, and many others, I'm sure. But thank you. And it's not just in Vista. Also, really, that took another surprise. And I think it's also, I know Commissioner Hill and I both serve on Truckee Meadows Flood, and what we're doing at Vista is amazing, and what that long-term, hundred-year flood will see to prevent not necessarily Hidden Valley or some of these things that happen, but in the bigger picture with that Vista Narrows project, there are millions and millions of dollars that are happening. So there's even plans that are outside of just what we're talking about that are long term to help our community in the long term. And so thank you again for everything. I really want to do this because you guys are amazing. Really, everybody was amazing. Thank you so much. I'll open it up to my colleagues.

Vice Chair Garcia, do you have anything? Yes, just echoing the tremendous work and coordination that happened. You said one home was damaged.

What structural issues happen that would classify that as a total loss versus the other ones that were impacted and one was destroyed and that was about three feet of rocks and mud that Broke through the back doors of the home and went all the way through So it's it's according to the FEMA designations of water levels and debris impact and

Wow, what a nightmare. I mean, that's horrible that they had to experience that. Very traumatic for the families and the neighbors and everybody that had to witness that. I was reading, and again, for those of you who didn't tune into our strategic workshop, the www.emergencywasha.com is amazing. It has the maps. It has all the things on it. And if you click the Updates tab, it gives you a very concise informational tool that you can use to disseminate information. On there, you had mentioned that, you know, because we're limited on what we can do on private properties, can you talk to us about who the Team Rubicon is? I think that's what they were called.

Yeah, absolutely. Team Rubicon is a group of volunteers that used to make up just primarily retired military, but they've expanded their force and they can come in and muck out. It's called removing the mud and dirt. And we've partnered with them before when we did the defensible space project over by the old Patagonia warehouse for vegetation removal. It's what they do and they love to do it. So getting in and getting dirty and helping people.

And it's all volunteers. Yes. All right. Well, thank you to our volunteers as well. Thank you.

Commissioner Hill. Commissioner Herman, do you have anything?

No, just a great big thank you to everyone that was involved.

Thank you. Thanks again. Appreciate it.

All right, we'll now close item four and move to item five, public comment. Manager Thomas. Thank you, Madam Chair. This is public comment, and comment heard under this item will be limited to three minutes per person, and it may pertain to matters both on and off the commission agenda. Unused time may not be allocated to other speakers. The commission will also hear public comment during individual action items with comment limited to three minutes per person. Please make your comments to the commission as a whole.

Thank you. First up is Catherine Yarte, followed by Terry Brooks.

Is it on? Oh, it is. Okay. Good morning. Catherine Yarte for the record. I'm actually going to be speaking on item 21, so I wasn't sure if I'd have enough time to get all my thoughts out, so I did both. I do think it's a great plan to get something on the record to capture the lost revenue for electric vehicles that we're not getting via fuel tax. And I think this is a good start, but I don't think it's going to capture enough. Doing it via registration is going to eliminate the opportunity to capture the income from the transient population that travels through Washoe County. And through the state, we are a drive-through state. We are a tourist state. And so only attaching it to our registration misses the opportunity to capture that additional revenue for our roads from other people, from other counties, districts, and states and cities that are coming through Nevada. So what I would like to suggest is that we consider doing it the same way we do fuel tax per gallon on gas and diesel could we do a fuel tax per kilowatt on charging stations in order to capture that transient traffic. That would also apply to those who live and have their own charging stations at home. There could be a way to meter that in order to tax it at the same or similar rate. With the $250 per year, that's a significantly smaller amount based on an average, and many of these people are driving significantly more. than other people with a gas or diesel vehicle. So the bigger issue is making sure we don't miss the opportunity to capture the revenue from those people traveling through Nevada as tourists or simply just driving through and ensuring that we capture as much revenue as possible to make up for the loss that we're currently experiencing. So I'll probably add to that on the other one. I don't want to go overboard here, but thank you.

Thank you. Terry Brooks, followed by Kyle Sundland,

Good morning. It's me, Terry Brooks, again. And today I feel the responsibilities to address discrimination and politics when it comes to disabilities. Some politicians want to do what they can to help the disabled in any way. But some politicians don't care about the disabled and just want them to go away. Some politicians have done what they could to help the hearing impaired, and they helped to do such things because they've really cared. But those who continue to discriminate against the hearing impaired won't explain why they do so because they haven't really cared. Some politicians have done what they could to help those who are blind, and they helped to do such things because such caring stays in their mind. But those who continue to discriminate against those who are blind cannot explain why they do so. They just need to change their mind. Some politicians care about the physically disabled who are in a wheelchair. So they help to get ramps in places when the disabled need to go there. But others haven't supported such ramps. They said it would be a wasteful expense. They waste their own time saying such things because they don't make any sense. Some politicians have supported a lot of mental facilities as a safe and comfortable place for those with mental disabilities. But others didn't support them back in the 1980s and shut down such mental facilities and forced the residents out on the street who had mental disabilities. The best way to help and treat people with disabilities is to let them have a safe place where they can learn to deal with their disabilities. I would like to thank Reno's Newton Learning Center, where children with disabilities are allowed to welcome and welcome to enter. All humans have equal rights. No one is above another. And we all have the responsibility to care for one another. I would like to thank you all for listening to me today and for allowing me to come in here today. Thank you.

Thank you. Kyle Sonsland, followed by Oscar Williams.

Madam Chair, Commissioners, my name is Kyle Sundland. I'm the Vice President of Behavioral Health at Northern Nevada HOPES. I'm here to talk about line item 22, the WARF grant, and I just wanted to extend our appreciation for this opportunity. Hope Springs is unique, and especially as an FQHC, which is a federally qualified health center, we have a real opportunity to combine medical and behavioral health and really go for stability in housing. I'm also accompanied by one of our therapists, Heather Milligan. And one thing that we always try to communicate with our residents at Hope Springs is we're looking for sustainability over immediacy. And at Northern Nevada Hopes, and especially with behavioral health, we're really developing a program with our transitional living program of Hope Springs to really create that stability for our unhoused and at-risk population. So I just wanted to say thank you to everyone, and we really appreciate this opportunity.

Thank you. Oscar Williams, followed by Jeff Church.

Good morning. Oscar Williams here. I want to break out a little bit, but I'll bring it back to item 14. I'm concerned about protecting the public purse emphasis on elections. Excluding the cost of the new warehouse and the full extent of the lease and along with the remodel, I think there's probably $15 million or something budgeted for that. The remodel, $3 million something. The life of the lease, I don't know, $8, $10 million or something over 20 years, whatever it is. Our tax dollars... I want to give a rough estimate of the capital improvements on elections from 2023 to 2026 would appear about 15 million. I mean, that's a really loose estimate, but that's just for new equipment, software training, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right. Not even the actual cost of conducting the election, just capital improvements, excluding the warehouse and remodel, which is another 15 million or more. These are our tax dollars. I have limited disposable income to you guys to continue to tax and spend like drunken sailors. You have an unlimited, insatiable demand to spend. There has to be something in the middle that makes sense. And I wish to ask you a couple of questions to help define that better so we can all be on the same page. And I know you can't answer these questions, but I shouldn't have to even ask them. It should be publicly available. And it goes like this. What is the cost per ballot counted? Does anybody in this room know what the cost is per ballot counted for the primary that we just went through? Anybody? I don't know. That's why I'm asking. I'd like to know. We should know. It's a common business management metric, but we don't have that information. I'm also concerned about statements by the register of voters in regards to the time to process a mail ballot. If he claims it takes 10 to 12 hours to process a mail ballot when we have the finest state-of-the-art of equipment that can do tens of thousands of ballots per hour, and when in fact he's been quoted in the news as saying he could do 15,000 ballots a day, He's got all the early voting to count the mail ballots. He's got all this great equipment and multiple stations for openers and for tabulating. And yet we can't seem to get all the ballots done in time. There's always a thousand or something that are not processed. The results come in late or not consistently when we're supposed to get that updating of reporting after elections. My estimate, two to three hours. You estimate it in batches of 100 to be nice, round. How long does it take to do 100 ballots, mail ballots from intake to counting, sorting, storing, printed, done? They can't do it in three hours. There's a problem. We've got the state-of-the-art equipment. Now, in regards to item 14, simply at this point, I ask that you table it until we have more input of observers. So we're going to get the bang for the buck that we deserve and demand as observers. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Jeff Church, followed by Lindsey Harmon.

And I think this is where I put this.

Is that correct? Yes, it is.

Good morning, Jeff Church. I run RenoTaxRevolt.com. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm not here very often, and I want to speak on RTC5, but I will mention very briefly that I agree only in part with the first speaker that if you are going to tax the public charging stations are the right place to do it for EVs. Also want to comment on the chair's comment on the Vista Narrows. Flood is one of the best agencies I've ever worked with as part of RenotaxRevolt.com. They're very responsive and they're getting it done even though the voters said no to them for no new taxes. And that's a point that carries over to what we're going to talk about. RTC-5, the annual index gas tax, it goes up with no public vote, no public input hearing, nothing, goes up every July 1. This year, 4.2 cents. Call it a nickel. Diesel, 4.7 cents. The total tax, based on my math, for Washoe County is $1.14 a gallon. Congratulations, you're number one in the country. That is the highest gas tax anywhere in the United States. Prove me wrong. Ask staff. Prove me wrong. I'd love to stand up here and tell you I was wrong if you can find some other county with a higher gas tax. That's federal, state, and local, $1.14. I'm thankful that we're going to have a new DA who maybe is going to give a fresh set of eyes on this on how we legally can address it. I want to point out there are legal issues. I'm not going to litigate it here in a minute and 30 seconds, but if you know me, on behalf of the public, with no personal interest, I have litigated before. I have won. Some I lost, some I won, some were settled out of court. But I'm not afraid of litigation. So let's try to head this off at the pass and discuss pre-litigation, how we can resolve this, and how we can maybe do something so that people don't go to Carson City like I do to buy our gas. I have a hybrid. It comes up later today. When I go to Carson City, I shop. My wife and I, we go down. We have lunch with friends. We shop. We buy gas. All that money that we spend goes to Carson City and the state. You don't get a penny. So... It's a regressive tax. It's called the law for curve. There reaches a point where people go, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to pay it. I'm going to go elsewhere. Once again, when I go down to Carson City and buy things, I pay a sales tax of 7.6. I bought my car in Carson City. Sales tax here, 8.26. Just like Oscar said. You're spending like drunken sailors. You've got to be able to live within your means. More, more taxes is not the answer. It's a Creedence Clearwater. When they come to your door, the only answer is more. And that has to be an exception to the rule. Great little cartoon. I'll hand it to the clerk later before I'm done today. But it says everything. Renotaxrevolt.com. Thank you.

Thank you. Lindsay Harmon, followed by Adrienne Alcala-Moss.

Hi all, Lindsay Harmon for the record. I'm here today in support of agenda item 21. This is a common sense solution to ask electric vehicles to pay their fair share to support the infrastructure that we all desperately need improvements on and rely on every day. So I am in full support of agenda item 21. Thank you.

Adrienne Alcala-Moss, followed by Eileen Eklund.

Good morning, Madam Chair, Commissioners, DA. Thank you for the great name pronunciation. I appreciate that. So I am a nurse practitioner. I work for the Life Change Center. We're an outpatient opioid treatment center with three sites across Reno, Sparks, and Carson City. And we were recently selected to be part of the WARF a grant within an outreach and engagement project that we're very excited to get going. And I'm a fairly new Nevadan. I've just been here just over a year and was looking for ways to get involved. And it's very exciting to see your civic engagement process this morning. So I thank you for your time. And we just really want to express... our gratitude and excitement to be able to get this project going, to help our community, help engage folks, get them into treatment, get them moving on with their lives. And John Sederland here, he's our peer support lead, and he's the lead on this project, and he may speak under item 22. But I'll just give over.

Like she said, I'm John Sederlin. I'm the Peer Recovery Support Specialist Supervisor for the Life Change Center at all three sites. I manage the peers there. I also want to say thank you so much to all of you for this opportunity with the COPE grant and funding like WARF. Because of opportunities like these are why I'm sitting here today with 25 years in recovery. If we can get... this program to just touch one individual's life, that's going to be generational addiction touch, not just that one individual. So if everyone in this room and everyone in this community were to touch one person, we would be able to reverse the effects of fentanyl in our community. So thank you again for considering us for this grant, and we look forward to executing it.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. Eileen Eklund.

Hello?

Thank you, Commissioner Herman.

Okay, am I on permanently now?

We can hear you. Thank you, Commissioner Herman.

All right. Good morning, Commissioners. Eileen Etlin, for the record. I live in Sparks, and thank you once again for the opportunity to speak. Today, I just want to say thank you. I want to thank you for your efforts on behalf of our libraries. I was away last week and missed your vote for the new library trustees. But I want you to know that I'm encouraged by your choices and believe that the new trustees both have special knowledge and skills to bring to the library board. I'm also grateful to you for appointing Commissioner Hill as liaison to the board, which I think will be really helpful in improving communications between the two boards. When I first began attending meetings of the library board and this commission, I was, like many Washoe County residents, frustrated and worried about the future of our library system and the conflict that surrounded it. So far this year has been a breath of fresh air. Our new director seems to have hit the ground running. Her reports to the board indicate that she has a firm grasp of the challenges we face, as well as great energy and enthusiasm for tackling those challenges head on. She understands how important it is to invest in our libraries and ensure that they remain central hubs in our communities. With this new director, two promising new trustees, a new library board chair and vice chair, and a new liaison, for the first time in quite a while I feel hopeful that the library system can get back on firm footing and move into the future with the resources, staffing, and support it needs to succeed in these rapidly changing times. Thank you, Commissioners, for your help in opening up what will hopefully be a new chapter for our Washoe County Libraries.

Thank you. Wendy Colburn, followed by Laura Weatherington.

Good morning, Chair Thomas and members of the Commission. My name is Wendy Colborne, Chief of Staff for the Building and Construction Trades Council of Northern Nevada, and I'm here regarding Agenda Item Number 21. We generally support requiring electric and hybrid vehicles to contribute to road funding. Our roads are critically underfunded, and all vehicles should pay their fair share. That said, our preference would be for the Nevada legislature to act on this statewide, and ideally through a vehicle miles traveled structure rather than a flat registration fee. We're also concerned about what happens if this question goes to voters and fails. A no vote in Washoe County would make it significantly harder to get this done at the state level. However, we're not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and if this question does go before voters, the building trades will support it. Better road funding is better road funding, and we support this mechanism for moving us in that direction. Thank you.

Thank you. Laura Weatherington, followed by Jane Fox.

It's really too small, sorry. Laura Wetherington, for the record, thank you for your service and for the opportunity to speak. I want to thank Chair Andriola for asking additional questions of the LBOT applicants and Commissioner Hill for joining the LBOT as a liaison. Your stewardship of the library system heartens me. I'm here today to ask you to amend future library board of trustee applications to include a question about the applicant's home library. I heard you discuss last week that in the future, appointments to the library board will be considered by commission district. And I'm curious about that and want to think alongside you for a few minutes, two minutes and 27 seconds. I want to understand the fullness of the reasoning because I suspect there's a lot of thought that's gone into it. Of course, the most immediate reason that comes to mind is having people within each district feel they're equally represented on the LBOT and for this board to feel represented on the board that you appoint. And I understand and support that. But as I've continued chewing on the discussion about over or under representation by commission district, I started to wonder how many libraries are in each district. So I went home and mapped it out, and I saw that some districts have more libraries, and perhaps this is one factor in the over representation. Frankly, I don't know. But this led to another thought, prompted by the new director's recent report, where she spoke about each branch as a hub of a different micro community. I had known before that each library within our system is unique, but her explanation that each library's micro-community has a different set of needs and therefore offers different hours, materials, and events, it opened my eyes as to why. And so I'm not convinced of where I've landed now, but I wonder if fairness is a part of what this board is aiming to do by appointing by district, might it make sense to not only consider the districts that this board represents, but also the library micro-communities that the LBOT represents? You know, like library jurisdictions. If District 1 is overrepresented, I think this is one that you all named last time, are all the recent candidates coming from the same branch? I would hate for the Commission to overlook incline or Verdi applicants to wildly different branches and communities because Sierra View has been historically feeding the board. So this is an open question for me and something that I hope that this board will have a dialogue about as you prepare for the next set of applicants. And one last wild idea. To shore up the library board for the longer term, you could run a program like the Washoe County Leadership Academy, perhaps equally ambitious but smaller in scope and budget. Such a program would work with the library system to develop outreach to potential LBOT cohorts, either through each library branch or by targeting specific micro communities. I heard Sun Valley was the theme, you know, last week. Maybe this could be a theme, right? Underrepresented branches or areas of the county now represented by the bookmobile. Hear me when I say train the whole community in library trusteeship. Thank you. Thank you.

Jane Fox, followed by Penny Brock.

Good morning. Thank you all for, um, helping us here today. Um, I am Jane Fox for the record. I'm the director of the Larson Institute at the school of public health, uh, at UNR and I am the lead for our street reach project. So I'm here today to express our sincere gratitude. for all the money and the effort and the support that you are giving to our Street Reach project. As you know, some of you know, but I'm going to remind you all again, Street Reach is this collaborative UNR effort between the School of Public Health Larson Institute, Orvis School of Nursing, and several community partners. We provide street-based health care to individuals who are unsheltered in our community. And currently we are offering nursing assessments, wound care, bloodborne virus testing for HIV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and then linkage to community services, particularly healthcare services for those that test positive. We are working in the Fourth Street corridor three days a week right now. And since launching in April, 12 weeks ago, man. It's been a whirlwind. We've engaged more than 450 individuals out on the street. We've enrolled 128 patients into our care. We provided wound care to over 35 individuals and tested 103 individuals for HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C. Through those testings, we've identified 16 past hepatitis C infections and eight current hepatitis C infections. And so that's about an 8% positivity rate, which is higher than the general population, of course. So beyond medical services, we connect individuals to primary care, prenatal care, women's health services, behavioral health support, and crisis care. We've also helped people access housing, employment resources, and then basic needs such as food, clothing, shoes, showers, and really at its core, Street reach is meeting people where they are and responding to their most immediate needs. This financial investment will significantly expand our reach and build upon the recent transfer of the mobile health in action clinic that you so kindly transferred to us, as well as the provision of space that we are working on at the CARES campus. Through both our street-based and our mobile health in action clinic, we'll be able to serve more areas around Washoe County, and we will be expanding our services. Those services will include a psychiatric nurse practitioner, chronic disease management, preventive care, and then also oral health screenings with referrals to community dentists. So we really deeply appreciate your support, your partnership, and your trust in our work. This investment enables us to provide high quality, compassionate care to individuals who are too often left without access while advancing our shared goals in serving the needs of these people who are unsheltered in our county. Thank you.

Thank you. Penny Brock, followed by Verona Cortez.

Penny Brock, for the record, addressing item number 14. Let me tell you a story. Observing all those hours the subject came up, what was planned for an observation area in the new department elections location? I requested a meeting with Assistant Manager Ryan Gustafson for observer Robbie and me to meet with him and Andrew McDonald to find out if there were floor plans. And if so, we would like to see the floor plans. It took two weeks, but it happened on June 16th after the commission meeting. It was 2 o'clock to 2.45. Only 45 minutes for that meeting? Robbie and I arrived, but no Andrew McDonald. Mr. Gustafson confirmed there were floor plans, but did not have a copy. Chit-chat. The clock was ticking to 2.45 when the meeting would end. Andrew McDonald finally arrived, showed up late with no floor plans. Clock ticking. I asked Andrew where the floor plans were. He said it was not legal for us to see the floor plans. That was shocking as Nevada law under Nevada Law Public Records Act NRS 239, the Washoe County Elections Department is required to disclose existing compiled plans and records regarding space remodels and implementations. I told Andrew that the floor plans were public information paid by taxpayers and we had a right to see the floor plans. Mr. Gustafson agreed. More waiting, clock ticking to 2.45 meeting deadline. Reggie Greer from the ROV office finally appeared with no floor plans, just a small copy. We could hardly make out What the difference areas were, we had to observe and where the observation room was. It was pointed out the observation would be made from a long hallway outside the ballot processing room with work areas blocked by walls, which meant lack of transparency and also observers would not have chairs or counters for notebooks, binoculars, water bottles, and so on. we would have to go from window to window to along the hall long hallway we expressed concern that observers and other stakeholders had not been included in the input on these floor plans and there was no assurance and we did not think there would be meaningful and trans transparent observation of the ballot processing room this is mandated under federal and state law Robbie and I both said the layout of these floor plans was unacceptable. Then the elections manager attacked Robbie. A heated exchange occurred. It was shocking, that behavior by our manager. It was unprofessional to have him yelling and making false accusations.

Thank you. Veronica Cortez, followed by Donna Klontz.

I'm just gonna set this here.

Good morning, Veronica Cortez, for the record, the lunch lady running for Assembly District 27. I brought my little book because we talked about the rodeo a little bit. If you look down here, 1983, my dad used to get box seats ever since I was a child. In fact, when I went to Virginia Palmer, that's my elementary school and I was Citizen of the Week, they asked me, what did I want to be when I grow up? And I said, a cowgirl in a rodeo is my really only dream that I wanted to do. And my dad never let us join any organized sports because, you know, we're ranchers and you want to run barrels, go to the field. Or you want to go rope, well, go rope in the field. You know, we did. I did enjoy a lot of Reno Rodeo, and then I did become a barrel racer with the Sierra Nevada Gym Canada Club, so I do have my belt buckle that I proudly represent. I did have a barrel horse. She passed now, but I did use to sell the programs outside the Reno Rodeo to raise money for our organization, which is a great organization. You can get your kids in it. They can learn how to rodeo from a young age. And there's gonna be a kids' rodeo this Thursday and Friday at Rancho San Rafael, completely free. It's gonna be hosted by the Valley Amigos, which is my foundation. I realize that it goes from Jim Kenna to You got your junior rodeo, then you got your high school rodeo, you got your amateur rodeo, then you got your pro rodeo. So I was actually amateur rodeo right before pro, but broke my arm, had some stitches in the leg, and then I had a baby, and I was like, well, maybe God wants me to just stop. So I stopped with that. But there was a group of kids that wanted to always join organizations and learn how to rodeo, and they just couldn't afford it because it takes a lot of money to do stuff like that. So I founded the Valley Amigos, and proudly I can say that the top rider right now in the Mutt & Bustin' is from Valley Amigos, and we were training about a week before Mutt & Bustin', so Parker Cortez has a 96 right now, so very excited about that. I do advocate for Sun Valley, so I'm going to talk about that a little bit. A little over a year ago around Mother's Day, I had put a post out on Facebook and said, you know, we should really get rid of these ambulant vendors on the side of the street because we could collect money for them. I mean, all our books are in the red, SVG ID, Washoe County. Do them a day permit for like a couple hundred bucks. They have the money. Then we got more money coming in. I got backlash from the SVG ID that I'm just creating problems. I'm not going to say who else thought it was a terrible idea that I mentioned that. Well, I'm not sure if you know, but there was a lady selling flowers on Father's Day in Sun Valley. Man walked up and shot her and then shot himself right in front of the fruit truck right outside the Mexican store. Now, this is the second time that I'm advocating for Sun Valley about the unsafety of it. It's not safe, and we want to hold these huge events. The first food truck Thursday, people got mowed down in the crosswalk. Rob Pierce on November 4th said, we need an agenda item clarifying the desired pattern of growth in Sun Valley. Please get us that agenda item. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Donna Clonks, followed by Monty Turner.

Good morning County Commissioners and County Manager. My name is Donna Klontz and I do a lot of work with our senior community all over our county. I wanted to talk about a couple of things on your agenda today. Number 20, the Hope Landing development that is listed there is something that we desperately need and more of the same. Homelessness is a major issue in our county because so many folks can't afford to pay rent or to even buy homes, which is even harder to do. About half of the folks who live in the CARES campus today are seniors. 60 and up. It's close to that at all times. Many of our seniors are living on fixed incomes. They've retired. They're not working anymore. And today's costs are rising, and they're in trouble financially. And so some of them are a paycheck away or a retirement check away or a Social Security check away from not being able to stay where they live right now. And so they end up on the street. So this housing project is a wonderful thing, and I'm hoping to see more of the same. The second thing I'm here to speak about is number 21, the ballot question on asking folks about putting taxes on EVs and hybrids. My husband and I are recent owners of a hybrid. I think it's great that we start collecting some funds to keep our highways up for folks that are not buying much gas or not buying gas at all anymore from the gas tax. I like the idea that earlier speakers talked about finding a way to also find a way to get some income from folks using our roads that are just passing through that might not be paying taxes here in our community at all. And last of all, I want to raise something that we've talked about many times in the past. Since 2009, I think, the legislature gave our commission the ability to impose a supplemental general services tax, GST, of 1% per dollar on all of us just by a vote of our board. It hasn't been something that our board of commissioners had wanted to do, but it would allow for collecting. I think the last time math was done, it was $15, $16 million a year that could be used for any service or need that our county has. It wouldn't be just roads or housing. It could be whatever the Commission believes are the greatest needs. And so I ask you all to take a look at that again. It's something that you have the power to do, all five of you, and I'm hoping to see that happen soon. We have such needs in our county for services to support all ages of our folks, whether it be our school district kids or our seniors at the other end of the age continuum. Thank you.

Monty Turner, followed by Matt Buehler.

Okay, Monty Turner, for the record. I live in Sun Valley. I've been around my whole life. Now, this gas tax thing is really bothering me. So the other day, I have a big 85 Peterbilt, holds 250 gallons of fuel. I drove to Middlegate a couple weeks ago, come back. It was $300. $300 to drive to Middlegate and back. And it's an antique truck. It doesn't haul anything. It just does shows. So one of the things I'd like to propose, we need to can this because the other night I got a phone call, a lady in Susanville, her horse fell. They couldn't get anybody else to haul it. So I had to race from Reno in the middle of the night at 4 o'clock in the morning to Susanville to grab this horse, drag it into a vet, basically put it down, grab her trailer, take it back. I felt so sorry for her. $900 this morning. $900. There's no relief. So I can't afford it. Nobody, I mean, most retired people here can't afford it. So a lady down the street ran out of gas. I had some gas from a generator. I gave it to her and asked what happened. She can't afford gas. She can't afford to go get medication. She can't go for anything. Nobody will come to her house. You can't get any deliveries or anything anymore. It's crazy, unless it's a pizza. So what I would propose is let's do an alcohol tax. Let's do gaming tax. Let's do taxes on other things and forget the gas tax. Ditch it. I mean, the dollar sum would be a lot to me right now. But just ditch it, and that would make total sense. I mean, everybody comes here and drinks. So the big thing I have is everybody talks about Teslas and everything else. What about the guys like me that drive out of town? Nineteen miles I paid road tax. The rest of it was out of state. That doesn't work for me. That doesn't. We're going to go to Truckee. I mean, I pay road tax in California all the time. And I'm paying it out in Nevada. Does it make sense? I'm getting fuel here and I'm coming back getting fuel here. So I don't understand why I'm paying the taxes both ways. And there's no way to ditch that. And I'm like, look at these other trucking companies, the dirt haulers that have to run to California and get cobble and stuff like that and bring it back in, other things. Then the other thing, I need to change subjects real quick. We've got a bunch of apartments coming in behind my house, and we like to have a wall put up because these people, we're already dropping rocks. I washed a truck 10 minutes later at 3 o'clock in the morning. You couldn't even tell I washed it. It's that bad. My wife took her car down, had to wash it, drove it in, sat there for 10 minutes, you can't even tell we washed her car. The dust is horrible. It's just horrible up there. It's not safe to breathe or anything else. Commissioner Garcia knows about our fire hazards around there. For the last week, we've been smelling smoke all around my house. So we think the neighbor's got something going on with his trees where it's getting to be spontaneous combustion. The guy down below me, there's smoke coming up from his house. If that catches, it's game over. We're going to lose that whole neighborhood right now. There's nothing nobody can do. My house is going to burn with my truck and everything else. Nice, right? Thank you so much. Hopefully this gets to somebody. Have a good day.

Thank you. Matt Buehler.

Good morning, commissioners. I'm Matt Buehler, a retired 22-year career Air Force veteran, 30-year legal resident of the great state of Nevada, and a 19-year Washoe County resident. I'm here today to ask this commission why they certified the 2026 Washoe County primary election results when there were so many egregious irregularities. I understand that 15,000 or more legal residents did not receive their ballots in the mail, as is mandated by the NRS. How could you deny so many, for that matter, any legal writer, a voter, the right to vote in this election? You may say that they had the opportunity to go to the polls. However, didn't three of the five of you dictate through your political affiliation that every registered voter in Nevada receives a mail ballot unless they personally opt out? You made the rules, now you want to step them back after the fact when the results are not in your favor. As a veteran, it is a front to my dedication and service to you, this community, Nevada, our great nation, and indeed all who have honorably served. It is wrong that these taxpaying citizens were denied the opportunity to participate in this election under the rules that you enacted. May I propose that these disenfranchised citizens file a class action lawsuit against the three of you, Washoe County and the state of Nevada, to have their property tax waived or perhaps paid for by you for the 2026 through 2028 election cycle, as I think this to be a better alternative than to dumping tea into Virginia Lake or the Sparks Marina. Thank you.

Thank you. We have no one else signed in.

Thank you so much. Okay, we'll go ahead and close public comment, and we'll move now to item six, commissioners and county manager announcements. Manager Thomas.

Thank you. This is item number six, and it includes reports and updates to include boards and commission updates, requests for information, or topics for future agendas.

Do you have anything? No, thank you. Commissioner Hill? Vice chair Garcia, commissioner Herman. Do you have anything?

I can't, I'm not sure if I'm on.

I can hear it. I'll hear you actually.

Okay, fine. Okay, good. I don't have anything.

Okay. Thank you. Um, I'd like to ask Manager Thomas if you would be so kind to talk about the announcement given in terms of the emergency declaration that we'll soon be hearing specifically in relationship to the activity that occurred in terms of presentation from the Board of Fire Commissioners earlier and what we heard from Chief Edwards at the beginning of this meeting. So appreciate it. Sure.

Yeah, just by way of information, we formally, the county, I signed it, the clerk signed it, you'll be ratifying. We declared a local emergency in response to the impacts of the flash floods that we experienced on the 19th of June this year. The severity of the incident exceeded our local response and resource capabilities, and so in those instances, We do, when conditions continue to pose a significant threat to the safety and the health and the welfare of our residents, we formally declare an emergency so we can seek retribution for those resources. So we will be hearing the ratification of that item on Friday, but we thank you. We'll put that on the record. Thank you. Appreciate it.

All right, hearing, did you remember? Okay, Commissioner Hill.

I remembered. Thank you, Madam Chair. I did want to just make sure that the board knew and the community that we have another appointment for the library coming up, that we have a resignation. So we'll be, I'm not sure when that will be agendized, but I think we're just going to use the slate that we already have received. And I just wanted to make sure the community knew that we'll have another appointment coming up. So thank you.

Thank you. All right, hearing no other announcements or comments, we're going to close item six and move to item seven, presentations. Manager Thomas.

Thank you. We are joined this morning by Taylor Adams. He's the president and CEO of EDON, the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada, and he's here to give us an annual update. Welcome.

Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the commission. manager Thomas and all those that are with us today it's so it's so great to be with you let's see I think we have a presentation that the team submitted yeah well while we're there I will I'd like to if I could take a quick moment of liberty and also by the way for the record my name is Taylor Adams it's for the court but uh and I'm the chief executive of the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada but uh but before we get started here's our presentation I do want to acknowledge my good friend Bill Thomas, who sits on our board, and not that we take position. We do see a great deal of merit to what's coming for this commission later in the day. We think that all of our public systems require everyone's support, and so we appreciate your consideration of what's coming and think that certainly on behalf of our organization, we think there's a lot of common sense in making sure that we're able to care for our infrastructure going forward. As we look forward, for the members of the community that are with us today that may not know what we are, what is the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada? We're a public-private partnership. We were established just over 43 years ago. Most recently, in the Sandoval administration, our framework was somewhat changed. And so in the present, I like to say, About 30% of our revenue comes from public agencies. This year, it's 26%. It's important to know that Washoe County has contributed to that through a services agreement that we negotiate every year. And the majority of that funding comes from the governor, where we do our work by contract with the Governor's Office of Economic Development. The rest of our revenues are raised in the private sector every year, and that represents the 70% that you see on the screen. And we are committed to growing and maintaining a vibrant and sustainable economy in Northern Nevada. Our team, business attraction is what most people know us for. It's actually about 23% of our work this year. Business expansion and the retention of our existing businesses, that is the majority of our work. That is where we work with northern Nevada companies to ensure that they are able to grow here and expand here. What I like to say is that the promises that we make to the companies that we're bringing here aren't also true for the companies that are here, that all of our systems are broken. So we spend a lot of work. trying to ensure that our existing businesses have the resources they need to succeed, and then also entrepreneurial development. We think that our free markets in many ways are dependent on entrepreneurial activity, but more importantly, it is still the gateway to living the American dream for so many of our families, and so we want to make sure that there are vast opportunities for creating and growing businesses here in northern Nevada. Now, I often get questions about, well, who do you work with? EDON works exclusively in the commercial and industrial economy. We don't specifically work in retail. Our friends at the Chamber do an exceptional job of caring for that community, but we work in the commercial and industrial economy. In addition to these teams, obviously, we have operations functions and investor relations and marketing, and then in operations. What did the last year look like? So, and also, you'll recognize this format, I want to, if I can take a quick moment, I want to commend marketing team we're always trying to make things look a little better and a little more interesting for you and so this is this is the first time we are rolling out this version of our work and so which you can see here I always like to start before we show charts with with just a listing of the data behind so these are companies that chose us last year along with the jobs they brought in the capital investment that they're making in our region As we continue, and this is, by the way, this is a combination of all three of those buckets that we showed you a minute ago of business attraction, retention expansion, and then entrepreneurial development. What does that look like? By industry, you can see here 12 projects in advanced manufacturing. For us, that's really important. Because when we talk about advanced manufacturing, and really also for logistics and distribution, we're talking about employee-heavy functions. And so what's great about this, these are companies that are creating jobs for our community, that are creating opportunities for our citizens. It's interesting. If you look back just 15 years, I think the number at that point was five out of every ten group of young people that finished their education here left Nevada to have the career that they wanted. Because of the expansion of manufacturing and logisticians and operators, and I was so glad to see our trade groups represented earlier. Obviously, the 4,000 members of the International Brotherhood of Electricians and Welders 401 make up a healthy portion of our economy now. And so what's wonderful is now we fast forward to the present, over seven out of 10 young people choose to stay in Nevada to have their career. We want to see that number get to 10 of 10 because these are our children and our grandchildren. But obviously the incremental work here matters and we see that in manufacturing and logistics and distribution. We're also seeing that we're becoming a location for tech to locate. Now, everybody thinks that that means data centers. Important to know, I am not talking about data centers. Now, certainly, data centers are finding their way to Northern Nevada, but that is not what's represented here. What's represented here in the tech and IT space are great companies, and I'll back up. Companies like Send Cut Send, as well, Future Form Manufacturing, Ampersand that's on this list. These are great manufacturing companies that just happen to be in the tech space. And so, and what's great in the case of one of those companies just achieved a billion-dollar valuation this year, and that's right here. And so, what does that mean? So, a company in America with, or really anywhere in the world that achieves a billion-dollar valuation is called a unicorn. In the entirety of our history, we had one of those prior to this year. That one, of course, was Tesla when they came here in 2017. We had two homegrown companies achieve that this year, Positron being one and the other being SimCutSend. So an incredible step forward for our economy and the maturity of our economy for our community. As we look forward, one of the things I hear a lot is, well, everything, every company that's coming here is coming from California. There's no doubt. California is a big part of our pipeline. If you are a tech manufacturer in Silicon Valley, it's really difficult to scale and expand in those communities. And that's not meant to be a political conversation. That's about the cost of real estate and all of the inputs that go into development decisions. We find the cost of our real estate, our low-tax environment, our appropriate and responsible regulatory environment allow us to be a preferred destination those companies because we also happen to be closest to them and so as a result that we still see inbound traffic in the industrial space from California but it's important to know if you look every every state that you see on this map that is that is shaded in as a place where we have seen a deal come to us from in the last two years so so important to know that Nevada is not just a preferred destination for or companies west of us we're a preferred destination throughout the United States, and you can see here in that second bullet that we had companies from three different continents pick us last year. So really excited. We're a preferred global destination as we look forward. And I'd be remiss if I didn't thank Madam Chair and members of the Commission, you, for your role in ensuring that we continue to be that. So thank you so much for continuing to ensure that we are a great place to locate a business and to hire people and employ people. Looking at our performance, just a little bit of granularity about what we showed you in those three buckets. In business attraction, we closed 17 projects last year, just over 800 jobs, 500 million-plus in capital investment. That was off of 284 leads, 155 site visits. What does that mean? There were 155 companies, more than 10 a month, an all-time high for the community. that visited northern Nevada while trying to make a real estate decision around growing a business here. And then thanks to the great work of our real estate developers, we saw just less than 5 million square feet of new industrial space delivered to our region. So an exciting trend because that 5 million square feet, that, of course, represents tax base, and that is how we're able to continue growing. and continue providing for the needs of our community as we look forward. In business retention and expansion, we worked directly with 385 companies last year, and that's why I say this is the vast majority of our work. This is sort of a new area. We've always been in this space, but we've really expanded our focus. When I got here three years ago, we had two people doing this work. We were seeing about 140 companies a year. The problem is there are about 700 companies, as NRS defined them, as primary companies. in our region alone. So we set a goal to get from that number to 600. In my first year, we did 250. This past year, we're closing out our fiscal year right now, just as you are. We'll do just over 400 this year. Our goal for next year is 500. And then as we work into the following year, we're going to set a trend of meeting with 600 northern Nevada primary companies every year. As you can imagine, that has revealed a great deal of work for us. The 385 that we worked with directly this year, we were able to... to organically add, or excuse me, we were able to assist them in adding 877, so just less than 900 jobs. And when I say that assisted jobs, those are jobs that will be added in the coming year or 24 months. 687 jobs that were created organically. We think this is a great number because these are companies that we didn't really help. It's impossible. Not everybody needs our help, but we want to make sure that the great stories that happen in northern Nevada are told. And so what's great is almost an equal number of jobs were created by companies just from their own success, which is a tremendous story. And it really speaks to the strength of our economy that just less than 700 jobs that we found were just created by businesses that were growing here and finding success. And then collectively what we saw is about 200 million jobs in new capital investment from our existing industry. That's a really powerful number because you've got to remember, if they're in our existing industry, they've already made an incredible investment in our community. And so, to double down on that investment and do it again and to pick us again over every other community in the world is a really powerful thing for our economy, and it's a really aspirational moment for us that I don't want to miss. So, thank you again for your support in ensuring that we were successful delivering that. In entrepreneurial development, Maybe the best year that we've ever had. Doug Irwin, who you all know, who leads this group, senior vice president that leads entrepreneurial development for us, is working to quantify this for me right now. When we saw these numbers, I said, Doug, this has got to be the best we've ever seen. He goes, I think it is. I said, well, you know, we need to know. And so Doug is shoring this up for me as we speak. Like I say, this is the first time we're running with these numbers. We're at the end of our fiscal year as well. But $950 million in venture funding coming into our economy in a single year. That's not a multi-period number. That is this year. We saw that kind of money get invested in our startups. I promise you, New York City would like to have that number. There is nobody in the country that wouldn't love to have a billion dollars in venture capital flow into their community in a year, particularly if your population adjusts that. I mean, that is a really special year for us. This group, the three employees that do this, they worked, in addition to everything that you've seen on the prior slides, worked with 300 founders to help them start and live their version of the American dream. We saw 18 of those startups funded. And so, if you spread the $950 million out, that's spread over just 18 companies. It's really, really, really exciting. There were 46 startups that we saw created through either you know, the funding that we're talking about there, or just families that were just bootstrapping it themselves, living the American dream. And then 89 jobs were created around this activity. And here's what I love. I wouldn't let the 89 jobs think, well, that doesn't sound like much. You got to remember, these are young companies. On day one, it could be a couple that are just getting started. It could be, this could be two founders that have been working out of a garage like Microsoft did in the early days who got some money and now have two jobs. What's great about this, these are the companies that will create the future for us. And more importantly, it's kind of our best future because it is definitively for us by us. These are the businesses that embrace the cultural pillars that make up the greatness of Northern Nevada. And so these 89 jobs in a single year could likely mean thousands of jobs 10 years from now, because these are folks that are just getting started. So really excited. We, uh, really, really, really happy with the way that this, that this year played out. So what's next for us? Um, we're, if you look, we're, we're, we're in the space. Uh, we think that this next year includes a lot of, uh, of advanced manufacturing opportunity. That is what we're seeing in our pipeline. Energy generation is really important. Why is it important? I mentioned data centers earlier and I, and I, I want to say, um, We think that compute and data are a really important part of the future of our community because data centers are like digital parking lots. And if you think about why do we build parking around our businesses, because parking unlocks opportunity around it. We believe that that's true of data centers as well. We've seen that play out across the country. However, you will see our organization be the first to admit that nothing should happen without some – there's no use that should happen in any community without some regulation, without full understanding. of the impacts that that industry has on the surrounding uses and more importantly on the resident base that's there. So where we fully support this industry, we equally and with full support believe that it's important that we have common sense regulations that governs its use within our jurisdiction and really throughout the entirety of the state. That said, one of the things that we do know is we do know that compute uses are energy intensive. And so we don't want to wait for us to figure out what the right set is. Our organization is actively working to bring new generation into our communities now that is appropriately located so that it's not adversely affecting our residents, but so that we can, so that we're an active participant in safeguarding the electric rate and more importantly, the cost of living for our community. So when you see energy generation, I spend about half of my time right now working on that to ensure that even before regulation comes down the pike, that we are doing what we should responsibly be doing to be a good community partner for this jurisdiction and for all the others that we serve. We feel the same about water. I mean, we're so fortunate to have great partners and a great partner in John Zimmerman at Tumwa. I know that many of you serve on serve on his board and we're and we're we're also fully read into the works being done there to ensure that we're safeguarding water uses we go forward as well tech is the last thing I'll mention here forgive that little that little bit of a ramble but um but tech is the last thing that we're working on and and why check because tech and manufacturing we're finding are coming together and touching in in northern Nevada right now most of the manufacturing that we're seeing has a high-tech component and this is really built off of the success that we had from Tesla, from Redwood Materials, and many others like them that have come over the last 10 years. We're now focusing to ensure, as we now have a critical mass of employees in our region that know how to work in these companies, that we're continuing to provide great opportunities for both employment growth, but also career growth for our resident population as we look forward.

That is all I have.

I thank you for the time, and I'm happy to take any questions.

Thank you. Well, I wonder another stat that might be interesting is you're a small but mighty team. I wonder what per person you all generate in terms of the benefit to our community. That's amazing. I've only been here close to 40 years, and I can tell you these numbers are off the charts.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We're actually, so one of the things, it was not quite ready for today. We saw a draft of it, but we It wasn't something we could fully defend as we're still sort of fact-checking ourselves. But one of the things that we will be bringing to you all and sharing is some true fiscal impact data based purely on net new real estate tax generated in the jurisdiction. We think that's a powerful number to bring you. I wanted to have it for today, but we weren't quite there yet. In the next two weeks, I hope to provide it. But thank you for that. Thank you so much.

Of course. Well, we'll be looking forward to it. I'm going to open up to questions. I have a couple, but I'm going to actually go first to Commissioner Herman. Do you have any questions, Commissioner Herman?

No, just a wonderful presentation. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Great. And then I'm going to open up to Vice Chair who sits on the EDON board, so I'd like to make sure that you're recognized for that as well. Those are some early meetings, Taylor.

Yes, they are. They're great meetings, and thank you again for your annual report and your leadership. I really would like to go back to the entrepreneurial development slide. You really leaned into the statistics on that. But I think this is really such an exciting slide that often gets overlooked when we talk about the impacts and the change that EDON is having on our community. And the reason why is, you know, we know that the U.S. is among the top countries in the world for innovation and entrepreneurship. That's what we're known for. And I think EDON leaning really into that with that small and mighty team of yours have just generated such tremendous results in such a short amount of time. I remember when the board, the commission approved $150,000 ARPA grant to EDON for Startup Week and we recognized early on, I don't think we were on the board, it got implemented I think my first year that I was on the board. But we've been very curious and interested in helping bolster and strengthen that entrepreneurial spirit that is happening here in our county. Because we know when we invest in the pipeline, in the workforce, and we put dollars and support behind that innovation and entrepreneurship, only amazing things will happen when we create that healthy ecosystem. Is there anything else on the horizon in terms of this team and what they're doing? I mean, they've knocked it out of the park already, but what is their long-term vision? As we start up so many startups, what's the sustainability of that small team in making sure that those startups continue to have resources? Or do you have a community partner that you kind of hand them off to, or are they just kind of incubated here and then let to fly away?

So first, Commissioner, thank you for the question. Also, Thank you for your service on our board. And those are early meetings. But I have to tell you, I especially love it, and the community may not know, but Commissioner Garcia's children enjoy my meeting. And I don't know why or how, but it's wonderful when a couple times a year, if they're not in school, that they will come to the meeting just to hear the conversation. It's so great to have them there. So thank you. And And thank you for acknowledging entrepreneurial development because also it's important to know this is by a long shot the most diverse group of business owners that we work with. And so when I talk about the American dream, we really mean it. I mean, we mean it across all of our work, but it's so applicable in entrepreneurial development because this is where we see change. opportunity for so many of our citizens who maybe haven't had it before. And so this is, as we look forward, we, and I'll quote Doug with this. So Doug, who has built this part of our portfolio, on day one, I think he's been with us 14 years now, wow, started with an entrepreneur first mentality. And we built all of our program around that. And Startup Week's a great example. What we've learned about Startup Week is it's more than we can do by ourselves. So this is maybe the most inclusive part of our work. And so this is where we work with a broad consortium of community resources, as you know, to ensure that we can put the right resource in front of the right founder in the right moment. The College of William and Mary for the city of Richmond, Virginia in 2011 did a piece of research that first defined an entrepreneurial ecosystem, or that first defined the cyclonic effect of an entrepreneurial ecosystem that showed a founder standing on the ground with like a cyclone above them and all of these inputs. Access to capital is uniform, but whether it's access to capital, mentoring, joint venturing, initial opportunity? Is it a connection to business process outsourcing? By that I mean an outsourced sort of finance function or HR function or things of that nature? And it's our job to sort of try to pull the right pieces out of the cyclone and get them to the founder in the moment. And so it's important that this is already work that's bigger than just our team. And as we look forward, we think that we'll see more of that. What's really exciting in the present – We're seeing a lot of young companies coming to us or a lot of young founders coming to us from California and from other parts of the country to sort of grow and scale. Secondarily, there is an abundance of wealth that is finding its way to the Nevada side of the lake. And I'll just place that there without making a further statement. What's interesting is we're finding that that wealth has fairly broad expertise in tech and is willing to invest in our community when those opportunities are in front of them and so so we believe that That tech and tech manufacturing will continue to be the healthy portion of what we're seeing in entrepreneurial development We've got a little work to do on the employee side of that right now we don't have enough people in the region to working in these specific places today to adequately staff up without pulling from other parts of the country. So we're working with the University of Nevada right now and Truckee Meadows Community College and the Washoe County School District, many others, to sort of ensure that we're shoring this place up. But we believe if we can solve the employee side of this, that there's fairly vast opportunity ahead of us in tech startup, tech funding, and then tech scale.

The quote on your website, a small town feel with the big city benefits, rings true to what we've built here. So congratulations. Thank you.

Thank you.

Commissioner Hill.

Thank you. Great presentation. Thank you so much. I mean, I commend you and your team. The rest of the state is having a hard time, and northern Nevada is booming, and that's a lot of the work of the team and just relentless work to ensure that people want to come to Nevada. I'm just curious, when you're talking to the folks who choose not to locate here, even though we have... a lot of benefits to come here um economic development benefits in our state what do you hear from them uh specifically like what are the top three reasons that they choose not to come to washoe county or story county sure so um so the most common reason that we lose is um we we lose to uh to bigger communities um that have that have a little more uh i'll just say

that have a little more capital to throw at a deal. And by that I mean... Actual cash instead of just offset taxes.

That's right.

And this really isn't even about abatements and incentives. This is just the reality of sort of... When you look at communities in the Southeast, so I'm competing with Huntsville, Alabama right now. There's a great deal that we really want to finish. It's going to be Huntsville or it's going to be us. What's interesting there is the community there, and recognize there are the way that these types of incentives are calculated is you add up all the taxes that the company would pay, you project them out over 10 years, and then you give a piece of them back. The thing about Nevada is we can't give you a tax that doesn't exist. And so it's important to know when I say that people are throwing cash at a deal, what they're doing is they're basically giving, call it an advance against taxes that that company will pay. In our state, those taxes don't exist. So in the place where we can help the company understand, hey, yeah, that's right, they're going to do a little something for you for 10 years, but here, that levy doesn't exist. You're never going to have to pay it. We win. The The challenge, though, is sometimes a company needs that cash to make their deal financeable because oftentimes it can count as equity with the bank. And so this has been a reality the last two years where rates have remained high and uncertainties remained high in the market and other inputs. I mean, I think we have to acknowledge the fact that we thought fuel and the 10-year Treasury was on a downward trajectory. A little incident in Iran has put all that on pause. And as that's wrapping up, we hope that we're seeing oil try to retreat now. We're hoping that trend continues. We would love to see the 10-year Treasury now fall in line with it as well. It's an important thing to know. That's also going to be a critical part of seeing new housing starts and seeing people start buying homes again is we need that 10-year Treasury to come down because that's where mortgage rates are locked. So one, if I lose on that, two is I lose on people because we've not had nearly as much churn in particularly in owner-occupied housing as we would have liked to have had. We've not seen as many housing starts as we would have liked to have had. Now, I want to say in defense of our residential development community, the market has not been right for that given the stickiness in the 10-year treasury and the Fed holding rates high as long as they did. The Fed is trying to lower. We're Again, because of this war, we're hearing they may have to raise rates again, which would create a pause on that. But, I mean, it's important to know the Federal Reserve was on a trend to lower rates. The 10-year Treasury didn't move because of uncertainty in the market. But as we look forward, we do see the market in the coming quarters returning to its normal trajectory. And at that point, we believe we can solve this, too. The third one would just be we are – A lot of the communities we compete with are close to other large sort of dense urban areas. And we are not. It's great. We're the standalone community that is self-sustaining, which is incredible for us. If you are shipping goods anywhere, it can be a long run to get them there from here. If you're on the East Coast, you can access 70% of the United States population by one day's truck from wherever you are. We don't have that kind of density. However, we are the preferred place to basically access the other 20%. And so I do think you'll see as... As companies continue to expand and continue to grow this way, I think we will continue to win. This is just where we need to make sure that we've got our eye on the ball so that we continue to be competitive ahead of markets like Salt Lake, like Boise, and like some of our colleagues south.

Thank you. That was a great explanation. Very interesting. I didn't even expect that. And then I think other than that, that's it.

That's all we got. Thank you. Well, thanks. Well, this is what happens when you have wonderful colleagues you serve with, because they ask all my questions. So I was going to ask about barriers and wanted to highlight the startup week. But I do really appreciate you coming. It was a great presentation. I really am hopeful to look at that fiscal impact and what that looks like, not only what you've done, but also what those projections, especially with you looking at the visits of 600, right, and trying to really reach a stretch goal that you've established. And so I think it would be really helpful to keep us informed, and we appreciate all of the hard work. And you do have a small but mighty team, so please thank them as well.

I certainly shall. Thank you all so much for the time today. It's been wonderful to be with you.

Thank you.

All right. We'll go ahead and close out item 7A1 and move to 7A2. Manager Thomas.

Thank you. We are joined today by the Washoe County Public Guardian, Tracy Bowles. She's here to discuss updates to the Public Guardian's department data, innovative solutions to current challenges, and department successes. Welcome, Ms. Bowles.

Thank you, Manager Thomas. Good morning, Madam Chair and members of the Commission. I'm here to give you our annual update and just share a few facts. I had no idea that I had so much in common with EDON, that metaphor with the cyclone just circling above you. That's kind of how I feel for our staff. We get protected persons who come in with a cyclone of information circling above them, and It is our job to pull all of that out of the ethos and organize their lives and put it back on track. So that was a great metaphor Mr. Adams shared. So we do have a presentation too. I'm stalling for time so it gets up there. But I'm here to, we'll have our normal facts and figures that we'll kind of go through. As you know, Washoe County has a mission of a safe and healthy community, and the Public Guardian's office is just a small part of that. We currently serve for about 300 individuals, and our mission is to be appointed by the Second Judicial District Court for individuals who lack capacity. Those individuals can be from the ages of 18 all the way up to however long they can survive. So our oldest person with us currently is in her 90s, and we have had some individuals in their 100s recently in the last year. So it looks like we're loading. There we go. That is me. This is our mission that I just told you about. We do provide a variety of services that look a lot like case management, but they're quite different in terms of the fact that we are mostly making decisions for our protected persons. We are a staff of 20, including myself. We have three fiscal staff, we have three administrative staff, we have 11 guardian case managers, And we have two guardian supervising case managers who supervise that work. And our authority is gained under NRS 159 and 253. And then anything contained within titles 12 and 13 of the Nevada Revised Statutes. We do follow a guiding principle of the standards of ethics that are created by the National Guardianship Association. I spoke to you last year about these different standards, so I think you're kind of versed on some of those things. One of the things I also wanted to point out this year is that we also, the Center for Guardianship Certification is a certifying organization that certifies guardians in their individual work. We have six certified guardians. We used to have one, which was the public guardian in the past. And then our supervisors would become certified as well. So we added those to our ranks. And in the last couple of years, we've incentivized promotion in our department by being certified. And so we now have three additional certified. case managers in our department. And I think that is amazing. The Center for Guardianship is also looking at an agency certification as well in the future. And we are in discussions with them about the benefits of agencies actually getting certified nationally. So a few, these are some of where our referrals come from. These are the ages of our clients, excuse me. Most of our clients, as you will notice, are over the age of 65. We do have kind of that growing portion of our clients that are still between 40 and 65. Those are really very difficult to place. Those are individuals who come with a lot of housing challenges and for the most part come into our services being homeless. So that's something I always like to highlight for the commission. We didn't have an uptick in our new cases over the last year, but what we did notice was that we had a lot of our folks are surviving a little longer and so the overall caseload increased this year. So it went from 277 to 302. And I mentioned, I think last year while I was here, or earlier in the year, I mentioned that this is the highest caseload that we've actually ever seen in our office, at the Public Guardian's office since its inception. As you know, we haven't added any more staff, so those caseload ratios are just climbing. And due to some other things like FMLA and things like that, some of those individual caseloads then continue to go even higher. So our average right now is about 30 cases per person. As you can see, these are our caseload numbers across, I just wanted to compare from last year in June 2025 to this year, June of 2026. You'll see that those case numbers have dramatically increased. So we were, even the numbers on the side there, so some of our case managers are carrying almost 50 clients, but I want to tell you about why they're carrying more cases and what we've done this year, so before you get too alarmed. These are our state management numbers. You'll notice that these have actually gone down in the last year. These are in large part due to us finding other practitioners in our community that can take cases where there is a lot of money. Those don't need to sit with the public guardian's office if there are funds that can provide for other guardianship services. We are finding partners in our community and making those referrals and going to court and asking for those guardianships to then be served by somebody else. So I think that helps us limit the liability in our county when we can find those cases that have that wealth that can then pay for itself, those services. You'll notice I've included our mandatory reports reporting. These are mandatory reports that are due to the court. And these numbers aren't great, but I really think it's important to be transparent when there are challenges in government. And so I bring those to you today. Our annual reports have gone down in terms of timeliness. And our inventories, those have gone up in terms of timeliness. This, you'll see, has come, the inventories are actually improving because of the structural changes that we've made within our agency. But our reporting timeframes are still quite challenging for our annual reports. And I'm going to talk to you about a project that we explored this year to perhaps help with this as well. So these are things that we asked for last year. We talked about these challenges that we had considering our budget, considering the fact that we're not adding new staff. We talked about wanting to streamline reporting and paperwork burdens, and we talked about wanting to work on those terminations and getting those out of our office as quickly as we can. We talked about simplifying policies and procedures to make it easier for our staff to negotiate their work. And we talked about fostering more teamwork in our office in order to get the job done. And we also talked about engaging private providers and family members to take over those guardianships. So I've already shared with you kind of the outcome of our engaging private guardians in our community. And we're going to talk about how we've achieved many of these things in the projects in these upcoming slides. So in July last year, we set about doing an internal audit in our department. We really dug in very deeply to find out where are our strengths, where are our challenges, who's doing the work, who's struggling to do the work. And so we got some really great data on our department in terms of how we're doing overall. Unfortunately, some of that data also said we were really struggling. We were struggling to manage the work that we are tasked with on a daily basis. And as a result, we talked about that internally, and I had two senior case managers who came forward and wanted to propose an idea about how we could change how we do the work. And I am one of those people that I believe good ideas come from everywhere, and really encourage that. So we sat down, we had conversations about how that would look, what challenges that might bring, what we would need to do to make this successful, to kind of change the organization of our office. We wanted to give it a try. So we entered into a pilot program for the year. We decided we would, after we did this audit, we would do some shutdown work. We would clean up. We would try to get our business in order so that moving forward, people were faced with more clean slates to do the work that we're doing. And we hoped that the outcome of this project would strengthen our documentation and our reporting, which helps strengthen the accountability of the public guardian's office. We hoped that it would streamline the work efficiency of our case managers. And we hoped that it would enhance teamwork within the office. People would be working more together. And we hoped that we would be able to provide a similar level of service despite the rising caseloads that we have. So we separated our work. Normally our work is done, a case manager is assigned to a single person. That case manager does a lot of investigative tasks at the beginning to try to get to know who that person is. And then they meet the person, they go out to the person, they follow them, they set them up with resources. They do a lot of things that help them to meet the needs of the protected person, but they're very different tasks. Some of them are very financially driven tasks, and some of them are very people-driven tasks. And so what we decided to do is really separate those tasks. Let's give our people-oriented people people tasks, and our more investigative financially oriented people financial tasks and investigative tasks. So we decided what individuals would do. And in this way, we hope that that workflow would be different in the sense that the investigative and the financially oriented staff are mostly in the office. It is mostly desk work. They're sitting there making phone calls, returning phone calls, and doing that work. But our people-oriented tasks, they're in the field. And so it's really challenging to have to stop what you're doing to find resources to pay for a placement. but also go out and see your person and make sure that they're safe and okay and getting everything that they need. So we separated these tasks. We defined those boundaries for each of our staff. We worked throughout the year updating our policies and procedures to make sure that staff had clear information. We had multiple meetings to find out how it's going, what's working, what's not working, and we kind of pivoted and made changes when we felt like those needed to happen based on our staff feedback. So the outcomes of this project, we really feel like we have improved documentation consistency and compliance. We are auditing these monthly, and so we know exactly when the documentation is getting in and who is doing the work and how quickly it's getting in there. We have reports of faster completion of priority tasks, those marshaling of resources, which are critical to pay for services, to obtain placements for individuals. to marshal their assets more quickly at the forefront of a case and get those benefits in place. Medicaid or Social Security, those types of things, those are getting in place more quickly. We have reports from our staff of stronger collaboration internally, that there's clearer boundaries, people understand what their job roles are. And there is increased transparency across the department where people really know what work is being done and where there is need for somebody to kind of pick that up. Our staff have also experienced more positive workflow impacts. I've had some individuals just say there's a lot of psychological pressure that has been lifted from the staff to do their work. They're not worrying about things because they know that there's other staff members that are doing it, and because it is pretty transparent, they know they're doing it. They can see it being done. We feel like this has created a more positive workflow and we feel like there's more time for some person, protected person and that personally oriented work that needs to happen. So we are planning on continuing this pilot. We are gonna make some refinements. We're gonna continue to tweak it a little bit, but we're gonna continue this. The other thing that we've done this year is we've been exploring AI, which is really scary to me, to be perfectly honest, right? But we thought we would look at this as a potential option to offset some of the mounds of paperwork that we read. We are not psychologists. We're not internists. We are not cardiologists, but we read all of their notes. We read all of their paperwork, and it is our goal to understand what it says and glean from those reports what our protected person needs. Excuse me. So we also write a lot of our own reports. Every month, we go out and see our protected person. We write a lot of reports about how they're doing, what they need, how we're following up on those. And we have that administrative staff and fiscal staff that is also following up on things that we're doing throughout the year. At the end of the year, we have to report all of that to the court. So our project is looking at initially uploading all of our internal reports and our external reports that we're using that are safe and secure behind our Washoe County firewall, but they're also not visible to the AI team either. So they're very, all of the information that is being uploaded is seen only by my staff. In fact, the person that is putting it in Then the AI helps us to read those documents to formalize our annual report and give us a product that we can then look at that is annotated, that we can check, that we can fact check, that we can edit, that we can change, and that we can adjust until we're happy with what it looks like in terms of our reporting to the court. Now, this is still in its testing phase. We have not released this. We haven't started it ultimately, but it is looking promising for us. So we are going to be presenting this idea at our national conference in October for other guardians to take a look at. They're asking a lot of questions about AI. And I've already spoken to several groups across the country about this project and what we are seeing. And so we look forward to being able to present that in Washington, DC in October. We also had a very successful intern program again this year. Last year I talked to you about our bachelor's degree students that came from UNR social work program. This year we invited a master's student to come. She actually works for us, which added an extra layer of challenge. Because when you do that, you really have to separate the job duties from the internship duties. And so we sent her to work on some policies and procedures in our department. She has created a document and a system for reviewing our policies and procedures with our staff using that collaboration so that we can better improve our standard operating procedures. She was able to complete our guardian of person standard operating procedures during her work. And we were super happy to have her because it was really getting her out of her growth zone. But she's one of our newest case managers as well in our organization. So she learned a lot about guardianship in the process. And she learned a lot about policymaking. And she also learned a lot about behavioral health during that process. That's her passion. And maybe one day she'll go and work in that organization. But until then, I'm super happy to have her. We also, I told you last year about our internal training academy that we were very proud of. This year I just wanted to share with you that we were able to present that at the national conference last October. Sue Weil, our deputy public guardian, was able to present that in Oklahoma City, and she was invited to speak in Washington State, and some of her feedback is on the screen, which I thought was pretty amazing. They would love to work with her. I'm super happy that I get to work with her. She's really a gem in Washoe County, so super glad to have her. And then plans for fiscal year 27. We hope to have some outcome measures for our AI project. We hope to be talking to you about that next year. We also hope to implement a comprehensive communication plan. We've already met with our communications team here at Washoe County. They've come up with some great ideas for us that we'll be implementing soon. And I'll be speaking at a cab, the North Valley's cab, next month with our public administrator. So that's one of the things that came out of that. And continuing that forward progress on our SOP and then hopefully implementing our peer audit program. So that is all for me. Do you have any questions?

Thank you. It's always great to see you, Ms. Bowles. Like, every time you come, there's another improvement, another way to try and do what you can to make your organization, the community, and the folks you serve better, really. Thank you.

We work hard over there.

Another small but mighty team. I do have some questions, but I'm going to open up to my colleagues. Commissioner Herman, do you have anything? Maybe I'll come back to Commissioner Herman. Vice Chair, do you have anything?

We're looking forward to her visit to the North Valley Cab. That'll be wonderful. Thank you so much.

Absolutely. Nicole and I are excited to come out there.

Okay.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Great presentation. I learn something new every time you come in. And today, my attention just went into the amount of reporting you all have to do. I pulled up all the NRS. It's crazy. I had no idea. You've got a report, you know, when people move into a different long-term care facility and what's happening with their estate accounting and, you know, the death and termination, all those things, it's incredible. My question to you is, I know we're locked in with NRS and you have to do these reports. Are there waivers, like, you can apply for, like, in... When you have circumstances when your caseloads are that high, is there an ability for you or us to advocate for you to push pause on some of that reporting so you can get caught up?

Yeah, in NRS, there's not a ton of pause buttons for the public guardian. The court has been kind enough on certain occasions when we go every three years to do our annual reporting for our protected person if they don't have an estate. We do go to court every year if they do have an estate over $10,000. But every once in a while, and if it's close enough in the reporting period, we ask for our oral report to be accepted for our written report, and that is most often granted by our court. We have to report every time a person moves, not just into long-term care facilities, but every time they move. We used to have to report in NRS when they went on vacation and their location changed, but we were able to get that changed in statute. There is what we have been doing is, you know, I've been really working with the staff to write the report in terms of what is necessary. You know, there's a lot of my staff that care so much about the protective people that they serve that they could write pages and pages. we really encourage them to be concise and just what is important for the court. But you're right, we have to, not only are we writing a lot of reports, but we are also asking for a lot of permission. So we have to go back to court for permission to sell a home, which I think you should, but we also have to write a status report for that. If we need to invest money for a person, we have to ask permission from the court to invest that money for the person. And those are things that are necessary for the oversight and the protection of the protected person. But what I'd really like to do is find a pause button for the public guardian's office so that we could perhaps not accept a case or that we triage the cases that we accept. I think that that's the place in which there needs to be a different answer. Because we don't have a pause button to say, I'm sorry, I can't take seven more cases today. We just get seven more cases. In statute, there's not a lot of language that allows us to... to argue against the guardianship, but we do advocate for that when it's necessary. We go out and meet our protected people in advance. We don't think that they need a guardian. We will argue that in court. If we find family members, which that's the first thing we always do, is we look for family members, and then we educate them about what being a guardian is like. There's a lot of myths out there about being a guardian. Some of those myths are perpetuated within our community, and it's really important that people know that you don't have to have an attorney. in order to become the guardian for their person. You don't have to have put out your own money to support the person. You don't have to be a caretaker for the person. You have to make decisions. And so I think a lot of people are scared about stepping into that role because there's a court involved. But we do try to reach out to family members and help them understand what guardianship truly is and they'll get better information from our office than maybe at the bank or at the hospital or sometimes even in an attorney's office because we're actually out there doing the work and we really understand what it takes. I admire your question about looking for a pause button and I wanna find something like that for my staff and if you think on it and I think on it and we come up with something, I'm really happy to implement it because it is a lot of burden to get case after case after case. We wanna do a good job. We are not people in my office that like to fail so we wanna do it really well and with a lot of integrity And when we get those caseloads that are high, we worry about that.

Understood. And thank you for engaging the pilot, the operational changes you've made. I really commend you and your leadership. Thanks.

Thank you. Thank you.

Commissioner Hill. I know you and your team are just tackling really difficult cases and just appreciate the work. Sadly, government, we don't get applause. We have to take care of everyone. And I do love the idea of figuring out how we can better educate family members to understand what that role is and why maybe government shouldn't be doing that. But I know there's so many people that don't have anyone out there that we are needing to support as well. And just figuring out ways to advocate for our county to have more resources. That's what we've got to do so we can support the work. But I'm loving that you're continuing trying to improve and especially after the audit. And yeah, I mean, since is Madison AI a closed area? it is closed right yeah so that's why um i think that that if we're gonna you know implement ai that it's that closed system and um that we have that proprietary um uh usage of it that's that's great so i can't wait to hear the next update and keep us posted and thanks for working with us on seeing how we can continue to provide housing for vulnerable people because that i know is just I can't imagine being a staff member knowing that you're dealing with a homeless person. You cannot find them the proper housing. And I know that that's happening in all of our departments in Washoe County. So we'll continue to fight as well. But thank you for your work and your team's work. It's hard work.

Thank you. So thank you again. And I just also want to commend you for really creating a culture. I think it speaks to the leadership characteristics that you have. And everyone collectively, how can we do things better? Embracing Madison AI and looking at technology, which sometimes may be a little scary or an unknown uncertainty, but sometimes As Commissioner Hosea, it's a closed loop. You can also have it be open loop too, but in terms of what you're talking about. And I also think that really aligning with measurable outcomes, it will be interesting to see as this progresses. And then creating those relationships and the educational components. So anyway, thank you so much for all your hard work. thanks for all you do and for all your staff as well. Because I think your point about separating duties and giving staff the ability to take a big load off of themselves because they have to take care of themselves too, I think is really commendable so that people can concentrate and feel that they have a road to accomplish, even though that road and path may be bumpy. But it doesn't put that additional pressure on them. So thank you for your leadership in that as well.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair and Commission. I appreciate it, Madam Manager. Thank you. All right. Thank you.

We'll see you soon. What we're going to do is take a quick break. So it's 12.01. We're going to take a 10-minute break, and we'll come back. Just calling for a short recess. Thank you. Hello again, it's 12-11. I'm going to open the meeting back up. And what I'm going to do is ask that we move item 21 to the next agenda item. I don't know if there are any objections from commissioners. If hearing none, we'll go ahead and move item 21 to the next item.

Manager Thomas. Thank you, Madam Chair. This is item 21. It is discussion and possible adoption of Resolution R26-25 as the 2026 Streets and Highway Funding Advisory Question Resolution, thereby approving a submittal of an advisory question to the registered voters of Washoe County at the general election on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026, concerning the need for new fees to be imposed on electric and hybrid vehicles to pay for roadway construction and maintenance as requested by the Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County. And we are joined by Bill Thomas.

Mr. Thomas, welcome. If you would indulge me for one moment and just share with everyone, there's been a lot of public comment and maybe some folks that are even watching that maybe don't understand the authority that RTC has. And I wonder if you would be so kind to share what that authority is. Thank you.

VERY GLAD TO CHAIR ANDREOLA. GOOD MORNING OR I GUESS AFTERNOON NOW, COMMISSIONERS. AND I WANT TO START BY THANKING MANAGER THOMAS AND HER STAFF AS WELL AS DEPUTY D.A. LARGE FOR HELPING US BRING THIS ITEM FORWARD. SO RTC'S PURPOSE VERY SIMPLY PUT IS WE ARE THE STEWARDS OF THE fuel tax, and the sales tax that's collected in Washoe County for public transportation. So that is really the sole role of the RTC board, which is made up of elected officials from Reno Sparks and Washoe County. We have no independent authority to regulate, to tax, to create any fees. We simply are the stewards again for all the elected bodies and all the citizens of Washoe County to make sure that the funding that is set aside for transportation is spent properly.

Thank you. And I would be remiss to not recognize two members of RTC, Commissioner Hill and Vice Chair Garcia. And I really want to thank you for that clarity, because although there have been a lot of solutions, a lot of discussions, the legislature is really the place that may have some additional opportunity for some of the creative items that have not only been mentioned today, but have been mentioned for quite some time. So we'll look forward to your presentation. Thank you for me asking a couple questions. Thank you.

Thank you very much for this opportunity. And one of the things I want to do is, much of this information for the board and staff you're familiar with, but I think the more the public sees this and understands it, I think the wiser we become as a collective community. So a lot of what I want to do today is really just share with the public some important facts that led us to this point where we're asking this question on behalf of the RTC board. So first, I would suggest that Infrastructure is really what's critical to quality of life and our ability to function as a society. So in the case of roads, if you think about it, everybody used the road to get here today, even if you didn't drive and you took a bus or you took an Uber or whatever, you had to use a road to get here. So that's just the necessity of our life is we have to have infrastructure like roads. And the key question, which a lot of people maybe don't recognize, is how do we fund these roads? Not only construction, but maintenance. And so we did this little chart just to give order of magnitude of what this subject is about. So you can see. that the voters of Washoe County with the RTC5 tax did decide to tax themselves in a manner in which we can provide, we believe, very well for not only the maintenance of roads, but also our ability to address some of the concerns in the community as we move about in terms of widening roads, making roads safer. And this graphic just gives you kind of an order of magnitude of what we spent in the last five years. So I would suggest to you any conversation about how much cannot really be answered until you say, what do you get for that amount of money? So jumping off of that, I wanted to pull up a couple of recent projects that were completed that likely either couldn't have been completed or would have been delayed if we didn't have our local revenue source. And those are very significant projects. Most recently, there's two that I would talk about. The Mill Street Capacity Project, which was open last week. That not only adds some capacity for people getting on and off of Mill Street, but also makes it much safer. So that's the part, too. When we talk to people, there's a constant awareness about safety when it talks about transportation. And so the money isn't just for building wider roads or just for fixing asphalt. It's also to make sure that that interaction between the public who are walking or biking is as safe as it can be when they're dealing with roads that have cars that are coming in large volumes and at high speeds. The other one is Arlington Avenue Bridges. Again, a very impactful project that without the help of our local fuel tax. we wouldn't have been able to complete. So we have, this is just a smattering or a few of the larger projects. And as you can see, I guess I would point out to you the order of magnitude of some of these, which generally the public wouldn't know. You know, Mill Street was almost a $34 million project. So those aren't inexpensive projects when we do them. And so we are challenged by the fact that those prices continue to escalate just like everything else in our life right now. The other part, which is probably more of the daily interaction of the community, is really the quality of our roads. And so this is just a reflection of what we have to maintain. And you can see there that annually we take care of between uh... hundred fifty up to two hundred lane miles of roadway and as we all know the roads is the minute they're completed they start degrading so what we have is a system here in washoe county that are uh... fuel taxes allowed us to create whereby uh... we have the philosophy keeping good roads good Instead of chasing the worst roads and spending all the money on a single road, we look at and analyze every year the quality of all of our roads. And we do this through a nationally recognized process, which is called Pavement Condition Index. So that's a national standard for what's the quality of your road. And we are essentially at an 80. Which means that we're good and we're generally smooth with minor cracking and where an ideal and where. And so it's an ideal preventative treatment situation, which is we are optimizing the spend for the public tax dollar by making sure we keep roads right at that point where we don't have to spend huge amounts like that $41 million to rebuild. And we can cover more lane miles so that at the end of the day, the public experiences throughout their drive an acceptable roadway condition. So the challenge we're talking about today is one that you will hear. I think it's true of all of our lives now is the resources don't seem to keep up with the needs. And that's the public policy question that brought us to this point, which I would say we've been talking about for more than six years. So this is not just a fluke that we're sitting here today. This is a culmination of many years of conversation, not only with RTC internally and with our regional partners, but also at the legislature. So two graphs that will show you kind of the magnitude of the problem. This is the vehicle miles traveled in our community. You can see not only because of the increase in population, but also just the nature of people's travel that we're driving more. So it's not static, it's growing, which means, of course, more wear and tear on the roads and more demand for congestion relief. At the same time, the source... Really, it's not the single source, but it is the primary source. And without the fuel tax, we wouldn't be able to do what we do, is declining. And that's declining because the actual amount of gallons consumed, which is the direct relationship to how much money we have available to maintain and build our system, is going down. So we are in this trend now where the demand's going up and the resources are going down. And that really was the genesis of the conversation that led us here today. And so we did some research and looked at what is going on. A lot of this should be intuitive, but I don't think we can do a good public policy without doing the research. And what you see here is the trend going back to June of 2022, not only in EVs, but also hybrid vehicles. And the trend is that those are continuing to be a larger and larger percentage of the fleet. So while all cars generally are tending to get more efficient, we do have a sector, particularly the ABs, that are paying nothing towards the fuel tax. So we quantified what does that mean in Washoe County, and you can see here between the two. And this is compared to what people who have internal combustion engines would be paying. So if all these vehicles were the same as the rest of the fleet, we would have had about $15 million more to spend in our community. So that gives you a sense of the order of magnitude of dealing with this issue before it gets to a point basically where it's a crisis. Now, before we came forward with this, the first thing we did is we actually went out and said, let's find out what the answers are and what the options are. And you heard some of that in the testimony today from some of the public, is what are the choices and what things can we do? So we engaged the Gwen Center, which is a nonpartisan public policy group that focuses on coming up with public policy based on true analysis. And the three methods, which I'll touch on briefly, vehicle miles traveled is essentially the ultimate replacement for gas tax. In other words, everybody would pay based on the amount of miles they drive. And that's one that's been under discussion for many, many years. It is probably the most complex and difficult and... Cost of implementation is probably astronomical because you're really talking about going to a whole new way of collecting data and billing people. The beauty of the gas tax or the fuel tax system is everybody pays incrementally when you buy gas. And so the bill is really charged to the wholesalers and not the individuals. It's baked into the price. So you don't have to do like you may be at a retail store where somebody has to calculate the tax and and you've got to pay it incrementally that way. This is a very simplistic tax. The other one which was mentioned is the charge on kilowatt hours. And what we found on that one is not just our research and Gwen's research, but a lot of people across the country have been looking at this. That also is a very complex system because you're talking about a whole different energy source delivered in a whole different way and figuring out how to charge that And think about it just in your own house, you know, finding out how much of your energy is actually for your vehicle versus everything else you use your energy for, and then reporting that back to a system that could then assess you and levy the charge against you. So I would say neither of these alternatives are really out of the picture. They're just not a near-term solution. And that's why the wind center suggested that we would do an enhanced registration fee. So we are not the only ones that have and are considering this. If you look at this chart, you can see that we're one of only 10 states left in the country that hasn't already done this. And I'm sure it's the same reason that we're dealing with now. As all of these states have found, the problem is one that has to be addressed. And so the most economical, most efficient method is really the registration fee. So we're not cutting edge here. We're basically following what the other states have done. To get a sense of how the community feels about this issue, we did a poll in December of last year, and we went out, we asked a whole bunch of questions to 800 registered voters who were likely voters in Washoe County. And the reason we did this was, you know, we've done this analysis, we've looked at what other states have done, we asked the Gwen Center, but the part we haven't really done is what is the community sentiment. And so you can see here that the feedback that we got from this poll was that six in 10 people feel like, yes, there should be a fee on electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles. And so that was our first touch point to say, what is the community sentiment? And when we did a little deeper dive into their comments, this is essentially what was behind the that position and I would use the term paying their fair share is really what we heard from people. This was not something that we plugged. This is what they told us why they supported it. So we did a second poll giving all of the national issues that have gone on related to the huge increase in fuel. The Iran war, a lot of things that would certainly, one would think, would influence people's opinion between December and now. And so we completed our second poll this month, early June. What we learned was people still have the basic same position on this, which is 6 and 10 say it seems like the right and fair thing to do. And so they did support an advisory question. And I would point out now what we're talking about today is not a tax. It's not a fee. It's a question about the sentiment of the people in Washoe County in terms of this being a viable and reasonable solution. to plug the gap, if you will, on our shortfall for transportation improvements. So, in conclusion, just to summarize why this matter really is important, it's necessary to keep our roads good, as I mentioned earlier. If we don't invest in our roads, then they will start falling apart, and we'll be in a place where we're chasing very bad roads at a very high price. And I don't think any of us are going to like that, because it'll become a question of whose road falls apart while someone else's road gets fixed. As I mentioned, the other big issue is safety improvements. This is our one source to do major transportation improvements like again going back to Mill Street where we installed the traffic signal so people could cross safely Mill Street at Golden Lane. We couldn't do that if we didn't have this revenue source. And then last, but the most important one when we pull the public is congestion. This really is our one tool to be able to widen those roads or add in new traffic signals or do some of the newer high technology measures we put in in our intelligent transportation system so we can make streets work more efficiently. That concludes my presentation and I am here as well as the team that helped me get to this point to answer any questions you might have.

Thank you. I would just ask for one more piece of clarification if we could. It's very clear this is an advisory question. This is not for the body of the Washoe County Commission right now to impose any tax. It's a question to the people who will decide. Can you share what those next steps, if in fact it does go on the ballot, and what the timing of that is, and then what is that full process?

Yes, great question for people to understand. So we have no ability, as I said earlier, at RTC to do any fee or tax. Washoe County is limited, as you all know, with what the legislature allows you to do. So you have no ability right now, if you wanted to, to pass legislation. a law to tax or charge a fee on EVs. So the next step after the ballot, the advisory ballot question is administered on the November ballot and we get the results back. Our plan would be to go forward to the legislature the 27th session with a bill for Washoe County which would implement what we're hoping is the will of the community. We would then present that to the legislature and while we don't control it obviously we will lobby very hard for the needs of Washoe County. My assessment is that this issue is is one that has been talked about the last two sessions and will likely be talked about again. But we will certainly be at an advantage in Washoe County because we'll have the sentiment of the public and we'll also have a specific bill on what our needs are.

Thank you for that clarification. I think sometimes there's always misunderstanding about what various agencies can do. But I think one thing is clear, the legislature has the ability to, they have a wide scope of opportunity. All right, I thank you so much for the presentation. I actually am going to open it to public comment first and then go to the commissioners for any questions. So I'll call for public comment at this time, thank you. Catherine Yarte.

Good afternoon. Catherine Yarte for the record. I'm glad I kept the second one because I did miss a point in my first. I do agree this is a good start and a band-aid to alleviate the loss that we're experiencing on the revenue and to create some equity for gas and diesel drivers. One of the other points that I did feel that was missed and requires addressing is many people are registering their vehicles outside of Washoe County to avoid the taxes altogether. So ensuring we find a way to capture that. And again, not capturing the travel through the state of people that don't live here is a big loss of revenue for us. Additionally, for commercial transportation businesses like Amazon, UPS, and those that have fleets in this state, many of those are registered outside of Washoe County and outside of the state. So if we're not going to, if there's an opportunity to potentially propose requiring that they register in the state, if their fleets are going to be based in Washoe County or have them pay a fee into this to help contribute towards the roads, I think this is a great start and I'm glad that's actually getting somewhere. I just hope that we have the ability to see it through to ensure that we are maximizing the revenue for this community so that we are not left behind.

Thank you. Jeff Church.

Thank you. I'll put that little cartoon up again. Jeff Church, I run RenotaxRevolt.com. I strongly disagree with some of the statements made about the Gwinn Report. I read that. If you give me an extra 20 seconds, I can explain that. But I disagree 100%. Mr. Thomas also failed to mention that if you did take a taxi or bus here, those are exempt from RTC-5. So maybe you could start by taxing them. More, more, more taxes is not the answer. I'm opposed to any new ballot measure that would even suggest that we raise taxes on EVs and on hybrids. None of that mentions clean air. You have an air resource board that some of you may sit on right next door. Clean air is important, and I contribute to that by having an EV that I just sold, and I've now got a plug-in EV, and we reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I really have to ask hypothetically, would it make you happy if I traded that in, because you're going to raise my taxes, and bought a Honda Civic that burns gas? Is that accomplishing anything? Doesn't take any more cars off the road, that's for sure. And along that line, if you really wanna look at this, you're gonna look at light rail. That's what we need and RTC is totally opposed. But I do have an EV, so is that gonna be retroactive or am I hosed? There's legal issues there. There's also legal issues with the wording of what you propose. I don't want to litigate. I litigated one of the most recent ballot measures, and I won successfully out of court, but I won. So let's not litigate this. I'll be happy to sit down with the attorney and at least point my views out, and he can tell me if I'm right or wrong before you go ahead. You've got until the 14th of July to do this. And I want to talk about George Washington when he was referring to some of the enlisted troops. He said they were cunning and bared considerable watching, as the first speaker said. We're cunning as taxpayers. I go down to Carson City. That's what Mr. Thomas didn't also mention. You're blaming EVs for the reduction, and it's actually not a reduction. You're making more money than ever, $110 million. But you're blaming EVs when, in fact, you can blame me because I go down with the gas car and I fill up in Carson City. It's not the EVs. It's the fact that most of us are smart enough to go to Fernley or to Carson, and the more you raise taxes, the more we're likely to do it. On the... Issue of need in what you have there, that's not a statement of fact. You haven't established there's a need. It's an option. You're opening yourself for legal liability there. And again, I want to point out light rail is probably the answer. We just had a fatal accident a couple days ago during that rainstorm by USA Parkway. People die. Repeatedly, they die on USA Parkway area from accidents. Almost a daily occurrence are accidents there. Light rail is the answer to that. Raising taxes on EVs doesn't take a single car off the road except those people are going to sell them. And again, legally, are you going to make me pay retroactive? I pay my fair share, and I could prove that if you give me an extra 20 seconds, which you won't.

Thank you. Veronica Cortez.

Hello, Veronica Cortez for the record, advocate for Sun Valley. What I'm holding here, it's a network plan survey, sorry, a network plan survey. Now in November, RTC, you can see this is their document, came out and did a presentation to about 10 people and they asked us to fill out these, you know, how do you feel, it's a network plan survey about how you feel in Sun Valley. So I'm just gonna read some of these. So for example, this person walks daily a few times per week. They don't feel safe at all because they said there's lack of sidewalks. Crossing the street does not feel safe. Too much traffic or vehicles are too fast. And it says, how often do you make a trip on a bicycle? Rarely, never. And it says, how safe do you feel riding a bicycle or scooter in your neighborhood? Not safe at all. It says, rate the condition of key walking and biking features in your neighborhood. New or expanded facilities are needed for sidewalks, crosswalks, street lighting, traffic signals, bike lanes and paths, separation from traffic, buffers or barriers, bus stops or transit access. It says, where do you go or where would you like to go by walking, biking or using a scooter in your neighborhood? Number one answer, grocery store. People want to be able to walk to a local grocery store in Sun Valley. Right now it's impossible, why? People are dying daily on our streets because safety and also we don't have a grocery store. So here's some information maybe you can work off if you want to get that vote. 60% for me is not a winning vote. I say let's find all the ballots that got returned to the ROV. Let's ask them how they feel about this measure on the ballot because they're not having a say in it because they couldn't even be contacted. So I have various of these. They're talking about too much traffic, having wide ditches. Again, crossing the street doesn't feel safe. And that's already been proven at the last Food Truck Thursday that we had. People got run over. Unfortunately, one was a kid. But you want to get some more money. What about all those off-road vehicles that are always driving all over the streets? They're driving right in front of the sheriffs. We defunded our police, but we didn't defund our taxes. And now everybody can do whatever they want in Sun Valley. All the off-road vehicles are coming up. They can just go down to the gas station, fill up, and then go home or go off to the hills or go wherever they want. They don't have registration. They don't have insurance. They're tearing up our streets more. I don't know if you know in Sun Valley, we have half streets. Ever been down Mineral? You're going to go half paved and then half dirt. We have three agencies that's in charge of our roads out there, RTC, SVGID, and Washoe County, and we can't get it together. We should have the money for this. Why would you want to tax us? We can't even afford it. We have people walking to the gas station to get one or two gallons so they can get their family to the doctor, to the grocery store. No more taxes. 60% doesn't want it. 0% wants no more taxes. Did I say that right? Sorry, we don't want taxes. Thank you.

I have these if you're interested.

Thank you. There's nobody else signed in.

Okay, I'll open it up. Commissioner Herman, do you have anything? Any questions for Mr. Thomas?

Okay, there we go. Thank you for the presentation. I'm still trying to figure out, you know, what the public is going to really need. And so I'll know when I go to vote. So thank you.

Thank you. Vice Chair Garcia, do you have anything?

Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Thomas, for those of the board members who are not part of the ROTC board, I know you mentioned the Gwinn study report, but can you also talk about some of the other votes we've taken at the ROTC board and some of the other reports that we've seen that have led us to the point we are here today?

So we've been talking about this issue at least for six years since I've been in this position. And it really comes about when we look at, in the past, we presented to the board, you know, what our future looks like in terms of the ability to keep up with growth and as well as the state of the roads. We've done research, I guess, in preparing for bills in the past. And we've also engaged our lobbyist, Mike Killerby, who's here, to bring forward legislation. I'm working with the legislature for the last two sessions, and we haven't really seemed to be able to get off center, so... That's why the board asked for us to go look at this issue, specifically bringing in the Gwinn Center. If there's another study that we did that I'm not thinking of right now, maybe you can help me out.

The regional maintenance, the big road study.

Oh, yes, okay, certainly. I'm sorry, I forgot all about that one. So we also did a study where we looked at the maintenance of roads within our – three local governments as well as rtc and not surprisingly i don't have the number off top of my head but we came back that um we are getting further further behind in terms of the ability to maintain roads um so that was an another piece that we had not specifically to look at this issue but also to quantify what is going on with the future now but also the future And really, in spite of the fact that I don't think anybody likes paying for fuel tax, it really is necessary for us to maintain our roads. And I do know we get a lot of complaints about the roads from the general public and so do all of you. So regardless of what type of vehicle it is, it uses the road. And when you use the road, you damage the road. So this is fundamentally a question, do you want to have safe, well-maintained roads? If you do, then it's going to cost. And really the question is here, you know, probably nobody wants to pay, but This is really about fairness. That's really what this question is. Is there a subcategory of drivers who shouldn't be paying their fair share? And I think that's why you get the 60% support is because we've heard that from the public is they think it's a fair way to deal with the issue. It's not a final solution. It's basically what we have today.

Yeah, I think the historical context is important. Commissioner Hill is the chair of the RTC board, so we see and hear presentations that the public may not be aware of if you're not following the RTC board meetings. You know, rewinding the tape sometimes and providing that context is really important. Our board did see the maintenance study. Then we saw the Gwinn Center study. We reviewed both of those in public meetings. We've received the updates on poll number one. Y'all, in my opinion, went above and beyond to take poll number two. You didn't have to do that, but you did provide those results to us. for the record, our RTC board unanimously approved this item to come before us. And so, again, this isn't about what it is or how it's going to be implemented or how it's going to look. It's really just putting the vote to the people. And for me, there's nothing more important than that. We are going to take another litmus test if approved today. to see what the sentiments are of the people who voted us into these positions. And I think that in and of itself provides the greatest amount of transparency and accountability for elected officials because we're really just taking the feedback of the people before we decide to make policy recommendations and moving forward with anything. So I'm very comfortable with the process. It's an exciting time. I wasn't here back in 2008 when the fuel tax was approved and then the indexing was approved. After that, those must have been some challenging conversations. But we're sitting here today, and I am fully in support of hearing from the voters in November. about what they think on this fairness issue. Because for me personally, I believe it boils down to fairness. We know drivers and people are driving more, but if they're not contributing to our roads, it's not sustainable. So that's all I have to say. Thank you.

Thank you. Commissioner Hill.

Thank you Madam Chair and thank you Mr. Thomas for your work to the community and for pushing this initiative forward and helping RTC lead the way. I think just all I would say to the community on concerns of Washoe County getting their fair share of this, this is why we're doing it because We We have been waiting for action from the legislature on this issue and due to inaction We have got to advocate for our community. We have the studies as Vice chair Garcia pointed out that show that we we need to invest in our infrastructure not only Do we need to invest in our infrastructure to ensure that we have a safer community? but we have got to invest in our infrastructure because it also creates a great paying jobs in our community as well that are private jobs. And so I think that understanding how RTC works and how well we've been able to steward the taxpayer dollar. And I think Bill pointing out those projects, thank you for doing that because we have been on the team at RTC has been on overdrive, getting great projects online and We are looking at rail to trick. It's $2 billion. That's just... to get it up and going. And we are thinking about how we're going to do it because we also think it's a priority. So we're looking beyond roads. But I just I think this is the right thing to do. And I think that the community will also respond and say, yes, we want people to pay their fair share. I've been around the state the last nine months. And when I point this inequity out, people are pretty horrified that especially that we don't have EV fleet paying their fair share on the road. So I think that we'll see what the voters have to say. And I'm looking forward to supporting this as well, both in the ballot initiative and the advisory question, excuse me, and also personally voting for it as well. So thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, thank you again for taking the time and thanks to both of you for serving on RTC and the entire RTC board and the depth to which you went on this item is over and above. And so I just really want to thank you and I know the last time, it's been a while since you actually came and were talking about EV in terms of your entire presentation And I'll mention it again, I am a EV owner, and I do not pay. And my vehicle is heavier than most other vehicles that are comparable to its size. So every day I'm going and traveling around, I am not paying my fair share. And I certainly believe that this question, as the Vice Chair stated, and as we've stated again and again, this is gonna go to the voters to decide. This is not a tax. EV owners are not paying now. That's the bottom line. They aren't. And the systems in terms of registration and capturing travel and all of that, the complexity to all of that, just the cost. I remember at the legislature, they were talking about just changing the system to accommodate various options was millions and millions of dollars to actually change the system within the DMV to collect it. just to collect it. And even if they had the funding at that time, it was going to take years or several years to actually implement it. So you're still losing that. So I commend the RTC board as a whole for doing their due diligence. I professionally want to thank you for the second survey. I really appreciate that. And I think this will be an educational campaign that is in need of this is not a tax. This is a ballot question, an advisory question, and thank you for also sharing what that next process will be if this were to go through. So we've done public comment. All questions, any other comments or questions by this board? Hearing none, I'll entertain a motion at this time.

Move to approve the resolution as stated in the staff report.

Thank you. We have a motion by Commissioner Hill. Do we have a second? Second. Second by Vice Chair Garcia. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Aye. Okay, we have three votes in yes in support of this non-taxed item, and we have one nay, so thank you, the motion carries. Thank you so much. All right, thank you again, RTC, for your presentation. We're gonna move now to item eight, Vice Chair Garcia.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Let me find my spot. Sorry. No, that's okay. Today I moved to approve three different donations, $3,500 from the Reno Elks Lodge number 597 for district courts, veterans treatment courts, $11,255.02 in monetary donations and supplies to the regional animal services, and a pass-through donation of $3,000 from the Rocky Mountain Information Network.

Thank you. Do we have any public comment on these donations? There's no one signed in. Okay, is that in the form of a motion, Vice Chair? Yes, ma'am. Great, second. We have a motion and a second. Any further discussion? All right, hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Aye. Motion carries unanimously, thank you. Commissioner Herman, I hope you're okay just in terms of the logistics. I'm going to ask Commissioner Hill if she would do the consent item, please.

Thank you very much.

Okay. I don't want to pull anything on consent, so do you want a motion on it? Yeah. Okay, move to approve.

Does anybody want to pull anything really quick? Okay. Okay, great. Motion to approve. Okay. Do we have any public comment?

We do not okay, I I just don't have the numbers or that's what. Okay.

Okay, great so just track. This is the consent item 9, 1, 3, 9, G, 1, I apologize. No problem, thank you. All right. Is that okay with the motion for those items? Is that okay for the second? All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you. Now I'm going to do the block. And so Commissioner Herman, I'm going to have Commissioner Hill do the block just in the spirit of logistics, if that's okay. Thank you.

Absolutely.

Very wise.

Thank you. Thank you.

A block recommendation from, we would like to recommend 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25. That is in the form of a motion, Madam Chair.

Thank you. I'll second. We have a motion, a second. Do we have any public comment? We do. Thank you.

For item 14, Penny Brock. And Ms. Brock has documents to be distributed to the board. Thank you.

Penny Brock for the record. This agenda item is to approve the remodel to go ahead. There's great concerns about these plans for observation as you heard earlier. I am surprised I looked at the attachment to this agenda item and I did not see the floor plans. That is a great concern. How can you approve this remodel to begin without seeing the floor plans or even approving them? I would ask you to please table this agenda item until you are provided with not only the floor plans but floor plans that have been revised so that there can be true observation sitting in a long hall is not going to provide, it's gonna be even worse than it is now. That breaks federal and state law. These floor plans have been kept a secret. I know that Chair Hill's concern, I mean, Chair Andriola's concern is for transparency in our elections, which includes all data. This is data. Why can't this agenda item be tabled? There is time for consideration for the architect to come in and get input by the observers. So this floor plan can truly reflect that there will be true observation and transparency in the ballot processing room during election. The other concern is the funding for this project. We see that there's been approval of the lease, which over the term of the lease is almost $7 million. I would ask, was the required solicitation of bids done as required by Nevada Contract Law Chapter 332? Capital funding, this was done in the May budget of 3.4 million. Previous design plan funding from COVID funds, $1 million. Now the remodel, over $3 million. Was there a solicitation for bids done for any of these items as required by Nevada contract law, Chapter 332? For that reason alone, this agenda item should be postponed so things can be done according to the law. Thank you.

Thank you. J.S. McElhenney.

Madam Chair.

Yes.

I did not hear 14 when I heard the numbers being put in. And I wanted to have that taken off today's ticket table.

Okay. So you're asking to remove 14 from the block? From the block, absolutely.

Is that what you'd like to do?

Yes, I would.

Okay. Are you okay with removing 14 since you made the motion?

Well, I'm not okay tabling it, but I'm okay discussing it, certainly. Yeah, happy to remove item 14 from my motion, Madam Chair.

Okay, great. And are you okay with the second? Second. Just for clarification, we're just pulling the item, okay? Okay, thanks.

Any other public comment? J.S. McElhenney. I don't know that they're here. And then for item... 22, John Satterland. Does not appear to be here either. That's everybody.

Okay, great. Is there any further discussion on any of the items excluding item 14?

Madam Chair, if I may do a quick disclosure for agenda item number 22, and that's specifically for the grant going to UNR Street Reach Mobile Health. As you all know, or by now know, that I'm an employee of the University of Nevada, Reno. I will be voting on this item. I do not have any procurinary interest in it, so just wanted to put that on the record. Thank you.

All right. Hearing no other discussion, we have a motion and a second. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you so much. Now we'll go ahead and open up item number 14. Are there any questions about item number 14? And then I am going to ask for clarification from DA Large. Would you like me to open up public comment again for item 14?

I believe Michael large for the record, I believe that was all public comment. Yes, it was received. Yes. So in terms of whether or not we want a presentation from staff or just a presentation of the item or specific questions that need to be answered.

No, I appreciate it. I just wanted to make sure on the public comment, just want to make sure I'm fair and giving everybody an opportunity as they see fit. Does anyone do need a presentation on this?

I will make comment. Go ahead.

Oh, I was just going to ask, um, the county manager to clarify this item, um, in terms of, um, the process and also, um, our responsibility as policy versus actually operations.

and and some of the detail and then i i i am going to uh... follow-up with a comment thank you for some really adamant to the record if that makes a lot i don't know if fourteen sorry i'm also that's so this is a recommendation to authorize the guaranteed maximum price one or g m p one agreement for the washoe county registrar voters LONGLEY LANE REMODEL GMP 1 PROJECT WITH CLARK SULLIVAN CONSTRUCTORS INCLUDING DOING BUSINESS AS CLARK SULLIVAN CONSTRUCTION AND THE CONSTRUCTION MANAGER AT RISK SEAMAR IN THE AMOUNT OF $3.1 MILLION EFFECTIVE ON JULY 1, 2026 AND TO APPROVE THE INSTALLATION OF TENANT IMPROVEMENTS WHICH INCLUDE DEMOLITION, CONCRETE AND FENCING, CARPENTRY ROOFING, INSTALLATION, METAL FRAMING, DRYWALL DOORS, HARDWARE, FINISHES, LOCKERS, SIGNAGE, METAL RACKING, FIRE PROTECTION, PLUMBING, HVAC, AND ELECTRICAL SYSTEMS. SO NOW THAT I'VE READ IT IN THE RECORD, JUST FOR FURTHER CLARIFICATION, THERE WAS SOME CONCERN FROM the speakers about the observation, meaningful observation. And first of all, I think I'd like to clarify that in the past, you've approved many projects, all of which don't include floor plans. You haven't seen them. That is not, you're approving in essence, and the DA can correct me, but you're approving that not to exceed for the general work that's going to be done, knowing that a lot of these plans are still being butted. We're happy to get together as we did to talk and staff with folks that are interested in providing public input We will continue to do that This item is larger than just the public observation area as you know when you approved it This is a nearly 50,000 square foot warehouse. It's a giant open space and When we talk about ballot processing rooms, there aren't rooms. The whole intent of what the plans outline, and I will joke with our ROV who called it the corridor of democracy because I know in discussions and putting these plans together, his whole intent was to make that observation experience as transparent and visible as possible. That being said, instead of rooms, there's chain link. There's visibility throughout the entire project. I can assure you that because I've been part of those discussions. Additionally, what this contemplates is the result of a very transparent list of pre-approved subcontractors and vendors. And in the staff report, it clearly outlines that the CMAR provided transparent access to all bids and is awarding the various work packages to the appropriate responsive and responsible bidder. So, as far as the procurement question is put out there, I wanted to address that that is in the document that's out provided to the public. If there's anything else I can help answer, I will. I just commit to the public, though, that we will continue to sit down and work through questions or suggestions on increased public transparency and meaningful observation, as that has always been the intent and will continue to do so.

I really appreciate that. That was going to be my comment in terms of just continuing to engage. And I think it's always hard when you look at a floor plan. That is a huge building. walking through that building, it's just such a huge one. We all went on tours, and I know the public has seen it, and I commend ROV McDonald and the leadership for all of the work, making changes, staying as tight as you possibly can within some of the budget constraints. But I do think that there is an opportunity through public awareness and feedback on how things are going to work. So, for instance, I've heard a request for chairs, and I've spoken with the county manager about, you know, can we have chairs? I believe ROV McDonald also, you know, is amenable to those conversations. I think the fact that we have heard countless feedback about what is called this fishbowl which is I don't think an official name, but everyone uses this fishbowl. And even the constraints and the remodeling that happened a few years ago to try and accommodate as much transparency as possible. So I think the county is absolutely committed. Thank you, Manager Thomas, for your commitment and RV McDonald's as well to actually look at what we can do the best we can to have everything be available for full transparency. Because if there are those who want to look at everything, there's nothing to hide. This is all to be transparent. And so I think welcoming those opportunities, just like with any feedback, those things are taken into consideration and have to be balanced with the project as a whole. So I really appreciate Manager Thomas for you helping with that and for the ROV as well. So Commissioner Herman, do you have anything?

I just wanted to make some comments. Sure. I didn't really have any chance to do that. It just seems like we're in an awful rush to spend this amount of money, which is a lot of budgets tight. These are comments from some of the folks out in the public. We have elections every two years, and we're putting an awful lot of money into a leased building, including a roof. We bought a building with a bad roof, it sounds like. And here's other things. You know, there's a lot of changes proposed coming down the pike that will affect our needs and reduce our physical requirements. I have a feeling. and it just seems like we're in an awful rush to get this passed. I don't know quite why. The first election that this will be taken care of will be the 2028. We need to concentrate on having a very good improved election for our general on this year's election, and I just I just feel concerned for the people that are so concerned about it, and I'm concerned for them because I represent them, and so these were questions I had, and that's why I wanted to take that off, you know, except for discussion. What can I say? Anyhow, this is kind of serious, and... And so we do want to be careful because we don't want to spend money that we don't have. All right. That's my comment.

Thank you. Well, thank you so much, Commissioner Herman. I think we all agree we're trying to live within our means and where things can be cut, they'll be cut. And if there is any legal requirements that come down, we'll have to adjust. We'll have to follow the law. Manager Thomas, is there anything else you'd like to add?

I will just remind the board that we consolidated two warehouses and the location here that we've consistently heard for years is too small, not very visible, into a larger, more accommodating space where the public can see all of the things instead of three separate locations. And by moving this operation, it allows us to make some improvements in this building for ease of transparency, public safety, staff safety, things like that. So I applaud the the board for making the move. And I know it's going to increase our ability to perform safe and secure elections in the future. So thank you.

Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Well, we've taken public comment. We've deliberated. I'll entertain a motion at this time.

Madam chair, I move to approve the guaranteed maximum price one as outlined in the staff report.

We have a motion by vice chair. Do we have a second? I'll second it. All right, we have a motion by Vice Chair, a second by Commissioner Hill. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you so much. We'll look forward to also maybe hearing how things might be going in that direction. I'm sure there'll be more to come. All right, I'm going to go ahead and close item 14. We're going to move to item 15, and this is an introduction and first reading, and I believe the clerk is going to be helping us with this item. Dr. Young is here, too. This will be bill number 1955.

1955? Yes. Okay, thank you. An ordinance amending the Washoe County Code at Chapter 110, Article 408, by applying the findings that reference... site-specific characteristics, only when those characteristics are present on the parcels in question to ensure the design flexibility and associated public benefits inherent to common open space development is potentially available to all subdividable parcels. Thank you.

Mr. Young.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair, Commissioners, Eric Young from your planning staff. Today we're asking you to consider an update to an amendment you made just last year to Article 408, which is commonly referred to as common open space development. So what we did last year was to add some findings to this article. Prior to April of last year, there were no findings required to approve common open space development. all familiar with the concept of finance we the planning commission the board of adjustment most of our boards are asked to make findings when they make a decision but our common open space development did not require any findings at all and so in april of 2025 a series of five findings were added to the article and as part of that addition the requirement was that all five findings had to be met In the past year, we've recognized that two of the findings have very site-specific physical conditions referenced in them. And so the proposal that we're asking to consider is to require three of the five listed findings always be met, but that the two findings that reference very site-specific physical conditions only need to be met when they actually exist on the site. So, let's step back and think about what is common open space development. 408 exists in order to provide significant flexibility to a landowner, but also in order for us to, as a community, achieve some goals that we may not be able to get, but we often desire. So, the purpose of the article is set forth regulations to permit variation of lot size, so you get smaller lots generally. In order to preserve or provide open space, protect natural and scenic resources, achieve a more efficient use of land, minimize road building, and encourage a sense of community. All of these things are benefits to the community that we often seek. And so in order to get those, we provide this opportunity to vary lot size. Can't be used for anything. Of course, it can't be used for your roads, or if you propose to give the community a park or a school, that doesn't count. It can't be used for your necessary facilities like ponds and drainage facilities. It has to be a bona fide common open space. So what are these two findings that we've discovered don't exist on every parcel? Right now they're labeled as a and B provide open space protect natural and scenic resources. So the first one specifically references references areas with steep slopes, development, constrained areas, heavily treat areas. Those don't exist on on every property. Clearly the next finding development identifies And protects natural and scenic resources, including but not limited to ridgelines, waterways, large diameter trees, and habitat for special status species. If those exist, we clearly would have protected them. But the fact is, sometimes, there's not a lot left in Washoe County, but sometimes you just have a nice flat parcel. And you want to take advantage of minimized road buildings. creating a sense of community, just being a more efficient developer. The other things that we agree are benefits to the community. But if these two things don't exist on your property, then you don't qualify for a 408 development any longer. The other findings that are non-site-specific, achieve a more efficient use of land, minimize road building, encourage sense of community, all of these things are often achieved to a higher sense when we apply the Article 408 Common Open Space Development. So, what we are proposing, this is the specific change, is to simply say that ARTICLES FINANCE A THROUGH C HAVE BEEN SATISFIED, AND THAT D AND E HAVE BEEN SATISFIED WHEN THEY'RE REASONING APPLY TO THE PARCELS IN QUESTION. YOU'LL NOTICE THAT WE HAVE CHANGED THE ORDER. THAT'S SIMPLY AN EDITORIAL CHOICE. IT SEEMS LIKE THE TWO THAT MAY APPLY FROM TIME TO TIME SHOULD BE THE LAST TWO, AND THE THREE THAT ALWAYS APPLY SHOULD BE THE FIRST THREE. SO THE LETTERING HAS CHANGED, BUT WHAT THIS ACCOMPLISHES IS LANGUAGE That clearly says you have to do all five if they exist, but when these two don't exist, you'd still have to do A through C, but you can qualify. So that is the entire amendment that we're asking you to consider. This is an update, a betterment, a refinement of an amendment we made just last year. If you have any questions, I'm happy to talk to you about that. And here's a potential motion for you to consider. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Is there any public comment?

There is not.

Okay.

Vice Chair Garcia. Thank you, Madam Chair. I just have a quick question. Thank you for recognizing the unintended consequence of what we passed last year and finding an easy solution. The order you mentioned makes a lot of sense to me. I just had a quick question about if this impacted any of the projects that went through the public process in the last year and two months, and if so, how was that remedied?

No. Once you're through, you're through. This is for anything that comes through the door. After. Right. Anything that has not been processed yet.

Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Commissioner Herman, do you have any questions?

No, thank you.

Thank you again for updating this. And this is a first reading, so I'll need a motion.

Madam Chair, I move to introduce the first reading of bill number 1955 as outlined in the staff report. Thank you so much.

Well, thank you, Mr. Young. Appreciate it. We'll move now to item 26. We'll close 15 and move to 26. And this is to conduct a second reading, public hearing and possible adoption. And Madam Clerk.

This will be ordinance number 1763. Okay. An ordinance amending Washoe County Code Chapter 5 related to employee service awards. This was formerly bill number 1954.

Thank you. Does anyone would like to request a presentation? This is a second reading. Hearing none, do we have any public comment on this? There is nobody signed in. All right. Hearing no requests, I'll entertain a motion, please.

Move to adopt 1763.

Great. We have a motion by Commissioner Hill. Do we have a second? Second by Vice Chair Garcia. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you so much. We'll go ahead and close item 26, move to 27, which is public comment. Manager Thomas.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Comment heard under this item will be limited to three minutes per person, and it may pertain to matters both on and off the commission agenda. Unused time might not be allocated to other speakers, and please make your comments to the commission as a whole. There is nobody signed in.

Thank you so much. We'll go ahead and close public comment at this time and move to 28, Commissioner's County Manager Announcements. Manager Thomas.

This includes reports and updates to the board and commission updates, requests for information or topics for future agendas. I do not have anything.

Commissioner Herman, do you have anything? No, ma'am. Thank you. Commissioner Hill? Vice Chair Garcia? I don't have anything. This meeting is adjourned at 1.16. Thank you.