Board of Commissioners - Regular Meeting

All right. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining us today on our ribbon-cutting ceremony and our very first day in this new meeting room. And just bear with us. We went through this all yesterday and tested it all out, so hopefully everything will go smoothly. But with that, I'm going to open up our formal session at 10 a.m. on August 6th, and I'm going to ask Commissioner Starrett to lead us in the flag salute.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you for that. Can everybody hear me all right in the audience? Okay, great. Is it too loud? Nope, okay. All right, we're going to move on to our calendar session. Is there any changes by the commissioners? None for me. None? D is public comment. If you're online, raise your virtual hand. If you're in the audience, just raise your hand. Seeing none in the audience, is there any online, Bailey? No? OK, moving on.

Hold on. You keep popping up and off. Pardon? Adam, who's that?

No, it's somebody online.

We'll give it a few more seconds here. Adam, oh, there we go. Go ahead and promote Adam. Adam, go ahead with your name and address first, please.

Adam Creighton, 1123 Southwest 51st Street, Lincoln City, Oregon. Thank you.

You have public comment?

Not at this time, I'm here in support of Juliet's House.

Okay, thank you. Moving on to presentations. And that brings us to Russell Mark and Juliet's House. Good morning.

Good morning, commissioners. Thank you for allowing us to be on your agenda today. And welcome to your new space. It's really quite lovely. As you know, last week we had a brief discussion about the possibility of Julia's House with support from the county to apply for a Community Development Block Grant. We sent a slide deck on Monday that we hope answers most of the questions. that you might have. And I'm here to answer any further questions that you might have so we can proceed. Next year is our 30th anniversary. It's hard to believe that we've been serving this community for that length of time. And our hope is and our heavy need is to expand the services to children who have been abused and neglected, along with serving their caregivers and their families to move forward in their healing process. As you know, the point of this grant is to purchase the building next door to us. It's a small office building. It was originally a dental office, then a psychology building. It's currently not being used much at all. Dr. Peter Carey owns the building and his wife. We have talked for the last few years about the potential of purchasing it. This grant will allow us to do that and to expand the services, our assessment services, along with creating a trauma-informed We are seeing an increase in the number of kids who have been exposed to drugs. We are seeing an increase in the number of kids who have been In this space, not only would we expanding assessment opportunities, but hopefully there is enough office space to bring in another agency that is also dealing with low income families. We've talked with Casa quite a bit. and also a potential of an independent living office for kids graduating out of the foster care system. This we see is a preliminary step to our biggest dream of creating a family justice center for our county and the service area that Juliet's House and so many other incredible agencies in this area serve. Are there any questions at this time?

Commissioner King? No, I know Arthur's here as well. Arthur's here as well. would be helping us facilitate this grant.

Can you hear me okay? Is this one on?

I don't have a green light, so.

You can dump it. Yeah, you were on.

Go ahead and hit it. There you go. It should be on there. Hello, everyone. I'm Arthur Chappell with Business Oregon. We're the state agency that administers the Block Grant program and happy to answer any questions for you about that. Any questions?

I don't have any questions. I spoke with both Arthur and Russell and Adam, who's online, a couple of weeks ago and got most of my questions answered. I think this is more of trying to work within their deadlines, which they've sent in their emails. And where are you guys wanting to, you know, do we have a consensus to move forward with this? Do we not want to? So I think this is, for me, an opportunity for you guys to

to weigh in here if you want to move forward with Juliet's house in partnership commissioner do you want to go or do we want to go to online and get comment from Adam Adam you want to go ahead with your comment please I don't have any specific comment I'm just here to answer any questions if I am needed or if I can

Okay. Sounds good. Thank you.

That was part of the grant writing process.

Got it.

Okay. All right. Commissioner Stewart?

Yes. Thank you.

Am I on here? Yes. Okay.

First of all, thank you for being here. And Russell, I want to thank you for the hard work that you and your team have done over the years. This is unspeakably difficult, challenging, getting more and more challenging as this problem doesn't seem to be going away. Arthur, thank you for the time this week to talk. I did have quite a number of questions. So having said that, I appreciate the work that's being done. I also have to acknowledge that my questions and my decisions would come from a position of fiduciary responsibility for the Board of Commissioners, and that is primarily how I'm going to approach this. So a couple of questions. I'm familiar with the CDBG grants and how they work and how complicated they are. i'm looking at the timeline of this and i'm a little concerned about the fact that it's it's pretty late in the game i know that we have one uh that our public works director mark glago has been working on on behalf of cove orchard sewer district which the county does have jurisdiction over so i know that there's one in play i know that there are different buckets of money and this would not be in competition with this but i also know that and also that we have understood that there is no other competing for this particular bucket of money. Okay, a couple of things come to mind. A number of the sublet part of that. I'm just wondering if Arthur can weigh in on whether or not that is allowable, and then also the rehab part of it, because the grant, the request is for that, for the acquisition, knowing going forward that there would have to be additional funds garnered for the rehab part of that, which is a whole nother separate issue. I'm wondering how we're going to address that because when someone goes out to build something, they don't have to deal with the prevailing wage, the whole situation that government has to deal with in terms of having to pay a higher price. So there's that piece. So I do have a couple of questions about whether sublet is allowed. under this particular arrangement. And maybe we'll just start there with where the funds would come from for rehabbing the building.

So this would be in the community facilities bucket of block grant funds. We have four main buckets. There's the public works bucket, which Cove Orchard is going for. It's about half the money. There's about a quarter of the funds set aside for housing rehab, which I think Amity is considering, right? A housing rehab application. And then about a quarter of the funds are for community facilities, which this would be. And then there's one or 2% for odds and ends, but those are the four main buckets. Within the community facility project type, there are several different eligible activities. You can build a library, you can build a fire station, a food bank. This would be considered a family resource center. And a family resource center is a facility in which more than one nonprofit service provider are located. Uh, we don't do very many of these. They're not a common project type for us, but we did one in Woodburn a couple of years ago that would look very similar to this. Uh, the city was the applicant and love Inc was the prime tenant and love Inc sublets parts of that building to other service providers. The trick is that the block grant program. federally has three main objectives that you can meet. And the prime one, the one that you really have to focus your attention on is service to low and moderate income people. So any tenants in there need to be able to document that they're serving that eligible population of low and moderate income people. As long as Juliet's house is able to show in their policies that that's what they're doing, that that should be fine. The, Those policies would be submitted by the county as part of your application if you decide to go forward with this and we can help you workshop those. We can show examples from other project types. We can give you what Love, Inc. did down in Woodburn and you can model it on that. As far as the rehab goes, so these are federal funds and will require a NEPA review, National Environmental Policy Act environmental review. The environmental review for an acquisition project is one level, and for a construction project is more involved and more difficult. A project that's acquisition only would not trigger any Davis-Bacon or other prevailing wages because you're not doing any construction. There's no construction, so there's no prevailing wage. A project that was acquisition and rehabilitation would trigger that more difficult environmental review and the need to pay prevailing wages. The rules are clear that we cannot do a project, we cannot deliberately sidestep those regulations. So if Juliet's House does an acquisition, if Yamil County does an acquisition project as part of this grant, it needs to be a complete project. The facility needs to meet Juliet's House immediate needs. Now, if they have a long-term plan to expand that building or change it or add services, that's fine, but we need to have a complete project now

where to turn key if it's an acquisition project needs to be turnkey and ready to go to meet their short-term requirements you can add furniture and things like that it's no problem we have rented this building in the past it is ready for us to move into uh any uh further rehabilitation that's down the road we would do a separate capital campaign for that uh as well as using funds that we have in our reserves right now but it is it's ready for us to move into now

I wonder if I might speak just a minute longer about the county's role, the business Oregon's role, why I'm at the table at all. So forgive me, but the Johnson administration, President Johnson established housing and urban development. And they started on a nationwide campaign of urban renewal, slum clearing, blight clearing, housing construction. This was not universally popular, right? And the Nixon administration tried to reform that that federal spending and the Community Development Block Grant was one of those reforms. The idea was to preserve the federal funding for good projects like this, but give local governments a lot more control over how, when and where that money is spent. So rural communities like Yan Mill County apply through the state for community development block grant funds. Larger communities are called entitlement communities. They get money direct from HUD. You guys are in the balance of state program that Business Oregon administers. And there's a long list of eligible things that can be done with block grant. Oregon focuses on construction. That's sort of where Business Oregon's sweet spot is. We're a construction lender. That's what we know how to do. building acquisition would be part of that, right? That's another thing we know how to do. And so those tend to be the project types that are eligible. The county is the applicant for this program and the county is the recipient of the funds. So our contract will be with you. You will invoice us as needed to draw down the funds and we'll cut checks to Yamhill County. Yamo County is responsible for making sure the project gets implemented and built as required by HUD. We have lots of tools to help you through that process. There are lots of examples. We've been doing this a long time. We've got plenty, a library of documents that you can pull from. to show how to do this correctly. There are set asides within the grant to help you hire a third party grant administrator to keep you on the straight and narrow and in compliance. But it is the county's grant. And Juliet's House would be a subrecipient of that fund. That's a very common process. We do that around the state. I was involved in that Woodburn project that I mentioned. We also did a senior center in Dallas where the city of Dallas was a recipient. The senior center owns the building. Wasco County did one for a mental health clinic where the mental health clinic owns the building, but the county was the recipient of the fund. So it's not an unusual process at all. But I just want to be clear about your role in that. Yeah.

So in terms of COG's involvement with this, I was looking at the administrative part of this, which is really where the rubber meets the road for us. At least it is for me. So you've got that. Juliet's house, the admin cap is going to be 4% of the annual salary plus 30% of the roll up. So that is what you're anticipating So that's about $6,000, but they've got a $35,000 admin allowance. So that's something that Juliet's House is going to recoup admin costs based on your- That's predominantly for the Council of Government to manage the project. So because it says Juliet's House, Your operating officer is recouping that.

That's a piece of it. Yeah, just a piece to oversee the project from our side.

With COG. With COG.

But the majority of that expense would be to the Council of Governments.

So the admin fees, you talked about tools and things. That's not in addition to what is earmarked here, correct? Correct.

The block grant program allows you to pull off funds for grant administration, project management, environmental review fees, and exactly how you structure that is sort of up to the county. We've got some sidebars we can help you think through, but there are lots of ways to do it. Most commonly, counties hire a third-party grant administrator. In this area, the Middle Lambe Valley Council of Governments offers that service. They've done it for years. there's no requirement that you go with them, that you can put out an RFP and hire, there's lots of for-profit consultants that do this as well and do a good job with it. But these are, there are caps in the grant RFP for how much can be pulled aside for grant administration, project management, prevailing wage, you know, compliance, monitoring and things like that. And these should be, these are not fees that the county should keep. I would not advise you to try to do this in-house. If you squint at the rules, it's legally possible, but it's very difficult and I've never seen it work out for anybody. So it should be somebody that's not the county that's doing this grant administration. Juliet's House legally could do it. You could have a third party like the COG that could do it. And that latter arrangement is the most common.

Okay, thank you. And I just want to bring our administrator in at this point, because it really comes down to our, you know, what's our liability? That, of course, is huge for me. What's our liability? And then what is the, in terms of the responsibilities and the due diligence, I know that our administrator, our chief budget officer, has been working through the ARPA situation and the fidelity to whether those grants were administered and addressed properly. And that's been an ongoing issue with Treasury and so I I think I want to defer to how you see the county being able to staff and address this so that we don't say yes because of course we love the work we love Juliet's house but then we say yes and we're like yeah we are so short-staffed in terms of we're not short-staffed but we we run pretty lean so I don't want to go yeah okay Ken figure it out or okay uh Kevin figure it out. That's where I want to address all this here.

First time, can everybody hear me okay? Is my microphone working?

I can't really tell either.

Yeah, so if I understand correctly, there's a 10% on the award, a 10% cap. That's what's in here. I'm assuming that that's pretty standardized. And I completely agree, because I think we're doing the same for Covorture. We're working with COG on that program as well. But I see the breakdown, or at least what's being proposed. It looks like there's a portion for the environmental review, a portion for the grant management. and then I see a portion that's being proposed, but it still sounds like that we're still the county is still going to have an administrative role with this because obviously COG's not going to enter into a sub agreement and monitor that sub agreement compliance with that with Juliet's house that would fall on the county and our county council. uh in my team and then if the payments are being processed as well any invoices reporting or those requirements they're the county's still going to have a role in that because uh cog doesn't have access to our finance system so I mean there there is going to be some administration portion that's that's going to fall on the county for this and so just I don't know how that fits into it. So I guess that would be something we'd need to talk about if the board were to elect to move forward with this. Because like I said, there's going to be some administration or responsibilities that the county is going to have.

Well, and that's part of the reason why this is an acquisition only grant that we're looking for. We figure it's going to be Our role we see is to keep the lift of the county as light as possible. We're interested in writing the application, obviously, with any input that the county wants to make and certainly finalizing that. But even the administration should be fairly clean if it's just the purchase of the building and the property that comes with it.

The other question, I guess, that I would also have on top of that is with a grant like this, and because it's an acquisition, but there's some requirements to confirm that the property is being used in the future, I'm assuming that there's going to be ongoing reporting requirements or follow up with that as well? Arthur, you're gonna know more than.

Yeah, this was a two part answer there. I never wanna undersell the paperwork burden of a community development block grant. There's a lot to do. I think Russell's correct that Juliet's House can take on a lot of that burden for you, but they can't do all of it. As Kenny mentioned, you're gonna have to process invoices. one of the three of you commissioners will have to sign the environmental review and so forth. But there's a lot that COG and Juliet's House can do. And a lot of the paperwork that is unavoidably the county's responsibility is stuff that you're going to have to do anyway for Cove Orchard. So you're already going to do something called a 504 self-assessment, which we don't have to get into. But you're going to do a fair housing resolution that you adopt. And there's a long list of these things.

And that is one time for both? Or is it duplicates for each?

Most of it is one. You can submit it for both grants. Most of it is reusable.

And the way that I understand it, that's for future projects as well if we decided to. Correct. In 28, we decided to go for a different one.

You come back for another grant in the future, you might have to dust off and update some of those plans, your Section 3 plan, your limited English proficiency plan. And we have templates for these things you can review and adopt. You don't have to create it all from scratch. In a future grant, you may have to dust that stuff off and update it, especially if HUD updates its regulations. But you'll have the bones of it, and that's the big lift. And you're doing this anyway for Cove Orchard, sort of because you have to, right? So you'll have it done. Now, as far as ongoing compliance and monitoring, once the grant is closed out and our contract is done, the only requirement I can think of is that for five years, the facility must be used for an eligible use. It must be used as described in the application. and we hold the county responsible for ensuring that the most common way the counties address that is they record a deed restriction on the property that says this must be used as described in you know in our contract and after five years that deed restriction falls off and it's juliet's house property free and clear um So as long as they are going to continue to operate it as described, then there should be no problem. There's not much in the way of ongoing reporting. You have to do an audit. So you already do a single program audit for your federal funds. There's an incremental cost to do that for this grant. We can help pay for it while our contract is open. But then after it closes, you'll have the one more year of audit expense. I don't know how to estimate that for you, but it's not huge. You'll have the audit and you'll have that five-year requirement. And those are the only post-contract requirements I can think of at the moment.

And can you put a number to that? I'm not going to put you on the spot. Thank you. Because that's going to be an important...

The audit cost would be single-digit thousands low, I think. You pay tens of thousands for your audit every year at least, but the incremental expense for this grant would be... My second concern is going to be the liability to this.

I'm not going to get into the details, but we've been here and done this fairly recently where we got... we had we held the liability for the grant that was going to a third party and through the process it got a little bit ugly um i'm not saying that this would end up being the i i'm more trustworthy with this one than i would be but there's definitely a question there on liability that the county is taking on so we want to be very cognizant of that

And it'd be similar, like Commissioner Sterritt was mentioning, with the ARPA funds and all the various grants that we did during that timeframe, we had sub-agreements with each grant recipient. But ultimately, we're responsible. So we do follow-up, we do check-ins, we check on progress. This one's a little simpler because it is just an acquisition versus a construction-type project to where things are in motion. But... Ultimately, we're responsible to where the funds are coming through until we have that sub agreement. And ARPA is probably the easiest example that I have to do reports to the US Treasury and I'm monitoring. And if we come December, which is the deadline for spending for all ARPA funds, you know ultimately you know we're responsible in repaying any unused funds um back to the treasury which of course then we would have to go through that sub agreement working with the grantees and hey you need to return the funds because we need to return it to the you know so we have we we have agreements in place to do that and um You know. So there is some risk and exposure that if further down the road it's not compliant, or it doesn't get spent, or it's a different that the first one they're going to knock on the county store, and then i'd be knocking on the the sub recipient store. This wouldn't be so I mean

This is not the first time. I mean, I can even think of a grant, too, that we actually lost out partial of, ended up going, the remainder of it ended up going to another entity. But we ended up holding the bag on that one, too. So it is very concerning. And we definitely need to be cognizant of that. What's our time frame?

Behind the commission, Juliet's House was a recipient of ARPA funding for a mental health building. And that was a very clean process. It was a complete construction from the ground up. And it was a very, very clean process.

Agreed. Appreciate that.

in that world of liability and what ifs if for some reason Juliet's house had to cease to exist and we were three out of the five years done would uh the county be able to sublet to let's say Casa or another or Henderson House or something like that, a similar organization to be able to operate out of from that point of view, would that still satisfy the... Well, we wouldn't own the property, correct?

Juliet's House would actually own the property.

Juliet's House would own the property. With deed restrictions. With the deed restriction. The county is responsible for making sure the property is used for an eligible activity for five years. If Juliet's house went under after three and you had two more years of that, what I can say, commissioners, we don't want the money back. The paperwork for us to get the money back to bill you and repay HUD would be miserable. And we would work with you to find an answer, to get somebody else in there to do something. So to cover our liability. pieces of being on the hook. I can't waive the requirement for the five years. That's a federal rule. But I can say that Business Oregon would do everything we could to help you find a solution to that because we don't want the money back after it's been spent. Does that answer your question? Yeah.

And we have no reason to go anywhere. 30 years. That's a big what if.

I have a question. Timelines and process for going through this because just knowing working with Mark and the Noticing requirement, the hearing requirement and the things that we have to accomplish and then getting the sub, you know, all the agreements in place as well. I don't know if that can happen post award or things have to happen. Do we, I don't know what the deadlines are, but do we have sufficient time to go through the required process to be able to submit an application?

We're a little late in the game. So the grant cycle opened July 1st and closes September 30th. You got two deadlines. September 30 is the deadline to submit the complete application. The end of August is the deadline to submit your intake, the pre-application, whatever we call it. To do that pre-application, you've got to hold a public hearing and you've got to get the minutes from that hearing. You've got to submit that to us. And then we clear you to do the full application during the month of September. It's not too late to do that, but you need to start. If you decide to proceed, you would need to start rather quickly. You need to publish that notice and then have the hearing next week, probably soon. And the hearing does not have to be at a commission meeting. As long as it's properly noticed according to your procedures, it'll work. But you need the hearing and the minutes from it. And it doesn't need to include commissioners either, I'll point out. As long as it's okay with the county's procedures, Ken or Kevin could gavel in a public hearing, gavel it out, and submit the minutes. That's totally up to you guys. I've never done that before.

Yeah, nice.

The rules on our end are simply that you notice it and that you follow your own requirements for public. Okay.

I have a question about the admin. Again, what's it going to cost us? Do we have the staff capacity? And do we have the bandwidth to take on something like this, even though it's a worthy project? So in terms of I see the admin, I see that there is money carved out for Juliet's house. And obviously, there's that administrative bucket for COG.

uh where is the county's admin carve out i don't see that here you don't have one it's not really the only it's not possible for the county to keep any of the admin funds uh as i as i mentioned before if you really read the rules tightly you'll find an exception to that but it requires you to hire a person just for this grant and then lay them off at the end or take a part-time employee and increase his hours just for this grant and then reduce them again at the end And every time I've seen a county or city try to do that, they've had to repay the grant administration portion. It has never worked out in my experience. The county cannot keep any administrative funds from the block grant.

So in other words, we have a finance department that's running on all cylinders. We have administrative staff that's running on more than all cylinders. And now we're going to take this on and there's no remuneration financially for what it costs because county council is going to have to get involved. I'm just trying to look at all the problems up front before we say yes and then go, oops, what about this? And then it falls to our administrator to figure it out.

Yes, ma'am. There will be expenses for the county internally. If you've got third party expenses, most of the time we can pay those, but your internal staff time is not compensated by the grant.

Okay, I'm going to circle back to my question again. If Ken can give me a ballpark on that, and you said it's in the single or in the thousands, not extreme, is this going to be above and beyond that, you believe?

I may have been speaking, I may have been unclear. The single digit thousands was my ballpark estimate for the cost of that audit that you're going to have to do. I got it.

Okay. So now I still am going to look back to you then to have a ballpark number here.

I don't know if I have a ballpark because really it's a, you know, because I understand probably the limitations and it has to do around supplanting broadly. You know, so it's more of a workload, an additional workload requirement. And so, I mean, I don't know. And I don't have an answer. I'm

Ken, I'd be happy to connect you to some counterparts who've done these recently and you can talk to them.

I mean, cause Arthur's right. I mean, for, you know, the. You know, like Cove Orchard, for example, Mark's going to have some time involved with that because, you know, he oversees Cove Orchard Sewer District. And it's going to include some time from finance to process, you know, invoices and things like that, in addition to everything else that we do on a daily basis. So, I mean, it's really hard to kind of ballpark, you know, what that's going to be. Yeah.

John Potter, i'm going to take the position of that you know. John Potter, we're i'd like to be a partner to to juliet's house and use the the the funds that are available to be able to for them to do better service now we've. John Potter, Not me, but you know the this board has made decisions to not have a grant writer those types of things right to.

John Potter, That you can.

John Potter, Why, I agree, but, but I think that you know we're. We're going to partner on a million dollars. I'd like to partner on a million dollars. And so if that, to bring to our county a service that's essential to my mind. And so if that means that I'm okay with the county having to do some of that lift from that interview.

And I'm not saying yes or no, but you're basically making an assumption on what that cost is. And you don't know what that is. And publicly, that's not a good decision to make when you don't have, you have an open-ended number, basically. So I think it's, A lot of us to have at least that number and my follow up will be just timeframe to make sure we can fit this all in and still I know we're tight and grants just run that way for some reason now but. Can we fit this into where can can ballpark us get us a number. Make sure it's something that we're going to end up being comfortable with have one more meeting next Thursday and then. The application if approved would then come before us would have our go through our process for that meeting the following Thursday, which would be.

the twentieth. So I would simply offer up that whatever expense the county would assume in this process. Number one should be minimum, because it's it's a building acquisition. It's not a full-on building, as we did with the arpa funds, and also balance that with the the community benefit. the public benefit of being able to serve more children and more families. And that alone is a tremendous savings to the county in terms of public service.

And I appreciate all that too, but for at least for me, to sit here and make a decision on an open-ended number is not the correct way to do this, as long as we can fit it within the timeframe. If I had to, then I would make a decision. But if we have the time to do this, what I would believe properly is, which is to get numbers to address any concerns that this board has and fit it within that timeframe, I think we should do that.

I I appreciate what you're what you're saying and I I if we have the time the number would be helpful uh from what I also understand is that some of this workload time frame will also be doing for Cove Orchard is that that I understand that correctly or I I think that the time frame to get that at that intake in is that's your

your minimum viable path, I guess. That's what you, yeah. So you might find yourself in a situation where you go ahead and publish that notice for the public hearing before you've even decided whether to apply. And maybe you're out a hundred bucks or whatever it costs to put a notice in the paper. But that's one thing you could consider doing. Keep the process going while you talk to other counties and cities that have done similar projects and gauge that administrative burden. And then make both decisions next Thursday.

Could we notice for the end of this meeting have...

Arthur Russell come back and give us those numbers or can gather those numbers we notice public well it's definitely internally it's going to be a county number because that's they've addressed all the other costs it sounds okay but we have not addressed internal costs which are going to be tough but i think we can get close um but can we notice that public notice piece for the end of of our public our formal session

well it's whatever the time frame is what did you say I think it's a minimum seven days and we don't count the day that you publish it and we don't count the day of the hearing so it's okay yeah so if we notice it today or tomorrow we'd be the 20th and you can one way I've seen other jurisdictions do it is you schedule the public hearing to occur say half an hour before a commission meeting You gather, you gavel in the public hearing, you close it, you gavel in the commission meeting, and approve the minutes from the hearing you just had. That gets you your two meetings, approve the minutes, and that's, as long as it's noticed, totally fine.

Yeah, well, we usually, as a procedure, we'll do it as part under the agenda for public hearings. That's what we did for COG, or for the, sorry, for co-vorted meetings. We did it as part of formal session, just like we do every other public hearing that we may put on the agenda.

I think you have time remaining to do the public hearing and get your intake in, is the point I'm trying to make. There's a few ways to do that.

I just want to throw in the comment was made that if we had a grant writer I think that we've established that that would not change anything here because we would not be able to use that particular resource. So I think to get that narrative out there is not only disingenuous, but it's

Oh, I think that that job comes with, I mean, this is a whole other topic. Yeah, it is. Well, you brought it up, so I'm going to... No, you brought it up. Well... You brought it up. You want to keep interrupting me or do you want me to finish?

Finish, please.

Okay. I think that if that person existed, it's not Ken or his staff doing some of that lift that we're asking for. It comes with part of their job, the way that I see that job. So...

All right, well, I think that is obviously we just know it's not another conversation to this so that's so so here's here's my bottom line, this is not a debate on on the on how worthy your work is. or the value of CDBG grants. My question is, is this the right fit for this particular project? We are under the gun. And whenever we're being asked to make a decision without all the information, I don't feel that we have, I do believe we have the fiduciary responsibility to know what it is we're voting on. And I don't have that information. Ken doesn't have it. And I wanna make sure, We can get to yes, but without saying it doesn't matter. We're just going to do it anyway, and I think that is is not a a responsible decision.

If you're pointing at me, I did agree with you.

So, as I understand it, the the question in the air is, what will this actually cost or the conceivably? What will it cost the county to to manage this project?

everything, all of the all of the requirements of what we have to do, I want to make sure we know what those are going into it. And that is that is an internal discussion. As our chair pointed out, you've given us a lot of information. I've talked to Arthur on the phone. This has been a really comprehensive presentation. And I appreciate all that. This is just the one sort of dangling participle, if you will.

so um i saw adam had his hand up at one time adam do you still want to do you have a comment that you want to make on this um no i believe that the question was already answered whether or not there was enough time with the notice and the meetings and the voting to approve the minutes to fit this in by the august 31st deadline and it does seem to me that when i reviewed it we would be able to do that um But we'd have about four days, even if we were only going on the commissioner standard schedule and not scheduling anything special following appropriate protocol to approve the minutes. So yes, we would fit within the timeline.

but only just without adding any additional meetings okay so and it sounds like we can do this without uh within the time frame that are we originally stated so i guess my recommendation would be can come up with a number go ahead and post the meeting prior to if i'm doing my math right and you guys can correct me but it'd be the august 20th meeting so prior to that we would have No, it would have to be after the board meeting, because we'd have to approve that we're going to go ahead and do this, and then we would have the public hearing after our board meeting on the twentieth to the to have the public hearing.

Well, I think I think if it helps, you know, because just like we're doing here is having the discussion. You could do, we could do the notice of the public hearing, see if there's any public comment on this, you close it. And then the board could make a decision at that point to proceed or not proceed, you know, however the board wants to go. Okay. So it doesn't require, you know, you can do it at the same one. It's,

So it doesn't require of us to agree right now to do this application? You can have the public hearing without us agreeing right now whether we're going to do the application?

I think what I'd be looking for if there's consensus to proceed with the public hearing and then making a final decision whether or not to approve because again the public hearing is also to hear comments and if you get public comment that says and and the decision to proceed or not proceed is based on the public comment proceed you have that element as well so That's why I'm saying you could do it at the same time. Do the public hearing, close the public hearing. It would be an agenda item and then we would go into the next and I could have information available and, you know, and then you could make your decision at that time.

And is my math right that it's the 20th if you remove the day of that you applied for?

yes okay and just knowing you know like the notice and getting the notice out and making sure that we're meeting deadlines for you know the newspaper to get the the notice posted the 20th as i would probably recommend if that's thursday i was trying to look at that it is well i got the right one if there's consensus to proceed with that then we'll we'll get the ball rolling i'm okay with that that's great okay okay thank you let's do that thank you thank you thank you guys thanks adam appreciate it

Thanks for your time.

Thank you all, commissioners.

Thanks, Adam.

All right. F is department updates. There is none. G is work session. There's none. H is consent agenda. There's none. I is old business. None. J is other business. There's plenty there. J1 is consideration of approval in the matter of initiation proceedings to legalize a portion of Southwest Holly Hill Road under ORS 368 setting a public hearing date. would move approval is there any further discussion and do we need to set a date or is that something Mark's gonna do later okay what well do we have to set a date as part of the motion I can tell you one of my concerns was we weren't curved enough but this is actually okay I can see Bailey yeah I'm glad Set one. What date do you want? 30 days out.

September 10th.

Okay. We're going to set the public hearing date for September 10th. um i would make a motion of approval is there any further discussion none for me all those in favor signify by saying aye aye motion passes unanimously thank you j2's consideration of approval of a sole source agreement between yamhill county health and human services and oregon family support network for family support services in a not to exceed amount of two hundred sixty nine thousand eighty dollars and twenty cents this is retroactive to july one twenty twenty six through june thirty twenty twenty seven move approval motion's been made any further discussion none for me none all those in favor signify by saying aye aye motion passes unanimously thank you um that brings us up to j3's consideration approval amendment number five to an agreement between yamil county health and human services and lutheran community services northwest uh board order two one dash one eight one in the amount of seven hundred forty one thousand three hundred twelve dollars per year for school-based behavioral health services and ttrs parent coaching services this is retroactive to july one twenty twenty six move approval Motions have been made. Any further discussion?

None.

All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you. J-4's consideration of approval of an agreement between Yamhill County Health and Human Services and the Willamina School District for Behavioral Health Counseling Services in the 2026-27 school year in the not to exceed amount of $83,351.79.

I move approval.

Motion's been made. Any further discussion? None for me. None. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you. J-5's consideration approval to submit the application for funding from the Oregon Department of Veterans Services in the amount of $141,509 for the 26-27 fiscal year. I move approval. Motion's been made. Any further discussion?

None for me.

None. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you. J six is consideration of approval amendment number two to an agreement between the ML county and homework bound pets humane society board order to zero dash 037 for clerical services in the amount of $7,507 per month retroactive to July 1 2026 through June 30 2027 I do have questions on this if the sheriff would come up.

I have a few questions to. Maybe they're the same. Go ahead.

I have a few different services that I want to run by you and I want to see if they would be included in this $7,500 a month. um one would be licensing of the other kennels of animals that are brought in from out of county or even within county if they run into an animal that's not licensed is would this 7500 be part of being able to track that with other shelters to make sure that animals are licensed before they're adopted out that way we know exactly where animals are at and we know really the biggest reason I asked is so that we can be able to send a postcard out to remind them to license their dog in the three-year time period or whatever it may be. Would that cover this or not?

My understanding is currently when somebody comes in and adopts, the requirement to license falls to the owner. It's not something that is a requirement through the contract that we have here. I'm trying to recall from the prior amendments that we did to the county code. I don't believe that there's anything in the code that requires any of the shelters in the county to do anything. They just provide the information to the new owner about the licensing requirement, and they have 30 days with which to license the animal once they have So this is just a continuation of our existing clerical that they process all the license applications, they do the redemption proceedings when an animal gets picked up and the owner comes in to retrieve it. But there's nothing in this that would require Homeward Bound to license dogs that come into the facility or that they take in from other sources. they do provide the licensing requirement information to new owners but there is nothing in this that would require them to license you know if they took in a dog that was a coming from another jurisdiction uh as part of their humane society work uh because the the requirements for the owner not for the shelter so the the

trying to track the owner type of thing is my understanding is talking to a number of shelters is that most of them or all of them will chip whether or not they're bringing animals in because I know Newburgh brings puppies in from Hawaii and I believe other shelters bring them in from Mexico and California so if they're bringing puppies in I think the question was if you're bringing animals in to our county and then they're basically at some point dumped, how do we track them? So my understanding is, is they are chipped at that point and then they are chipped again so that if the owner wants to update the information on the existing microchip, that is what they do. But some of them, like for instance, one of the rescues that I've worked with will basically maintain their information on the chip because they wanna make sure if you do dump the dog, they get the dog back. So that's one way.

I'm looking for an avenue. So our number one thing is income to be able to pay for. And a lot of that is lacking in the licensing end of it. So I'm looking for a small thing that we can do or is already in place, which it sounds like it's not, to be able to initiate in a very small area. So the shelters that bring the animals in to at least start there and initiate dog licensing there. So where then it can be a continuation of where it's adopted out, we now know where that animal went and where to send a postcard to.

but I think Washington County, one of the counties does this, but here we had made a decision, I think early on that we were basically asking, like for instance, veterinary offices and these private nonprofits to basically enter into a contract with the county to perform a financial service. And there is a, I think I spoke to county council about this, and I might not have, but there was a concern that we're basically, requiring them to become sort of a financial agent of the county. And that is where we said probably not a good idea.

Am I am I different than an individual having to follow that requirement versus a shelter following that same requirement. It's just the shelter now gets them licensed before the dog goes out. Because obviously we know, since numbers are way down from 10 years ago, that people are not licensing their dogs. Some of them, we don't even know how to even get a hold of them. so at least now we have at a bare minimum an address that they would relate to us that we can at least initiate a postcard with i don't think that would that my main question to make sure that we're on on task with uh item j6 is that would this uh 7500 be able to cover that communication between shelters and getting that information back to us through homework I believe that we could request because they're already sending out part of the 7,500 is for them to send out requests for renewal for licenses. Correct.

They do the the renewal reminders and the past due notices as part of this contract. And those are for dogs that they have on file. I couldn't tell you what their business practice is if they were to bring in five puppies from out of state. I don't know what information they capture when they bring the animal in or what chipping But certainly if they're adopting those animals out, we would have the ability to enter that name and address into the licensing database so that those reminders would go out. I think that if we were going to have a discussion about updating the code, you know, that if there's some sort of a licensing process when the animal actually arrives and then that transfers to the new owner, I would also want to get input from all those shelters because I know that the costs that they already bear for caring for these animals are burdensome to some extent. And then you're just adding another requirement on to the shelter. But I think that it would help us to build that database of where these animals are coming from and where they're going when they come through the shelter so you would have the animal either chipped or licensed or somehow able to be reunited back to the shelter that brings them in from another location and then if they are adopted out to a new owner that resides in yam hill county then they also would have the requirement to transfer that license to the new owner so that we know where that dog went

yeah um during budget we gave seed money for essentially an employee fte to take this over i believe or bring start bringing this in-house where are we at with that process to start to break away this especially this piece i think um to bring it in-house is there any

movement on on that front or is there well the last discussion that we had when i came before the board for a work session uh and and ken pointed out that you know we're just now 30 days into the new fiscal year we had to wait for july 1 for that new budget to go into effect so yes there is that seed money now available now that we're in the new fiscal year if you look at section two um there actually is i'm sorry section Yeah, section two, we put language in this that it's actually extending by six months and then you can extend by six months again. So we're not committing to the full year right now. We're committing to six months to give us that time to do a job analysis, description, posting with HR, figure out how that's all going to operate within the county structure. And that's just a discussion that Ken and I need to both probably uh shoehorn more time into our calendars to to meet up and and figure that out as far as the county employee portion um so that's why we did kind of stair step this we're we're giving ourselves six months because as you know it takes time uh to work with hr and we don't i don't yet fully understand where all there's going to potentially be complication, depending on whether this is a position that's represented by one of the labor unions, how it's going to incorporate into their structure, whether it lands in the sheriff's office, whether it lands in another county department. Those are all things that we have to figure out. So we did try to tailor this because I think six months is a realistic goal for us to have that stood up. But I also didn't want to not have something in place. I have spoken with the executive director at Homeward Bound. She is willing to continue doing this clerical work of processing license applications and sending them out and doing redemptions, doing the social media postings for animals that are picked up.

um i just think it's good practice to all of us understand what the expectations are for that work i don't think we're going to wave a magic wand and have a somebody start you know next month or anything like that we have to create it but i just want to make sure yeah and that was the question that i had had is that we could making sure that there was an out just in case we were able to bring this in house sooner than next year.

I mean, there's generic language in there that gives us that opportunity. And then we also, instead of doing a full year commitment, did a six month with the ability to extend again. OK. That was all I had.

While you're here, Sheriff, we've had a lot of conversations. We've heard a lot on social media about the whole kenneling situation. I think there is a lot of misinformation out there. Perhaps you can give us an update knowing that in the past there has been outreach to various kennels to see their level of interest, but an RFP is different because they have to look at the specifics of what we're requiring and they are

they're they're quite complex so it's not just yeah i've got a candle put a dog in it there's a whole lot more to it as we found out with newberg maybe you can give us an update on that sure uh so the rfp or the request for proposals went out yesterday or it was published yesterday a lot of work back and forth between captain whitlow and county council's office on ensuring that we try to address all of the various issues that have arisen over the years when it comes to you know putting a dog in a kennel is one thing but the county has obligations under state law and under county code as a dog control district to make efforts to reunite dogs with owners we have to do postings and publications and advertise so that owners have an ability to identify where their dog is and to come retrieve it So there is a lot that goes into the legal side of the obligations for the county. There have been a lot of good discussions that have generated as this has continued to rise to the top of some of the social media discussion or concern that individuals in the county have about what is going on with dog control. You know, there's a lot of kind of blanket statements that the county doesn't have dog control, and obviously that's not true. We've had a responsibility for the unincorporated parts of the county and for the cities that contract with the sheriff's office, the municipalities of McMinnville, Newberg, Carlton, and Yamhill. They've all had responsibility for dog control within their jurisdictions since we decentralized 10 years ago or whenever that was. So a lot of good kind of one-on-one discussions. I had some discussions with some local resources as I was at the fair and encountering people. I know Commissioner King has reached out and spoken with some of the local resources who have all emailed me as follow-ups. We are asking them to utilize that RFP process to really define what it is they're capable of doing in conversation with council. There is potential that multiple sources can work together cooperatively to accomplish the goals. So I am excited about the interest that has kind of regenerated through all the discussion that people seem to be willing to offer up what they're able to do and willing to do. But it will come down to a matter of the formal responses to the RFP, what people can not just say that they're able to do, but that can commit to in a contract so that we all have the same understanding of what the obligations and responsibilities and commitments are, both from the county side and from the provider side.

And long-term, I know the board went out and took a look at several opportunities or possibilities. Do you want to, we haven't made any decisions, but maybe you can share a little bit about what we did go look at.

Yeah, so obviously the commissioners, Ken, myself, we went and looked at a couple of existing county-owned properties to see whether they would be viable as kennel locations and whether or not they would serve the demands and the needs that we have for a centralized model of dog control. Once again, you obviously have to look at how the property is used now or what facilities are there, what work would have to be done, what's that gonna cost? but we are actively looking at both like short term and long term how do we address the here and right now and then how do we make a sustainable program long term as we look to the future i think we we had some good takeaways uh from the sites that we went to visit and i think it helped us uh to kind of take another look at what are the demands and the needs that we actually have to meet in the short term. I think that those are, as you know, still ongoing discussions to be had because none of it is free. None of it is just the easy button. I think I told you that before. There had been a dog control easy button. I think any one of us would have hit that a long time ago. And it's just a matter of identifying where we want to locate that when you're talking about the entire county. Taking a dog from Wilhelmina to Newberg is a challenge. It ties up staff time. It puts a burden on the owner to go retrieve the animal, to have to drive, you know, 25, 30 miles to go pick up their animal. Looking at locations that are more centralized to make it easiest for all residents of the county. It's never going to be necessarily convenient. There's just a lot of considerations that go into what's the zoning of the property? How can it be used? Is it something we can get a variance or a waiver? And then again, you know, how do we pay for it long term? Because while we are trending up and we are seeing good utilization of the online dog licensing process, it is still down significantly from historic numbers. And it's just that continuous education process and having that follow up. of hey we know that somebody in this residence adopted this dog and how come it hasn't been licensed yet or you know five years ago you were licensing four dogs to this address and you haven't licensed one for a number of years we have all that data it's just who do we send out you know who has the bandwidth and the capacity to do that follow-up thank you

well no that's good all right i'd move approval is there any further discussion none none all those in favor signify by saying aye aye aye motion passes thank you thank you sheriff thank you j7 is consideration approval of a memorandum of understanding between yamhill county and the greater yamhill watershed council to jointly pursue funding opportunities for fish passage opportunities along baker creek travis is here if you guys want any uh details on that we talked about it what

six, seven months ago.

Okay. This is just a continuation of that. Okay. remove approval is there any further discussion none for me none all those in favor signify by saying aye aye motion passes unanimously thank you uh j8's consideration of approval of a contract employee agreement between yamil county public works department and justin kivett for the maintenance and operation services for the cove orchard sewer district service district in the amount of 25 per hour for no more than 10 hours per week effective upon full execution through july 1 20 27. i would move approval is there any further discussion none for me none all those in favor signify by saying aye aye aye motion passes unanimously thank you that ring if i can i um i have um need to move sorry can i

Dave Kuntz, move to add. Dave Kuntz, Resolution and an ordinance for you guys to go over no decisions today. Dave Kuntz, Around the data centers this week I. Dave Kuntz, I would move that we would add this as an agenda item and then that.

So he just wants to open up a discussion. He's not proposing this. So his motion is just to open up a discussion on to resolution and an ordinance that he'd like for the board to consider at a later date. So that's the motion.

Okay. I'm okay with that, but I'm not going to get into a lengthy discussion. Okay. Okay. Yep. Yep. Get her handed out. Yep. Absolutely.

We need to vote.

So motion has been made to add an agenda item. Is there any further discussion?

None.

None. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you.

So this last week at a farmer's market, I was approached by some signature gatherers and quite a bit of disinformation around there about data centers potentially going on to parkland that was in the county or others in public lands available. And we had heard from somebody during public comment, Ms. Bowman, a few weeks ago, and so this was something that I've been paying attention to with our neighbors, Marion County, Salem, and Hillsborough, Washington County, and so this is really, you know, obviously you guys need to read through this, and this is really just from the way that we communicate, and I'm not asking for any decisions today, but just around data centers. And I know that it would be very hard for a data center to happen on EF lands, but this is really, to me, would be solidifying that it can't, that we are publicly stating that it can't. And I know about 10 years ago, I would have never thought that a restaurant or a nine-room hotel would be on farmland, but, or... you know airbnb or whatever they are right so i um this is really just a way for us to have a position on this i don't know where you guys stand on these things this is uh really where i stand i'm happy to have the conversation to expand this even further but um but yeah i i i would like to to have this discussion uh jody said we could do it in about two weeks if that's

yeah so I. have not reviewed it either document fully I did he sent me the ordinance yesterday, I want to be clear this I don't believe this is a moratorium. it's a zone specific prohibition, I want to make that clear and probably doesn't mean much to anybody, but a land use person, so I just want to make that clear on the record um. the process for doing what what's being proposed um it's a little bit it would be changing the zoning code so there'd be like a procedural step to this first the board would have to decide whether or not they want to have staff move forward with this as a proposed amendment which would then get kicked to the planning commission go through all the dlcd notices and all that jazz so it's not just a simple vote and it's in the um and again i haven't read it too close but um there's this piece that's specific to county-owned land that is separate from the land use piece so that could theoretically be um adopted more quickly so

Thank you. Cool. All right.

Thank you.

All right. We'll see you back in two weeks then. With that, we are on to announcements.

Fair was this last? Oh, wow. That got really loud. Fair was just this last week. I had a great time volunteering as much as I could. And when I walking around and looking at all the animals and stuff, you could tell I would be interested. They probably don't. Maybe you have this Commissioner Johnson already, but it seemed like it was quite a bit more than the last couple of years. And especially during the auction was really a packed house. So it was really cool to see that. for all those kids. And yeah, I had a great time down at the fair. There was an AOC veterans subcommittee that had happened during our retreat. There was a lengthy conversation just about priorities for veterans. And so there was there's a group of commissioners who are, most of them are veterans or spouses of veterans. And so we just, we were kicking around the ideas of how can AOC be better, have more priorities to to advocate for veterans during session. So that was a great conversation. I met with some sheltering folks this week to speak about needs, and especially during the heat and smoke, and had a great conversation with Travel Oregon and several wineries just about hospitality industry. And that's it. Thank you.

Thank you, I just want to give an update the Oregon water resources department has invited counties to look at a variety of different. opportunities to submit applications for place based water planning funding, and this was something that AOC was involved in years ago, and we were very, very involved with getting this set up at the state level, so there, there has been a contiguous area groundwater limited. proposal set forward and that one has been. has been submitted. So I'm going to keep an eye on that particular one. We do have a new veteran services officer and he is going to be hopefully coming before us to introduce himself. His name is Joseph Dorr. He is a veteran and he's ready to come to work and we'll be introducing him soon. We had our meeting of the Family Wellbeing Council yesterday, talked a little bit more about the Title V plan that we've pretty much spent a lot of time putting together. And that is to address the needs of new moms. And there are a lot of new moms who come to this without any social networks. So how can we work on that? Also, Foster Family Advocacy Council and some of the care management of the families that are really, really in need. So I think that's all I have.

Fair went green. Visually, I think it was probably one of the best ones that we've had. We don't have numbers yet, but just preliminary, just vendors on the first day were up 30%. So it showed well, weather was great. And that's always one of those things you can't control what's going to be too hot or rainy. Saturday, yeah, Saturday. Perfect all the way throughout, got a few showers that rolled in Saturday, but youth livestock auction did as well as they did last year, which is good, so it's not down. I think in general, the public perception, the public feedback that I've been getting was very, very well received. Everybody loved it. Everybody loved the concert lineups for this year. um everybody loved the sheriff's demonstration of our of our canines that we had and it was to me it seemed like uh it kind of moved around times a little bit but it was still very well attended for not being well advertised and they actually had them it was it went off well enough to the rodeo committee actually asked them to come back for a second night in a row which was great um but no overall the fair went Uh, fantastic. And I'm, I'm super happy. And I'm just, you know, huge shout out to the rodeo committee for their engagement and putting on that rodeo, uh, does not go and notice the time that they have to commit to that, to gear up for it and actually operate the rodeo, um, the fair board and the time and. You know, we expanded that fair board here, I think, a couple years ago. Best thing we've ever done. It's more people. They are super committed to it. They love the fair. The time and hours that they put into it are phenomenal. And that also does not go unnoticed. And then to top it all off, Gary just, you know, He knows how to pick the talent between him and I think John Nyberg's involved in that. And then they come back to the fair board with their recommendations. And I've seen the list. They're huge lists to try to choose from. And two years in a row now, they've absolutely crushed it, I think, for picking concert talent. anyway everything went well uh dayton city council meeting was monday night they discussed future plans for the layout of their library city hall and then their palmer creek lodge that has kind of their community center which they're actually now holding their meetings out of now so just long-term planning to see what dayton looks like for their government buildings Tuesday was a made tour with Mayor Morris and MEDP and MIP, and we toured Solid Form, which is out on Riverside. Great company, started back in the early 2000s, and they do a lot of metal fabrication. In fact, in the next probably few months, you'll see the county logo behind us here is being made by Solid Form. great company local and they have grown exponentially over the last 20 plus years now Devon's been doing that and they're not going anywhere and they love being in McMinnville and it was a it was a good company to tour and made me feel good about You know, being involved in this area. Amity City Council meeting, they discussed their top five priorities for LOC and what they're going to use as Amity's recommendation to LOC to help advocate to the state legislator on projects and priorities that the cities want to see. Chat with the chairs tonight at 6 p.m. in the Mount Hood room in this building, in the GSB. um in the mount hood room and then right after that 7 pm we're going to have the planning commission in this room um i'll be here we'll watch it i this is phenomenal how this all worked out today Kudos to staff yesterday running through everything. Kudos to IT and all of our tech guys that were in here just moving cameras around, trying to get everything arranged, arranging the iPads. And I think everything went well. You'll see a few changes over the next few weeks of things that we're going to get dialed in. The TVs are going to get lowered a little bit so we have a little bit more direct contact with commenters. But for the most part, good job, guys. This went well. A little bit of future planning here. Saturday we have a water treatment tour in Amity, and that starts when, Mayor King? Is it 11? Okay, so 10 o'clock it starts and then ribbon cutting on 11 and then next Monday I know i'm getting a little bit ahead, but there's a another ribbon cutting for homework bound pets and that's right at noon and then the air show next weekend so with that i'm going to close this out at. 1118 Thank you everybody for coming appreciate your time that you commit to us and. Ribbon cutting went good, and it was a good day. Thank you.