Board of Supervisors - Regular Meeting

Heat. Heat. bring this uh

March 26 uh work session to order. Roll call, please. Mr. Hoy, yes. Mrs. Null, here. Mr. Jury, present. Mr. R, here. Mrs. Shepard here. Mr. Chairman, you have a quorum. Thank you. Think at this point I'll turn it over to uh county administrator, Mr. Shep or Mr. Bellamy. Mr. Mr. Shepard just got a demotion. I'm in receipt mode here. I mean, yeah. We uh would like to start your work session out tonight with a presentation from Tim Wyatt on

You were also going to mention uh April 14th. If you'd like me to start there, I certainly can. So, looking at the schedule for our extra work sessions here, we believe that April 14th is an extra day and we would like to uh encourage the board to cancel that day. If you all are in agreement, anybody having fun, man, let's Anybody not in agreement? Unless we got something we need to talk about. Yeah, meeting. We will we will cancel that date. Thank you. Thank you. So, uh, why are we canceling it? We don't believe we have anything additional that's not already on the on our schedule to talk about.

Thank you, Mr. Wyatt, if you would please. Uh, Mr. Wyatt is going to give us a little presentation on artificial intelligent and artificial intelligence and talk a little bit about the FY27 IT budget. So, that's where we'll get started tonight. Thank you. Sounds good. So I'd like to start out um by just kind of the theme is it usually we try to question everything. Sometimes it brings up you know new ideas, new innovations and sometimes we remember why we've always done this certain way. I'm used to giving presentations from up here. So just kind of curious this way you don't have to look back and forth between the presentations and we'll see how it goes.

I'm curious. I applaud that because every time I look at the screen I'm looking here. I'm looking here. Look at the screen. Now I got both right here. This is perfect. But we'll see at the end of the night whether we still agree with it or not. Um, as the county administrator went over, I'm going to go over it at a high level view, the department, what we cover, artificial intelligence, and then using those to kind of narrow down into the IT budget and how it affects the proposed budget. First thing is about the department and mostly for citizens, we tend not to be the average stereotypical IT department that you would think about. Um over the last eight years we've been very proud for digital counties. They assess localities throughout the nation. Um they do different categories. Our category is 150,000 population less. For the citizens at home, York County, we're about 71,000. So we're about half the maximum size of our category. We're not the big ones. We're in the most numerous. 2800 counties are in our category. And they judge us on cyber security alignment with leadership and direction that we're given. how well we uh are stewards of taxpayer money. It's not about how much we spend, but how much we save. Um they go over artificial intelligence, innovation. We've been, like I said, in the top eight or for the last eight years, we've been in the top 10 localities across the nation. This past year, we got first place. Something I'm very proud of our department and the county as a whole because really everyone in the county contributes towards this. It got me also wondering, well, what if population wasn't a factor? About a month later, we were contacted by GovX and they compare us versus every local county. So, we're equally put up against Lowden County, Fairfax County, Los Angeles County. We got second in the entire nation. Wow.

Save no other locality in the United States. Great job.

Very impressive. So, a lot of that that we reach out, a lot of this is we do a lot of outreach that other IT departments don't traditionally do. Uh just a few months ago I worked with the PML, Virginia Municipal League and did a presentation to the B newly elected board of supervisors for a lot of localities around the Commonwealth and presented on artificial intelligence. We worked with Virginia Peninsula Chamber of Commerce and we reached out to the business community about how they can integrate artificial intelligence with their workforces targeting the business community. We also have award-winning citizen engagement program where we reach out to homeowner associations, uh, disabled vets, other organizations like that, and we present both on cyber security and artificial intelligence. We've also recently been spotlighted twice by international magazines. Last year, a 17 page uh spread article on technology for the people. And this past year, how York County is becoming AI first by 2030, the human side of AI was published, all about us. Additional um we have a lot of regional collaborations. I myself for the last three years have been president of an organization called Falite Virginia local government IT executives. We have 140 members and we represent over 90 different localities in Virginia. The IT departments, we collaborate, compare resources, leverage each other. We work with the state general assembly and give them input on bills. I believe this upcoming session we'll be working with a group called JCOT's joint commission on technology and science which reviews the bills that feed into the general assembly for the upcoming year making sure that good legislation effective legislation is passed as best as we can assist. And I'm also the vice chair of the Virginia Cyber Security Planning Committee. That's a governor appointed position. I was appointed last year under Governor Yncan and elected as vice

chair this year under spammer. All this is done by our department a simplified organizational chart. We have two people in leadership myself and the deputy position. We have two administration staff, seven PC support personnel. This is the face of IT. These are the people who come out fix the PCs, repair the things. Eight FTEEs are full-time employees for the infrastructure. These are our cloud support people, the people who handle the network and communications and our video engineer that's upstairs handling the broadcast of tonight's and all of our board meetings. And then we have 12 full-time employees for business applications. These people are focused on multi-million dollar software applications here in the county to make sure we leverage the most out of these investments of the software that we have utilizing the taxpayer money. Tim, you you like HVDs

on desktop or they're all standalone PCs?

They're all standalone PCs. So, I'll get into a little bit of that when we go into just what we do kind of different than other organizations. Now most people probably realize the IT department covers the county administration, the staff, community services, economic tourism development, public safety, finance, but we also support a lot of other agencies, the voter registar, county attorney, social services, and one of the other big key things is the other constitutional officers. So these are the commission revenues, the treasur, commonwealth attorney and sheriff's offices. They are independently elected. They don't have to use the county IT department. However, because all of them choose to utilize us, it's a huge cost savings to the taxpayer. They don't have to duplicate the IT department for each one of their organizations. That's through collaboration, working with them. We've been this way for many years. A lot of other localities aren't so lucky to have that collaboration.

Go back. You had school board up there.

So, school board we work, they have their own IT department. Melissa Pedigrew is my counterpart over there doing amazing work. We collaborate as whenever it makes sense. So we have a shared financial system between our organizations. We have other shared resources. We have generators for the shelters over there monitoring equipment. So we collaborate quite often of what's most cost effective at any point on any specific project, evaluate them. They've been great partners over the years. Okay. to try to give a scope of what the team does, I've come up with these numbers. So, if you go to add or remove programs on a county PC and you look at all the programs listed there and you go to every different county PC, there's 1,433 unique pieces of software that we have to support. That means we have to vet them that they're safe to be run on the county network. We have to look for patches. We have to update them. We have to maintain them. Sometimes we do training for staff of how to best utilize them. And again, I'll get into later about why it's so many um users. We don't have 1,254 county employees here. That's because with the schools, we have that joint system. So, we give it support to a subsection of some of them. We work with Colonial Behavioral Health. We have other agencies. Overall in the network, we support 1,254 people. It's across over 4,000 different devices. These might be a computer, a tablet, an access point that connects wirelessly for people to talk. It might be a weather device measuring the weather at a fire station to make sure that their vehicles that it's safe for them to deploy in a storm and they're not going to put the first responders in a dangerous situation.

What about these? Cell phones are actually handled a little bit differently. They're mainly handled through the 911 regional 911 system. And again, we look at each one of the applications and what makes the most sense and we're always questioning what's the best thing. Have we always done it? How can we do something better? And just because it isn't always done that way by every different thing, doesn't mean it's wrong. And then we do about 7,000 tickets. These are just on break fix items. This generally doesn't cover projects, things like that. Is that annually?

Yes, annually. All right. If there's no questions, I'll jump into artificial intelligence. Okay. What I want to go over first is the difference between traditional compute and artificial intelligence because they are fundamentally different things that not everybody appreciates. Traditional computers follow strict rules. They do repetitive tasks. The really important thing is they perform exactly what they're programmed to do with no adaptation. So when I talk about this, I want you to picture a calculator. You take a calculator and you say 2 plus 2. You hit the equals and it should say four. If it said anything but four, you're going to throw it away in the trash and have a story for the rest of your life to tell. The time the calculator told you 2 plus 2 was not four. Right? AI is different. It learns, it adapts, it mimics human reasoning and it improves over time. Taking that same example, you ask AI 2 plus two equals. 99.9999% of the time it's going to tell you four. But that one time it might tell you three and you're what 2 plus two is not three. And if you ask AI it might say Mr. Polaroid and me that's two. Mr. Own and me that's two. You add us together and that's one two three unique things. 2 plus two is three. AI is going to look at the context around the question you asked. It's going to pull in all sorts of information, all sorts of ways that you may not have anticipated. That's the strength and the weakness of AI. You have to make sure you're using the right tool for the job that you have before you.

So, you're telling us that PE students shouldn't use AI to cheat on math test. Any educator would tell you not to utilize that? Will you get in here a little bit to talk about the different AI models a little bit? We can dive into that. When you say AI, it's like saying cars, but you got Chevy, Ford, Toyotas, and so forth. AI, we'll touch a few parts of that towards the end. If you want to dive into there, we can have because they have their strengths and weaknesses depending on what you want to accomplish.

Yeah. And to that point, all a AI, artificial intelligence is not created equal. You have different companies, different models, and I'll circle back to that point in here in a few minutes. AI consumes large amounts of information. I can take a 5,000page report, upload it, and in two seconds, it's ready to answer questions. That's not something a human being can do. It learns not like we're used to a computer where you give it rules and it always has to follow it from that last slide. You train AI like you raise a child. You do it through behavioral training. Positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. You can go over AI. Don't take cookie from the cookie jar and you tell it a hundred times. But just like a child, most time it'll follow it. You kind of reinforce it. But that one time that child goes over to the cookie jar, steals the cookie, AI could still do that. You can't force it to do one thing or not to do something else. You're training it like a child.

Maybe cattle pride didn't work. Maybe a couple times. You and I are raised the same way.

How I usually interact with AI is treating it like a smart intern. They come out of college. They have the latest greatest information better than things that I weren't around and concepts when I went through college. But this intern knows all the best things. However, they may not know the way your county does it. They may lack some common sense because yes, the book theoretical says this, but in reality, we know something else. And so AI a lot of times stumbles on those things. Walt tries to learn practical common sense things that we take for granted. Everyone is already using AI. If you use Microsoft Office, you use AI. It's integrated in there. If you've done a Google search, you do the search and up at the top it says AI response and gives you some information. At this point, everyone utilizes it. It's just a question of have you realized it or not. I like to say AI amplifies people. It makes good people great, but it also can make bad people terrible. If you use this great tool and you don't know how to use it, you don't know how to give it the information, the context. You ask it two plus two and you get three and you might really fail that math math test really bad. Um, it's also not free. I'll get into this later. It's never free. We know that in business and ultimately it's a tool. I do want to go over five use cases that we've done. I believe all of these in are in the past year here in York County. I'll go over each one one by one. The first one is Office 365 productivity tools and generative AI like chat GBT or perplexity. The big benefit to the citizens is optimization efficiency with staff. We get responses a lot faster quicker. However, with all of these, and you'll see the same pattern with all five use cases, we asked the guardrails. What's the safety nets? With this one, it's capable of a lot of different things, but we met with each department. We met with leadership. We do training of do not send it sensitive information, how

to manage it, how to give it context, how to work with it, and we have policies in place as well to kind of put guard rails for the employees.

Can you give an example of a guard rail? So on this one we have AI policies strictly saying that if somebody shares sensitive information with it, social security numbers or something else trying to get to a test that's against policy. Um it's clearly said on that aspect when we met and we did the training it's generally we did an hourlong session. We called it champions for AI. We got everybody around. It was done over a couple weeks. We meet once a week. First one was presentation kind of similar to this but we dive into utilizing the tool. what not to do. Don't share that sort of information. When you get a response, you should treat it like it's from a person. If I give it to a task to a staff member, they report back to me. Before I give it to Mr. Bellamy, I'm going to review it. I'm going to fact check it. We've gotten used to traditional computing where 2 plus two, it's four. And we just pass it on. We don't look at it. We need to treat it more like a person and question every output, review it for accuracy. When data is put like so say great example social security when it's put in the system and it's used wrong by AI are you able to extract the data so that it's not ever used again

it depends on what the platform is so for these no other ones I'll come up to here in a second yes so it kind of goes back to Mr. her own statement that all AIS are not created equally. Is that Tim? Yes. Is is it not a fair statement to say that some of these products in in our system are restricted only to files that we allow it to view. So if you ask it a question, it can only answer from the information that we have allowed it to access. That's a guard rail.

Yep. Okay. Correct. Thank you. Another one that we've done is the website chatbot. If you've gone to york.gov in the lower right hand corner, you'll notice the chatbot. When I talk to citizens, they've told me, "I don't want to learn how to navigate your website. I want to ask a question and get a response." Simple, easy. That's what I want. It would be very costeffective to have a staff member always by the phone ready to answer 247. And they wouldn't be knowledgeable on every single thing we do. They'd be a specialist on one area. The chatbot helps bridge that gap. It's on the website 2 am you can ask the question. It's aware of what's on the website. It helps it be interactive and streamline the response. Now the guardrail on this is every single question a citizen or anyone else asks is reviewed by a staff member, usually the web master. And if it did not give the best answer, she trains it, raises it. That chatbot is kind of like her child that she's been raising for years, getting better and better, more responsive, more accurate each day. Which is why it's important that after you query it at the end, it asks you thumbs up, thumbs down, let it know whether you got a good answer or not to help train it to get better answers going forward.

And the county one also asks you if you would like a followup on a certain thing. You are allowed to put in contact information and it enables our staff to then reach out to give you more information. Mrs. N question. Well, my question is you said that they review the answers that chatbot gave the citizen. Do they let the citizen know that there is a better answer? If we have contact information get to Yeah. Unless they tell us, please contact me and give us their information. We don't know who they are. Okay. So, it's a half answer. Yeah. We review it. We've done the best we can, but just like anything in life, it's not perfect, but we're constantly reviewing them, trying to improve and Okay. and growing it.

So, so do you put that caveat out so the citizens understand that sometimes the answers might not be

Yeah. on all of our things like that. That's one of the big things. Another thing that's not in the slide deck, but is when to disclose we're using AI. And the last thing we want, I believe everyone here understands the currency of government is trust. And we don't want to make a citizen ever feel tricked. So we try to vocalize, we try to, you know, put that out there so that they're aware and we do the best we can. At this point, AI is in so many things though. Like I said, if you do Microsoft Office there, there are components of AI in there. You do PowerPoint, you do click on the designer button on the ribbon and it will show you all sorts of different layouts that recommends that's running through artificial intelligence. Some of these are so integrated that, you know, it just doesn't make sense to go out. But if it's highly created, utilized by it, we try to make sure citizens don't feel tricked. And on this one, I'm going to take a break because I've been talking and I'm going to turn it over to my assistant.

Synthesia training is well me. I'm an artificial intelligent avatar that can be used for training. While I'm not interactive, I enable consistency across training platforms, allowing for sections to be updated in the future and still presenting the same voice for a seamless experience. This in turn offsets staffing costs and produces increased professional outputs. Of course, let's not underestimate the cool factor to keep your audience engaged. County staff do review all presentations to ensure I am always presenting the information in a way they want. Thanks for letting me be a part of this. So, just wanted freaky. That's a real person, Tom.

That's freaky. You said it. So, Cindy Cindy the freeeper

AI is always innovating always new cases this is just one of them this is one the fourth one out of the five that I'm I'm really excited about this and it's rapid deployment of AI solutions so many of us might remember when we switched recycling companies we got the new one and we were needed to notify every citizen of what day their recycling was going to be picked up because new company new days of the week we kind of went through our normal methodology, the way we've kind of always put this information out and our citizens let us know it wasn't meeting their need. I got the phone call. So, I went to AI. I said, "Here's the problem. What do I need to do to solve it?" AI said, "No problem. Take your team of programmers, give them all the specs, and in a week they should have a solution for you." And I respond back to AI, "Well, I don't have a team. I don't have a single programmer on staff, and I don't have a week. the citizens want this. They deserve it as soon as possible. So, we worked with them within 30 minutes. We worked with AI. It generated the code for a new application. We spent the next three and a half hours with staff reviewing all the lines of code that it generated, working with our cloud vendors to put it up there. And in the end, the citizens within four hours had a new application on the website. They type in any part of an address. It pops up the closest matching thing and tells them the day of the week for the recycling picked up. This is something before AI we never could have been that responsive to a community need. Now still took tons of staff. I had five, six, I think staff members working for those three and a half hours purely focused on this to deliver the response. But that programming would have taken a solid week and we don't have a programmer. This overall to me is the overall power of AI. Being able to respond to meet the citizens needs in a time of which they want and they need in this modern age.

Next, I'm going to show you the fifth one. I'm going to play a quick video about pipe a promotional Stop. So this is a great example where a generic AI isn't the best solution. This is a customtailored by a private company called Pipe Aid. We give it hours and hours of sewer footage from a drone. A human being is not designed to watch hours and days of video footage literally looking for cracks in one section of it. An AI, it's going to look at that same frame the same as the 20th hour, the 200th hour, that frame. It picks up different cracks, potential leaks, potential issues. It flags them. It then gives us a data set that has pictures. Here's the part of all that hour that you care about. Here's how we evaluate the crack, how severe it is, and it puts it on our map so our engineers know exactly where to go, know how severe it is. They know what section of footage if they want to see more. It's a perfect use for AI. Those cracks are not going to look the same. Every crack is a little different how the light hits it. It adapts, learns every time, never tires. The EPA came out with new regulations and new requirements for

us. There's no way we would not we would have been able to meet that need without the software program. We did not have enough staff to go through it and the accuracy would have been far less than what we get with the software program. I do want to cover briefly other initiatives in the works, things that we're going that were in the process for going forward. San Jose, California hosts the Gov AI coalition. This sets out policies, best practice standards for government localities specifically and how to handle that. We partner with a lot of our private sector companies like Tyler Technologies. We're part of the AI advisory board. So for the international company, me and my staff get monthly updates. We review, we give them feedback, they tailor their future product line with artificial intelligence and how it works based upon our feedback. We actually have a demo right now we're looking through and evaluating, giving feedback on. It helps us prepare what's coming down the line and make sure it handles and is tailored to your county the best way we can. We also work with companies like REPT. This is a chatbot that we're working for employees. Helps take off stress stress and workload from tier one support for human resources, IT, finance so that the basic questions can be answered, but it's only for employees. I mentioned before with Valgite, we work with the state legislature. One bill can disrupt all sorts of things. Take our AI program back a long ways and we want to stay up to-date. We want to make sure we're leveraging as many tools as we can. The hackers are using cyber security. We have to integrate it into our defense strategy. We cannot keep up with the hackers using AI unless we start implementing it. However, we're evaluating it. We're making sure it's done intelligently, that it's limited to what actual access it has, and then streamline the AI evaluation process. We want to make sure AI isn't biased, that it meets all the safety guard rails, and as they come out, we want to make sure not to fall behind.

You meant to say you can't keep up with hackers that that are using AI, correct? Using AI with cyber security. They're using AI to break up security,

correct? Yeah. Sorry. Thank you. Now AI is advancing very fast. In parallel, robotics are also advancing. Robotics are just gears, servos, motors. However, they're using AI to start to control the machines. This is from the Chinese New Year. I'm going to play part of it and then talk a little bit about it. This shows off a little bit about where robotics are today. Each one of these is controlled by an independent AI. 20 years from now.

Two two years from now. If you notice, Yep. We'll talk about that shortly.

The floor is very slippery. If you watch their feet, I did martial arts and taught it for over 10 years. Watch their feet. They have to adjust in real time as they slip on different parts that are sli more slippery than others. Now they're going to show how it interacts with people, kids. Right now they're not directly interacting, but right now they're pushing. A kid may push a little bit stronger or softer than the last time they practiced. It has to adjust and you'll see a mistake coming up. This one hits the pole and that robot has to adapt in real time, drops down to one knee to stabilize without hurting the other performer. While this is a nice choreographed, when you put it together with what's really going on at the millisecond second level and the adjustments that the AI makes in real time, it's pretty phenomenal. Now, before we freak out, for every one of those, we also have some of these.

That would be my robot. talk about taking a fall.

So, yep. For anybody wondering why we need why this country needs to invest in AI and AI data data centers and infrastructure supported, you go back to that first video. Now you imagine a thousand of those armed with AKMs and we're and we're behind the curve. Not good. So So perfect transition. Thank you, Mr. R. I didn't study this.

So this is kind of the prediction by a former open AI developer back in 2023 of what open a AI predicted for the future. First thing I want you to notice is on the left, this is not a normal scale. So this first line is zero. The next line is 10. The next line isn't 20, it's 100. Next line isn't 200, it's a th00and, 10,000, 100,000. A line like this is an exponential curve on a normal graph that shoots up really quick. But when you have something growing and growing that fast and increasing that fast, the best way to show it is on this special graph that goes up like this. So, this came out in 2023. As of 2026 now, they say we're exactly online with their predictions. A few things are ahead, a few things are behind, but overall, we're right where they're predicting. You notice you go down a little bit to the right and it goes up really quick on this graph that, you know, is already growing really quick.

So, what's a smart high schooler? What does that GPT4? What's that mean? What if a smart high schooler if you take the GED test or something it should score on par with that. If you take some other ones they've had AIS and this was a year two years ago it had already passed the bar exam. It had passed all sorts of things. Some things it does really well some things it struggles with but on average those are the different benchmarks. So O open AI develops chat GPT. GPT4 is that version of the chat GPT. So JT GPT that version that algorithm is essentially as smart as as a high school they're on GT GPT4 what

something so every iteration every iteration every every number up it's getting smarter so so in regular this traditional computing it's O's and ones yes right some's off some's on okay uh so in AI. What is it underline? It's still on the same hardware. It's still zeros and ones, but it's the closest I can probably describe is if we have any Star Trek fans, the next generation, and you had data, the the android um and he had a posatronic net. He had a neural network that was his brain. That's what we've gone to. It's

I still don't tell me what AI is. The best way.

Let me take a shot. I had a very interesting discussion last week. It was by Amber Price. You might remember her. She's previous CEO of Centara Williamsburg. She's just recently been promoted out of that role. Um she talked about how it's being utilized in the hospitals. Mimography, breast uh tissue mimography has almost exclusively gone to AI because the detection capability on AI is down to 1/100th of an inch. It circles or identifies all the suspect spots in a mammogram and so the technician can go in and verify yes, no, yes, no on whether or not that that spot needs to be further investigated. On um on MRI, it's done the same thing. If you go in and have an MRI on your knee, uh the capability of the human eye to detect issues, takes about 15 minutes to do a complete MRI. It's done within one minute by AI. So what what you described is capability. It doesn't tell me what AI is.

It's still a piece of software like anything else. It's information fed into a software package. No, I'm I'm looking more is that you know we talk about quantum quantum computing. Okay. Uh which is significantly different than what we're doing today. So is this quantum computing? I didn't think so. Okay. quantum computing instead of and you you're leaning right into it. Instead of just on and off ones and zeros, you have different states in the transition state, which instead of base two and times two, it's times three and it grows much quicker.

When as quantum computing keeps growing, if it's utilized by AI, it's going to significantly increase capabilities. Yeah. Well, you start getting into all kind of you get into physics and stuff like that, but uh I'm just wondering I I mean is this just they've written a bunch of smart people got together, they created an algorithm and then and then from this algorithm they're able to enhance the performance of this machine. You can look at it that way. Yes. Okay. But still it's capable of okay

kind of goes beyond that. But yes, at the heart of it, it's a piece of software running like any other. which is very advanced software that breaks out of the rules. So, so somewhere along the way here then the logical conclusion I would say not conclusion but it was just progression when when you go into quantum computing you're going to get a point where the machine builds can build itself. Okay. Yeah, I was doing that perfect timing. So what they're trying to do is automate the AI researcher. The last version of chat GBT was primarily from other AIs. They designed the

sky that got stay with me. Give me a chance. So, but this is everyone's thinking about exactly how you should. I saw that documentary. So, they're trying to automate the AI researcher and the last version of chat GPT. That's what they did. They made AIs that were its sole purpose was to make another next generation of AI because now they're only limited by compute. There's a few other small limitations, but they're quickly getting to that point.

Why it's such a big deal beyond everything else that we talked about and Mr. Ran started to touch base on this is when we start to get to that scary word in the top right, super intelligence. There's two terms you might hear. There's AGI, artificial general intelligence, and that means that the AI can do everything an average person can do. A lot of people will argue we've already passed that stage. Some people say not quite. The next step is called super intelligence. That means that the AI is more capable than any human being could ever be. It's a better therapist than Sigman Freud. At the same time, it's a better physicist than Albert Einstein and Stephven Hawkings. And it's a better military general than Napoleon, Alexander the Great, you name it, all at the same time. That's where I can't predict what's going to happen because by definition, it's smarter than any human possibly could be. That's where things get unknown. Truly unknown.

So for us in government, I'm trying to figure out what conclusion we should draw from this. Okay. I mean, people machines don't vote. Yes. People. Yes. Okay. People have a say in which direction we want to go. Yes. They have a say in our society. The the social aspects of it. Yep. So what conclusion are we trying to get to in terms of we got smart machines build roads and stuff? Yes.

So for your audience, for this audience, there's two different things. For the bureaucracy, cost savings, efficiencies, that's what we focus on. From a political standpoint, there's two different realms. And just I'm going to focus on viewpoints because that's ultimately what they are. Um you have the one viewpoint that we need to have safeguards. We need to control it. AI pretty consistently when you ask it if one day it will wipe out the human race. It says 5 to 20% chance. That's pretty scary. Some people are pushing that we need federal, you know, different regulations on artificial intelligence. Slow it down. make sure we do this right and cautiously because it can be very scary. That's contrasted on the other side that okay, we slow down ours in the United States. Let's say we do that. We put regulations. We're going to do it right. But what about the other countries? What about China? What about any other foreign adversary? This is equivalent and much more so than the nuclear bomb. Once somebody reaches super intelligence, no one else can stop that country's military. period. There are serious, you know, government military security concerns with it. There's productivity. There's a lot integrated into it. And thus, you have kind of two different thought processes. High regulations or encouraging it to make sure whatever lo whatever country is the first one to get it. And I'm not I get to be very beneficial that I'm in the bureaucracy side. I'm not going to weigh in. But those are the two different thought processes that are hot hotly contended on various levels of politics.

So what do we do with this for your county? Thank you. So you'll see how this ties directly into the IT proposed budget. I want to along these lines and you'll see how it directly ties in. If I don't get to key questions, just ask them at the end, please. Some question. I think we need to reduce the IT budget. China's not. Yeah, China's not. We might need to increase it. Dragon.

So, I often get asked, why is software so expensive? There are higher requirements for governments and localities than anywhere else. We have accessibility requirements. You get to choose if you want to buy something through Amazon or Walmart or another vendor. In government, you're kind of stuck with where you live with what government you have. So we need to be accessible to people with visual disabilities, color blindness, other things. And there's a lot of requirements that by law, state or federal, we have to comply with. There's security requirements that go above and beyond. We deal with medical information through public safety. HIPPA act puts extra restrictions on that data. We public safety there's a when we deal with FBI information and criminal data. There's other regulations that only apply to governments. In addition, the state we have records retention requirements. We have to retain anything the state considers a record for a certain period of time and then we have to be able to deliver it via a Freedom of Information Act. There were some great products in Microsoft that we couldn't utilize because we're a government because it doesn't retain those records. So, it eliminates a lot of choices that the private sector, non-government, has. In addition, there's not always a lot of competition. There's key pieces of software that are unique to government such as taxes. Not talking about Turboax, but the treasur commission revenue, how they assess things, how they tax, that's only needed by governments, firefighters, sewer maintenance, you get the idea. These are very niche use cases that are not outside of government. People also ask, why not move everything to the cloud? We've heard for years the private sector telling us, put your data in the cloud, it will solve everything. There are far more breaches in the cloud than there are on this. Knock on wood. To date, I'm going to enjoy it while it's still true. We have never had ransomware on this network. We have never had ransomware on a single computer in the entire history. We have a phenomenal track record. One day our time will be up. We will be hacked. I

won't be able to say it, but I'm enjoying it until then. Um, another big element people don't understand is the difference between subscription and perpetual. When you go to the cloud, you are signing up for a subscription license. What that means is you start paying, you get access. The moment you stop paying, you lose access to the software and all the data in the cloud. Used to be perpetual. You buy the software, you own it, and you pay maintenance. If you stop paying maintenance, you still have that software. You just don't get updates. Why this really affects things is we're on company A. Company B comes along, it's better, it's a little bit cheaper. We want to go to company B. Well, now we have to keep paying company A. start paying company B, design it, configure it, test it, train everybody with it, migrate over all the data, which is one of the most critical elements. And unless we get all the data moved out the old one, we have to keep paying for both systems. That's a huge cost increase. Also, is automation and AI always good? License fees, nothing I mentioned before. It's not free. Microsoft Power Automates One tool. They say it comes free with Office 365. We were really excited just to find out that you really can't do anything with the free version. You have to pay for the enterprise to do anything you really want.

And they know if it's going to save us $100,000, they're going to charge us 99,000 90,000 somewhere around there. Not because it costs that much, but it's still a win for us. And they're going to maximize the profits. That's what they're designed to do. It's harder to reprogram. We lose flexibility. If you give it certain tasks and certain automations and you change something, you break that assembly line. You got to get a skilled, very expensive IT worker to come in to fix it. And the most commonly asked question is, will AI take our jobs? So, I'm going to play three different things of an F1 pit stop from 1950, 2009, and 2013. Over these years, technology changed greatly. It changed how they do pit stops. But you notice it doesn't decrease the amount of people though. It increases it. What happens is the expectations increase. The speed, the responsiveness, the reliability, all of those things go up. All of us probably remember before computers became mainstream in the workforce and everyone was afraid computers are going to take everyone's job. We have more people in the workforce today than we had back then. The expectations are what keeps changing. When I worked with staff members and with the business community, I point to the 1950s person, highly skilled, he was amazing. Watch him, you know, knock off those lug nuts, switch them. He could have said, "I'm great at what I do. I'm not changing. This is what I'm always going to do." If that was that person's mentality, they probably were not employed many years afterwards. Our goal here in York County, what we can do about it is train our workforce for workforce development. Their jobs jobs will change. If they don't change, we will fall behind. I'm going to keep running that just for

if they don't keep up with it, they will fall behind. Um, so the more we can do to educate them, to help them embrace artificial intelligence, the benefits, how it can make their workforce, their work job easier, how they can produce even more in the same amount of time, producing higher quality items, that's what we want to focus on.

So the short answer is yes, it will, but there may be other opportunities to move to. So going back to your point, no one should get comfortable with it not taking your job. It will take your job. There are tasks that we all do, me, all of us do that AI will do and do better and cheaper. So but you need to be be able to and be willing to pivot to that next expectation.

And right now the better part's a little bit contingent. I can ask AI for legal advice and it's going to give me an answer, but it's not going to be anywhere near the reliability of Mr. Hill. He has the expertise. He has the common sense. He's not that smart intern that's not going to lack common sense and scope. Yeah. Do that a couple more years. Okay.

Kind of drilling in a little bit more. I want to talk a little bit about IT budgeting, how we do it. And this is something we do in IT, but it's probably mirrored aspects of this in other departments throughout the county. We do a five-year forecast similar to how the county does used to do the CIP. One of the big reasons is we make and we leverage multi-year renewals. I talked about the cloud moving from one platform to another and that takes time. We buy a software program in year two or three we decide we don't like it. It's going to probably take a year to transition off. So, we leverage that. We work with them for multi-year renewals. Usually we can get a 15% discount or something, but we need to forecast that out because we're going to have a the price then 00 price, but we try to leverage that to save as much money as we possibly can with each one. We also generally know where when our vendors the end of their quarter and end of the year are there things we use against the private sector because if they're a publicly traded company, they're focused on these. They will give us great deals around those time frames. So that's when we just happen to renew all of our software and try to negotiate every last penny we can. We look at different things. PC replacements, we replace them at five years. Not because we like that number, but that's how long they're designed to last before they start to fail. One year, and some of the board members here will remember, it was a hard year. We stretched that from 5 years to six. The tickets that year that the department got tripled. We've all bought that piece of hardware and it's one year manufacturer warranty and it feels like, you know, one year in a day, it dies. PCs are designed to last five years and then they start having problems. And people may say, "Well, no problem. My monitor goes out. It won't be a big deal." Except for they're always working on something. They have a deadline. It never fails when you have a break. And if you've worked with the county staff, that doesn't happen. So that person stops work. They can't work because the monitor's broke or the PC is having an issue. They call one of my staff. We have to pull them off the job they're doing, run down there, assess it, get a new PC, maybe a loaner, put that into place, take it back, repair

it, put it back into place again, and they're still left after all that outage, all that wasted staff time with a five, sixy old PC. Financially, we worked out many years ago, it's more cost- effective to proactively replace them every 5 years. We looked at the warranty. We used to have the three-year manufacturer warranty and extend it out to 5 years. We looked at what we were spending and said we can buy a couple PCs for a fraction of the cost and just essentially self-insure and we make more money by not doing those extended warranties. But we don't take that and just apply it to all pieces of hardware. Cisco switches hardware they last and the hardware lasts and lasts. So what we do with those is we look at the last date of support when they last give us security updates. We look at that date. We go about six months before enough time to get the hardware in, configure it, put it in place, and that's when we replace those or at least we budget to replace them. It does take away some flexibility, narrows our window, but we're trying to focus on how to minimize the budget, how to be good tarts of the taxpayer money. Okay. Numbers. So, this year and the impact that it has, we're going to focus on the increase side of the ledger. Overall, $.8 8 million increase primarily and overarching that's driven by most of our software went up by 7.5% this year and I took out the bigger exceptions I'm about to go over so inflation whatever you want to call it in the IT industry that's what it's going up by Microsoft software just to log on to a Windows network you need Microsoft licensing you need licensing for database servers that went way up server virtualization they got bought out by another company.

Wrong call. Yep. Now, when we heard about that, we worked with our vendors. We renewed for as many years as they possibly would let us renew because we knew they were going to jack up the prices immensely and we got the longest contract we possibly could. Renewed it. However, that runs out and now we have to pay the new rates with the new company and the increase. You looking at Flex Cloud.

So, what we have on here is the overall price. We are highly looking at other alternatives. They are all going to cost about the same thing. We need to make sure that the actual operations we have the budget to choose the right solution. But yes, we are very much looking into alternative solutions for that. I can't tell you which one's going to be the correct one that I asked for, you know, approval.

Oh yes. And the same thing with the phone system. A lot of key pieces of hardware go into support. We have to replace huge components. we're taking this opportunity to evaluate the whole system of what makes sense. If we just renew that hardware, 80% of that system, we're kind of stuck with the whole solution over and over again. So, it's a good time to re-evaluate what that solution is. There's also, I'm going to hit this here in two slides, enhancement requests and then personnel increase requests. On the other side of the legis ledger is the savings um $.3 million. 100,000 is due to my prior deputy uh director Paula Cork. She worked tirelessly with our telecommunication vendors, switch companies, reduce services, fine-tune that, and she ended up with over, I believe, over $100,000 of yearly ongoing savings by doing that. We also have other things we do. Drop software, multi-year contracts adds up to another $200,000.2 million of ongoing yearly savings. Take the slide from last and the net overall increase unfortunately by the IT department is half a million dollars or 16% of the budget. That's purely off of that prior slide and those increases. So I do want to jump. So going a little bit back into these were the things driving that half million offset by the three. I do want to touch base on the enhancements to get a little bit transparency. So, and so that citizens kind of know what are the enhancements. Is it just, you know, things we want and things that are cool? These are the three different ones that add up to the amount. Um, UKG Teleap, this is our time management system. Works great for most of our standard employees. However, when we come to public safety and our first responders, they work on shift work. They have critical times when one person calls out sick and they need to make sure they get back up and people are

called and contacted so they can fill those vacancies in a timely fashion. Most of the departments that this covers on public safety do this paper and pen Excel spreadsheets creates errors, creates inconsistencies, creates problems whenever they ask for leave for the next year and try to handle that. Those are all done by separate systems that we used to use 30, 40, 50 years ago with all the problems we used to have back then. This solution integrates with our current time management system. It's UKG, same overall working company handles all of this. It's 60,000 for implementation and 40,000 ongoing for the actual subscription fee of it.

I've never heard of UKG. So actually UKG for time management is one of the industry leaders globalwide. They used to be called Kronos. That might be why. Um, UKG bought Kronos and we switched and now we're on a product called UKG Ready. This is a supplemental to it. So, you probably know it as Kronos. Yeah.

Yep. Second one is aerial mapping service. So, I think everyone's somewhat familiar when you go to the county website, you have the aerial photographs of the whole county of the flyovers. We've done that historically and we would get new three, I'm sorry, six inch resolution pictures every four years. more and more localities and at this point every single locality around us has abandoned that and they go with thirdparty companies like what we're asking for. They get it flown every two years twice as often and the resolution is four times the quality. So it goes from a 6-in resolution down to a 3-in resolution. There's other key benefits of it and it's not about pretty pictures. This data is used in processes throughout the entire county. Whether it's real estate assessment, whether it's plan development services, emergency services, this data feeds all sorts of processes. We got a free one from the state, which we were happy to get last year. Um, but its accuracy is one foot. It's a quarter of the resolution we normally get and a 16th of what we're proposing. It's very fuzzy. It's very granular. We can't use it for much data analytics that the county government does and even citizens have commented this is really bad. They have to go back to the 2021 aerial flyover for that 6 in. This will give us three inches which is on par with every other locality around us.

These are the images in the GIS system. Yes. Okay. And this is annual fee. Yes. They fly it every twice a year. If with this company in addition, if there's based upon their their definition of it, but a major event, a hurricane, tornado, they will fly in short order. So, we have immediate um feedback of new photographs outside of the normal two years. 35,000 get you two two a year. No, one every other year.

One every other year. The actual cost you can double that. Some localities fly it every year, but this is what I'm proposing because of the third bullet. So, we have a nationally recognized emergency drone responder program or a drone program for emergencies. We also have a non-emergency drone program focused on cost savings. We've been able to fly key missions, get video footage with video services and other things, but we really can't use it for data. You take a drone and you take a picture and on the edges of that picture, you'll get like a side picture of the trees or the building on the edges. you take another picture on the side and those pictures don't match up anymore because the angle because of how high the drones are flown. This helps stitch them all together and gives us one seamless picture. When you go to Google Maps, it's not one picture of the whole globe and somehow it took it simultaneously. It's a bunch of pictures all stitched together. This allows us to leverage the investment we already have in the non-emergency drone program. We can have a development and fly that every month if we want to and update our maps the next day of exactly what's changed in that development. So you don't have to wait two years. You don't have to wait other things. If we supplement it and choose to fly over that because it's a point of interest for the county and we're in complete control of that. Thus the board and county administrator we can say we need this place flown we can react as

a 3 inch resolution. So the better accuracy gives us more details, helps us identify things. Are we still going to use this for uh can we use it for surveying? So it's certified information, but they are never survey quality. The survey quality is something that a surveyor has to be brought out, has to do legal reasons and that stuff. This gives us everything else and lets us talk about information at a higher degree. So AI is now going to replace the surveyors. Yeah. Yeah. Well, robot robot will walk out there and do the same thing one of these days. One day. I don't know. One day he'll have all the stuff right up in here. He won't even have to have one of those poles with

either one of those able to do um elevation detect elevation.

I believe both of them. Yes. Um in addition, this one also gives us the possibility of 3D modeling for economic tourism development. Other ones we can make a threedimensional model of items. A lot of capability. The two positions I want to kind of wrap this up, give it to the other people covering positions overall in the county. But the two positions that I have requested is first the business applications technician. This is part of a team, a three-person team that used to support the AS400 mainframe, the green screen dumb terminal that we had. That same three people, we replaced it with Tyler Munus, much more robust, much more sophisticated, much more complex system. We took tax went with a venity totally different software company different program. They support both those. Then we took time management from the schools when went up to the cloud. The county portion moved over to that same team. They support all of those with the same three people. They are desperately underwater. What they do and the functions they do. If they make a mistake, it shows up in payroll. It shows up in payments. It shows up in all sorts of back-end items that is a risk to the county. I highly s recommend and request that position. The database administrator similarly we have one database administrator right now. He handles data storage of it, different permissions to it. Legislation's changing, requiring more, but more importantly in my opinion is this is the person who handles the AI automation, who handles computing automation to be able to work with all the different comp uh departments throughout the county and utilize the tools, help the workflows and work processes. Some of them are on Excel and paper. Until we have time with this key person as our weakest point, that position, we're kind of hamstrung. We can only get to a few applications each year, a few departments. This will double the capability there. So overall, just asking for continued AI

innovation, continuing the services that we provide, fund the three enhancements, and the two new personnel request as part of the county measure proposed budget. Any questions? Go back to I believe the lowhanging fruit in the county to give taxpayers the best return on investment is going to be AI AIdriven workflow automation.

If we can if we can save eight people one hour a day in manual repetitive task you just created FTE. So, but you got to list as a database administrator, but you said I mean I hope you're going to look more towards a AI enablement expertise because what kind of databases we got my SQL what do we got?

So most of the automation today where I showed you nice flashy end user a lot of it is behind the scenes that's where you can pass data and bring programs and data from two seamlessly functionally and effectively together. That's why there's a lot of overlap. The job description itself covers both use cases. Um the most kind of key thing is the databases, but that person handles both. The current one has a foot in both words because co-pilot perplexity, they can write SQL queries all day long. You don't you don't need a database administrator. You don't need to hire a database administrator to do that. Just to review the code. You just to review the code. Yep.

What do you mean review the code? So once it's been our practice and part our policy whenever AI generates it you have to have somebody with programming knowledge with structure to go and understand the lines of what it produced. We can't take something and by policy we don't take something generated by AI and just run it on our systems. That would be catastrophic. Amazon for example great company invests tons of money. They've had two massive multi-hour outages because AI they used AI agents and they effectively wrote new code, published it without any human oversight. Very effective until they made a mistake and they've caused two national global or national outages um highly impacting customers. For that reason, we still need some capability. So is this is this position you got listed as database administrator is it for a legacy database administrator writing SQL code or you're talking about an AI automation?

Yes. Yep. Functionally their job functions will be AI automation reviewing of code related to that handling of integrating software programs. Okay. All right. Because again workflow automation is where we're going to get immediate bang for the buck saving people time so we don't have to hire more people because this people who work so okay explain the other one to me business applications.

So this was the one with the AS400 mainframe they've had their work they now support three different software programs from versus they had the same team 20 years ago as they do today three-person team and yet they now support three different programs. They handle they collaborate highly with finance with commission revenue and treasur's office um as well as HR for the time management system and they handle the back-end flows um whenever somebody has an issue they're also firstline tech support they work with the engineers on the back with the companies if there's a more extensive one there checks and balances a lot with the financial team we call them the fences team um

because most of what they do are centered around that so they're leazison between these different departments. They're very technical. They're handling the raw data. I'm going to call them leazison. What are the three applications? Aventity, the tax program, Tyler Munis, the enterprise resource planning system, and UKG, the time management. So, so this is the team that are the subject matter experts. Yes. And that so that when the other teams department are using those software programs have an issue, an error, whatever, those are the guys that come in. that are frontline support. Support, right, to get get you over that. So, which one fixes Tom's most issues?

That's our boots on the ground help desk team. So, we get a robot to do that for you. Sorry. I don't have a robot right now. I'm good. Are you good? Okay. Happy to hear that. Any questions? No. No. Good. Thank you. Good presentation. Thanks, Tim. Are you ready to move on? I think so.

Okay. So, I'd like to call Miss Goodwin and Miss McKenna up. As you recall from our budget presentation on the 17th, uh I did indicate that there were some positions that we had included in uh the budget this year and I wanted to give you all the opportunity to to look through that and see what we have and haven't done. So I'll let uh I'll let the ladies get started here.

Okay. So, um, in addition to the two IT positions that Tim just talked about, the budget, the recommended budget also includes five additional non general fund positions that we show here. Those are for social services, sewer, utility, and vehicle maintenance.

For social services, uh, we're recommending two positions, um, family service specialist and a benefits program supervisor to ensure that the benefit programs are administered accurately and support the increased case loads. Um I know the board will probably remember Mark has given us some updates through the year about the federal government and how they've increased their um requirements on how often we check eligibility and they've also um set new standards on what our error rate could be on those and if we don't have an error rate below that they can pull back federal and state funding. And so it's important that one we address the growing case load um because it's become unmanageable for the existing staff and two make sure that accuracy is there. So we have that supervisor.

Um we discussed um also when we uh just met on the sewer rate study, but the error rate is a statewide error rate number unique to the county. Right.

That's correct. It is statewide. So it's a compiled effect. However, each locality helps to drive that number down. It has to get to 6%. Currently the state is operating at 11.5. The big 20 are the ones that are going to drive it down. But individually if we're also not doing their own case management with case loads of 6 to 800 and now the new requirement that they're having to touch these cases twice a year when during CO they didn't at all and then when they went back it was only one time a year. We have to have some checks and balances behind that. Understood. And and that 11% number was quite a while ago. Has there been an improvement in that number?

There's been a slight improvement. It depends on what um error rate you're looking at because they keep updating it all the time. Part of the problem is part of the error rate has to do with much like Tim was talking about system called VACMS. So some of the errors aren't even errors from staff. They're actually the errors from the computer not alerting that it didn't program it correctly. So it makes it even more complex where more than just the average worker, you need somebody in a supervisory level that can go behind and justify that because that's exactly what we're doing. We're submitting back to the state and they're saying this is an error. We're saying this is not an error. This is a system error. Thank you.

So we just recently talked about the sewer rate study that was conducted. Um and and when we were talking through that, the board was able to see significant capital projects that are coming down uh for uh utilities. Um that is going to require an addition of a superintendent and a specialist to help support that work and the growing infrastructure that they're having to maintain. When we looked at the rates that were recommended last week, those included these two new positions. And finally, um, uh, Mark mentioned when he was presenting the budget, uh, two weeks ago that we've added a significant number of public safety positions in the last five years. With those positions come additional vehicles and vehicle maintenance. Um, one additional automotive service coordinator is recommended to help maintain that expanded fleet. This position will also support the expansion of the fleet elsewhere for things like our popular trolleys of which we've just recently added.

Yorktown is such a great place to visit and the trolley service is free which only adds to the experience. It's worth a roundtrip ride just to see all that Yorktown has to offer. We love the trolley and the app to track its location makes it even easier to hop right on. My friend cares for a man who loves live music, and she travels many miles to bringing the concerts. Yorktown is one of his favorite locations, thanks in part to the trolley, especially Miss Debbie, who makes every trip more enjoyable and helps us to enjoy the concerts even more. So, our residents may not interact with our internal service personnel, those folks in fleet and some of our other internal um service departments, but they rely on their work daily to keep the systems running, the vehicles operational, and the services available. This chart you can see um over the past five years, the county has made significant investments in public safety staffing while adding very few positions to those internal support functions. Um and as we know um well one other thing I want to point out is around 2021 we were tracking along the same trajectory but since then um uh the general the non-public safety positions have remained relatively flat and while public safety continues to be a top priority it's important to recognize that there are those roles rely on internal services human resources IT finance administrative support to be able to operate effectively With limited growth in those internal support areas, many departments are now experiencing capacity challenge and are struggling to maintain that current service level while supporting the overall organization. It's important to note too in this chart, we did not include the 23 E911 positions from the um James City County Consolidation um because those positions were funded

and still continue to be funded by JCC. Um however it's important to note that our internal services still support all positions and so for as you know human resources or finance or IT it's not just this increase you add 20 23 more positions on and those are the the staff members that we're supporting from human resources uh finance perspective. So is this slide showing over 45 positions below where we need to be? No. So the red line is um general fund positions over the last uh 10 years, right?

Uh that were not public safety compared to the public safety positions that includes fire. Why are we com Okay, I'm I'm lost here. Why are we comparing these? Because we're making the case that you've increased public safety, but you haven't increased the support that's needed. What I would say then the problem is you guys haven't been explaining it well enough. We're going to change that today. I hope so. Okay. Very good. Challenge accepted. Okay. Susan, before we get too far down the road, that automotive, what was that position called? Automotive services coordinator.

Coordinates. So, is it like a service advisor? What What is that? What is that role going to do?

Yes. you you off into a car dealership and you've gone in to get service. So when you go in, you have a face you start the work order with that person and then they call you when it's done. So right now we don't have that in fleet. So we have one of five people that could be available when somebody drops off their vehicle. So when that when that happens, it could be the fleet manager. Well, he gets called out to a meeting or something and then that when the work is done, that person may not get called because it's just I it's we want to control the the flow of that work order by one person to to be able to to get things going. Sometimes, imagine if you had to go to a car dealership and walk out into the debate to find somebody to to get you to get start a work order for you,

drop your car off or go to the sales office. You just have to find somebody. That's it's we're working through it right now, but it's it since we've increased the fleet by 389 pieces over the last five years, it's becoming more and more difficult to um to maintain the efficiency. So, we haven't increased technicians and we really don't have the space to increase technicians, but a service coordinator to would help that that flow to make it more efficient to get the the work done um in a more timely man. I can see that. Also, I can see that person prioritizing work as well as opposed to first in first out which may not be what you want to accomplish. Correct. Okay. All right.

How many people do you have working in your in that that department? So, five, I guess you'd call it, admin staff, seven technicians, manager, superintendent, what required admin staff and operations coordinator that deals with fuel and and make sure all the fuel sites are operational as well as keeping the fuel levels. Um, and then so with this um this this coordinator, is that going to be their only job or they're going to be they're going to be trained in so if if that's going to be a full-time job, is is it enough work there to keep that person busy or are they going to be trained to do other stuff?

Just taking an average of work orders. So, you spent um 30 minutes to an hour per work order. That's a full-time job. It's between 3,000 and 4,000 work orders a year. And that's kind of an average. It fluctuates every year based on the equipment we have. So, it averages three work orders a day.

It depends on the the equipment. It could be, you know, three annually for a um sheriff's deputies vehicle. could be four for a tractor. So, it varies per piece of equipment there. But this person would also be in charge of they would handle like recalls, which there's more and more recalls with new new vehicles now. So, this person would handle that. They would be um uh let's see, I made a few notes here to see what we needed. So they would if they got if this person got the re the recall notice they would alert the department that has the vehicle to say hey we need to get that vehicle

packing recall yeah when things come in they that person would be the oh this is there's a recall on this vehicle I see it's going to take a little bit longer to let the let our internal customer know. So who does that now? Right now it's kind of a a tag team effort

with whoever is available. could be uh somebody may a technician may be be available to do that. may start it, but then the workers required admin staff that we have in there right now may have to call at the end, but technician starts it. He may start another job, not notify that person. So, I'm trying to keep the flow the communication flow with one one person start finish this reducing work is required. Will we will this reduce the number of people as work is required? Um I don't I don't foresee that in addition to that. Okay. Yeah.

Good question though. So we have some of those. We do. So, so for the board of supervisors, if we're going to go into the minutia of every position that we're trying to fill up here, why don't we have a a description of the job so that we can sit there because I can't I'm not going to memorize every one of these things. So, nor do I am I interested in micromanaging every one of these things. That's your job, right? Right. I hope they don't want me to micromanage them. But I mean,

well, we say micromanage, they micromanage the decision. If we have to make if the board's got to make a informed decision as to whether we support because you given a presentation on the manpower and we have to make a decision whether we're going to support that request. I mean, what level of detail am I supposed to go into here? I mean, am I going to know if somebody's going to split this or do that or fill part cover a part-time job or or stuff like that? I'm this is no way are you going to cover enough information tonight for me to make a decision. So, I would I would I would say if you if you want us to make that decision, then you need to give us a print out of what that job is and describe it in enough detail. Well, I will I will just say that we um are going to give you a high level overview of the positions that the county administrator recommended in his budget, but I but I do want to mention that 44 positions were requested in total. Um we've and so our team the budget committee has kind of gone through that vetting with the departments getting the justification getting the information we needed to be able to bring it to the county administrator so that he could then review it do his vetting to bring you the recommendations and so the recommendations are a small portion of the total we got

I have no problem with that what you described in fact I would expect it okay but but tonight you're presenting the information in a manner and this discussion is following a track That tells me that we're going to be into a more detailed uh analysis of the every position you're talking about.

We're a handful of positions, but it would be nice to have a a detailed description of what I was just asking him the justification of why we're doing what we're doing, the time efficiency, the maybe a cost that's associated with that or the efficiency would be cut down because of such and such and such. It always gives us a better feel for why we're doing that position. We can justify it. But this has already been vetted. By whom? By the committee, by the county administrator and they work for the county administrator. I have no problem with that, Shil. I don't either.

The problem I've got is I'm sitting here listening to this parts where we're getting into some questions justifiably so into the bits and pieces because you're bringing it to us as a discussion point. I'm not going to analyze every one of these positions like that. There going to be more questions than you're going to possibly handle in this meeting, right, in this format. This presentation certainly allows to be gotten off track pretty easily,

but it it really was never our intention to have a conversation about how many work orders are written and and some of the most intimate details of each position. What we're really looking for is just an agreement that you're okay with what we've recommended and that other than the basic information that they're providing, which is the justification for why we brought these into the budget, that's we just want your acknowledgement and your concurrence. If you tell us at the end of the day after listening to this, if you tell us you don't want this, then that's your prerogative. That's your

I would be really hesitant to say that that I would I wouldn't want something because no way are we down into the weeds with this stuff as you are. Okay. But I'm just saying that just we could very easily get down in the weeds and spend hours of doing this and be totally frustrated at the end. And I don't want to get it. I personally don't want to do that. That's why I trust you and you to do your jobs. Well, if you'd like the ladies to finish their presentation, we could do that. Well, I' I'd like to ask a question. We've already had our one-on- ones to go through. All of us. Yes. If we had questions on the resources being added, we would have asked those questions.

Is there any position on this list that somebody has a question on? I think we do it by by exception rather than going through the entire list. We're we're fine with that. But uh but what I'm looking at is the reason one of the reasons about doing it this way ju not only for us just to listen to what they have to present but it's because we have an audience that's too at at some point we have to let the the our government do their job we I'm with you but then we sit down here we we go through minutia I I don't agree with doing that. So I'm asking the question is there any rule in here that people take except any of the board take exception to and we can review that one otherwise I would say go forward go forward

absolutely we just got the details on this automotive service coordinator Tim explained the the two IT positions which has already gone into more detail than we needed and from this morning's meeting I had with staff understand the two social services and and the seal utilities so we that's all seven

so the going to I mean to me the supervisors it it what jumps out that's going to be a problem. If it's the total cost of doing this you know hiring these people then that's another issue. All right. Um but if we got to sit down right now here go through the justifications that of what you presented I I just I think it's almost a waste of time to be honest with you. I'm perfectly happy with Mr. Horoid's resolution to it.

No, I mean I I I I don't the supervisors have one have some issue that was in question. We got somebody we're paying to go fish. You know, that's that I can get I have trouble get behind that. But I mean, every every position you got up here, I think we're in agreement. And I would and I would say to you, Mr. Shepard, if you remember the you you you've done this for a couple years for a minute. That pendulum swings both ways. Some years you want more detail. Some years you don't want any. So we're we're we're on the wrong side of the pendulum. So I appreciate the correction.

But I just I'm sorry. I just I just kept the questions were good, but I kept thinking this format for these questions you it's I'm not going to onesies and twsies this thing have to be because you've already I know this whole staff has done this. I think uh we we raise an issue when we see a problem. It's in our one-on- ones and then you bring it to us for further discussion. I don't think any of us had issues this year. We'll take it as we go forward, but when I have questions, I have questions whether it's on the one-on-one or whether it's here. So, so ask your question and I had one and I didn't have that question then and I had it tonight because we had somebody here today. So, I've asked is there any other rules? Not not right now. Okay.

Not right now. But I'm not going to stop asking questions because I didn't ask on the oneonone. And that's my whole point is that you know this is not the format necessarily to be able to handle all the load for everyone's position like if I have a question they can't answer they can get it to me. I'm not tonight. I do have a question.

Yes. who's gonna up his okay thank you chairman I I do have um one request u of you so there has been a conversation about the business advocate

position that Mr. uh Drury has brought up in the past and the board has recently agreed that we should do that. So, I just wanted to be transparent on that issue and allow the board to ask any questions that they might have. We have not had a significant discussion as a group about it. So, if there are some questions about that, I would I'd like to hear them. But other than that, the conversation I've had with each one of you individually is that my intentions are to move forward with that in this current fiscal year. So, barring any other questions, I do have questions about the um

business advocate. Business advocate. There you go. Because we haven't really talked about it together and I heard us on the general general concept as general concept. What exactly are we talking about in terms of what you see in the staff? I don't know where that position really sits. I know you said I was going to report to you. Um, and how's that going to work out? Do we do we already have that position? Are we ready to fill that position? Uh, what is that? Can we have a little more detail about what that position is actually going to do now? Certainly. I' I've asked

Mrs. Null has asked for the job description and and we we have that. It is not quite in final form but it wouldn't take very long to finish it up. Um so the question is what is this position going to do? So this position will act as an advocate for business I envision mostly larger businesses but smaller businesses as well. um they will act as an advocate and particularly they are interested in the permitting and planning aspects of this. Is the property need to be reszoned? Do they need a SUP? I mean, how many times have we heard from business owners that ran off and leased leased a facility to run their business out of, but it was in the wrong place and they couldn't do what they wanted to do and they're already obligated to a lease. I know. of her debt a few times.

Me too. Yeah. Right. Absolutely.

So that's the kind of thing this person would help with with permitting with our outside agencies. They would be an advocate for uh let's say HRSD, VOTE because they all play a role in um in new businesses coming to the county. So, I've talked to I know you had a concern about how this would interact with uh economic tourism development. I've had a cons I've had a couple conversations with uh Christie about it. She's okay. The handoff is she finds the prospect and gets them here. Once they agree to come to the county, the business advocate takes them from there to to work on their physical location. That's their That's their real process. So, they'll be there, like I said, reszoning, permitting, SUPs, uh, site selections, they'll be there to help with those things, be a liaison to these other entities that have an impact on what they can and can't do.

And and and because we didn't talk together about this, my concern was the impact that this would have on the current staff. Okay? because I couldn't understand and I still don't totally understand how this relationship is going to work because we have two um county assistant administrators. They have division heads that do things and so you know you got this advocate going around that we put you know based upon their description it's going to work directly for you and I don't want to have that end up interfering with the one the leadership structure the uh the responsibilities that our staff that the especially the the leaders in the staff have because it could it could I feel under undermine undermine that and cause a problem. Now, we want to help obviously we're trying to we're trying to um trying to help businesses get through this smooth and I'll give a great example one years and years and years ago. We had a I think it was a charity that came in and bought a building and to do their work. They bought the building without coming through the permitting only to find out but based upon what they were going to do they didn't have enough parking spaces.

So now they're on the hook with a building right that they they got to go turn around and try to sell the loss. Yeah. No one no and that went on that was ugly. I mean no one was there to help them and a business advocate should be able to kind of say wait a second what do you before you go running off and doing something right let's get in here and figure it out. We have had people businesses in here that we really wanted to help where the business owner gets out ahead of the staff commits and actually does stuff only find out they violated it and paid money to do it

and they paid good money to do it. And so now they got to somehow we either got to accept the era which generally we don't or they got to back it out somehow. So that's what I'm seeing is for this is a way to smooth that out but is not to undermine our division heads. is not to undermine our assistant uh county administrators because then we're going to have another problem. I that's so that I voice that. That's concern.

I'm not going to speak for Mark, but this person is not going to have the authority to undermine any of the department heads. All they're doing is helping get through the system properly, on time, as efficient as possible. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but that's kind of what this person's doing. Well, you you know actually I think a long time ago someone who worked for economic development had that role a long time ago. Yes. I'm sorry. It was a long time but but and that worked very well and somehow that that job got absorbed someplace else and we it wasn't continued but we did have that going.

Yeah. I think that went away because it wasn't being used. it wasn't being it wasn't being used properly. I think there was a it was a system where there maybe not you know if a county administrator doesn't want to do something you know he can make it you know difficult very difficult to use it. I just think that there was there was uh there was some of this internal turmoil within the organization because we couldn't figure out exactly

what this person was going to do. I mean it was that was my sense when this was happening. So, and they just kind of evaporated and and then they reorganized the organization and you know that's a good way to lose a position. So, we I think we're all in favor very much in favor of having this person hold the hand of the builder or the developer, the business person, walk them through this stuff and stop them from screwing things up and then helping our staff making sure that it doesn't screw up stuff because that's really not the job for members of the board of supervisors to get involved in. No, but we somehow but somehow we have been getting involved in it and I don't think it's been right.

So Mark, I would ask for a followup. Uh if you could provide a job description with these questions and elements included into it. How are you addressing the various questions that have been raised here? I think that is worth one more look supervisors. Be happy to do it. There are three highle expectations I have for this position. one you just touched upon is taking that Yeah. taking that business person and lead walking leading them through the process to get to from point A to point B. You you mentioned larger businesses, but I really envision this for helping the smaller businesses, the homebased entrep the homebased entrepreneur that's ready to go

to a brick brick and mortar. the existing business that's ready to go from a lease spot in a shopping center to their own own building and all the minutia and all the bureaucracy involved in that. This person learns those process and help that person. That's one. Two, I want to see this person continue to drive a culture of of the entire staff going um what is it you want to accomplish and how can we help you get there and not just checking checking boxes. Mr. Jury calls that yes right. Yes. Getting to Yes. Right. And and the third thing is whatever this person does and learns and better. We start automating it

with AI technology. So we don't need two, three, four of those people that as a business grows. Yeah. He gets supplemented with with AI. I'd like to have two or three or four of those because that means all the businesses are coming to the county and and that's what we as we drive that yes culture. We should see that coming in. But I don't want to start building. There's a fourth I would add to that that we talk about the business coming in but we have businesses that are already here. Right. Okay. And they need to be treated the same way. Sure. So we I mean it's just don't assume that the and that's why I was that's why I was saying the guys who's ready to go from a small lease building to their own expanding their own building. We got to help those folks out as well. So

but I don't think the advocate is here to get a homebased business started. No no no no. This would be a careful business. This would be a brick and mortar. I'm talking about a big business. I understand. I just want to clarify. Yes. I'm not here to set up a homebased business. No. Right. Right. I totally Hang on a second. Well, tell me. I mean, I understand what you're saying, but sometimes a homebased business can end up causing you a whole lot of problems if you don't if it's not handled correctly. That ends up in our lap. So the the staff needs to understand that if a problem's occurring on a homebased business, they may want to go over to the advocate and maybe get the advocate to help them out a little bit. Definitely some handholding that can help.

I could see maybe that, but I think his point is that's not the purpose of this, but that would be a leg that this person could work toward. I see that still being a planning staff effort. Yes, we'll work through those.

So, Mr. Jury, to your point, I I did want to respond to your comment about that. Um, from my perspective, what what I have witnessed that has caused the most angst is that you you recognize that not everything is black and white. There are gray areas in our codes, in building code, in those places. And what you've seen on a couple of occasions, Mr. Hooray has seen this uh with uh North Point

where we we had an interpretation of code to allow North Point to occur if it was ever going to occur and you didn't necessarily agree with it. To me, that is the biggest piece of this job is to keep things like that from happening. And um if if the security wire the other night had been an issue for a new business, that's the kind of thing I would expect that person to be able to navigate and say, "Uh, Mr. New business owner, we will, you know, make arrangements for you to be able to do this for your business if it's important." And he would bring it to planning and development services and champion it through the process. So I and they may not always be in agreement uh is what I'm really want to say to you. And in that instance,

they need to be if you want to be business friendly, if that's what the board is telling me you want to do, that person needs to have the authority and breath of understanding to influence the directors. Right. And the only way that's going to happen is to be at this level. Yeah. For what I was saying, they're not there to undermine. No, sir. Not at all. They're there to work with them, right, to get a Yes.

And to Mr. Sheepard's point, he had when he and I had talked about it, uh, he was very concerned about that with planning and development services and with economic tourism development. Brian and I have had conversations. Uh both of those organizations operate under Brian's purview right now. We've had conversations with both of those folks to make sure they're okay with what's being proposed and I've heard no negative comment from them at all. As well as public works, which also is a big player in some of these bigger projects. Right. Absolutely.

So, we'd be happy to send you a job description. you could take a look at it and uh I'll come back and poll each one of you to see if there's a question or if you're ready for me to move forward. There's one other point I'd make and clearly I've been in that position for a long portion of my career. You need to have somebody close enough to the top to be able to hear your issue and relay it. And that's that's why I support it being a a level immediately beneath you. And to your point, Mr. Drury. That's why they call you cuz they want to go to the top, right? So, if they recognize that this person can make those kinds of decisions, they're going to call this person. Thank you. Yeah. Hallelujah. These calls that you get,

right? Right. But we appreciate your help. Yeah. Yes, sir. I think we've covered Yes. section. Okay. What's next? That would conclude our presentations for this evening. Okay. Good. have any more questions or comments? No, I still don't know what I AI is.

Yeah. The only comment I would have Doug is when I was asking the question, it wasn't that I was not agreeing to the position. I just wanted to get more clarification of of because I'm not familiar with that department. That's why I was asking those questions. is not the getting the minutiae of it. I just want to get my head wrapped around that. Don't please don't take I You did take you take it my as criticism. It wasn't criticism to you because what I'm sitting here is thinking of 40ome positions we're going to go through in this detail. No, no, no. That was no way we wanted to do that. So, if we have questions, you always supervised some of that just for my own application. It wasn't questioning the position at all because I agree. I think we need we've added 50ome employees and how many vehicles you know

right it's got to we had we do have to have some support with that I'll close tonight's session next meeting is Tuesday of next week uh and it is our first public uh public meeting town hall town hall no town hall meeting town hall no it's a bud budget meeting yeah the town hall griffin town in the north end of the county.

That's right. I haven't had a final conversation with the doctor.