Board of Supervisors Meeting - 4/2/2024

e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e hel good morning everyone I get your attention with that or welcome to uh Welcome to our Board of Supervisors meeting um our special meeting uh for Tuesday April 2nd 2024 we will have the uh pledge to the flag by supervisor gson please please join me II to the flag of the United States stes of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with theity and justice for all thank you okay so we are going to start right away w

ith our 9:00 a.m. item is our fiscal year 20242 departmental budget presentations get away Daniel good morning chair Jones and members of the board I'm Daniel chatney with the county executive of office um pleased to be here uh for day one of two days of Department budget presentations for our fiscal year 2425 budget process so I heard a comment earlier this morning that was surprised that we were already at budget time um but on this slide up here we're just reminding everybody this is really a

year round almost a year round process for for the county and the county staff combined as we start the real the development process in November every year with the Board of Supervisors budget Workshop immediately then we're creating our internal service fund budgets we release our base budgets to departments early in January every year and then but by March or the first week of March all Department budgets are submitted to the county executive office today we're doing our department budget pre

sentations and then after tomorrow's presentations of the same we will be meeting um with the board members to review budget requests finalize the recommended budget over the months of April and May and then expect to come back before your board on June 11th for our public hearing to consider the fiscal year 2425 recommended budget and then two weeks later we will bring back the budget for adoption on June 25th back on November 7th we did our B budget workshop with the Board of Supervisors the o

bjectives out of that were the same um as they were the previous year but it was to fund current services prepare for our increasing staffing needs to maintain our service levels take care of the capital that we have and then prepare for New Capital needs we asked the board for direction to appropriate general fund transfers as requested to balance budgets to new Revenue to continue our pension funding strategy continue the tiered budget submission process and continue to set budgetary salary sa

vings rates based on historical vacany cany rates so this is a a slide just kind of recapping our general fund uh fund balance um you can see in fiscal year 2223 we were at about 177 million uh we were projecting current fiscal year fiscal year 23 24 to add about 20 million or so of fund balance to that and that would just be net revenues over expend expenditures based on current projections and then you'll see another drop off going into fiscal year 2425 and what we're what we're planning for t

he budget at that point um which would be the use of designed use of fund balance for capital projects Etc uh also during the midyear update uh we talked about the the the miscellaneous Financial considerations that we are are looking at and dealing with is as far as putting forward this 2425 budget so again inflationary pressures uh labor negotiations our pension and op uh long-term liabilities our Capital Debt Service and cash contributions to capital projects all while we're seeing a flatteni

ng of sales related taxes so at this point we will go into kind of a preliminary view of the 2425 working budget and to do that is Dan Vic um who is on our budget team is our budget administrator is stepping in and stepping up to take over the rest of the presentation uh um for the the department overview for this morning good morning Board of Supervisors Daniel Vic with the county executive office and I'm going to give you a brief overview of the fiscal year 2425 Department budget presentations

and the department submitted budget um as a note the department submitted budget is also referred to uh as the working budget all throughout this presentation in in the individual uh Department budget presentations because it is still a draft budget and all budget figures for the working budget are as of March 1st 2024 and so just to kick it off starting in the second to the left column for County operating funds the fiscal year 2425 working budget was submitted at1 b75 million this represents

a 7 $3.2 million increase over the current year FIS current year adopted budget um the increase in County operating funds is primarily attributable to a $32 million increase in salaries and benefits which is about uh a 7 a half% increase across all County operating funds uh $31 million increase in services and supplies and that's going to be mostly professional service contracts and then an $1 million increase in other financing uses which is primarily going to be contributions from the general

fund to other operating funds um capital and Run Road fund budgets uh as of the department submitted budget have decreased by 70.6 million um these budgets are still were still in development at that point in time but any uh decrease or increase in um capital and Road fund budgets is going to be due to timing of expenditures of major facilities and infrastructure projects County proprietary funds um were submitted at 86.5 million this is a $22 million increase over the current year adopted budge

t the increase in proprietary funds is primarily attributable to a $13 million increase in services and supplies and that's going to be mostly um insurance premiums and um expenses for anticipated settlements in the risk management department jail medical contracts in jail food services contracts there is also a $3 million increase in salaries and benefits in proprietary funds and a $5 million increase in capital expenditures and that's mostly due to Tar bus purchases uh County csas and Special

Districts were submitted at just under $55 million it's a nearly a $14 million increase over the current year adopted budget most of that increase is due to uh the pler one and sunset sewer project that's funded by arpa funds moving from the capital fund um in this current year budget to a CSA budget okay so for funded positions um as of March 1st funded positions total 2, 94 positions across the county uh which is an increase of 35 positions from the current year adopted budget last June um you

can see the individual increases in each department listed in this table um here but as a reminder all of these uh position increases have been discussed with the board in the quarter 1 and Quarter Two allocation update and will also be uh gone over again in detail in the individual Department budget presentations if you have any questions on those so we want to talk a little bit about what's included in the department submitted budget as of March 1st so the department submitted budget did incl

ude property tax growth assumed at 5% we've updated our sales tax figures in the budget uh for our most recent forecast we've adjusted general fund contributions to other major operating funds in the county primarily a contribution to the public safety fund that increased um by $15 million for fiscal year 2425 we've um included all major adjustments known for existing contracts such as the Gathering in and Indigent defense contracts both of which reside in the general fund for fiscal year 2425 w

e've included all Personnel allocations through quarter 2 approved by the board we've adjusted Personnel driver for known mou impacts included existing Debt Service primarily for the HHS building and the general fund and assumed the continuance of all other County operations um just as a reminder um as of March 1st the general fund was in a deficit fund balance position of $7 million that our office is working um on still resolving through the budget process so can we ask a question is it okay y

eah you can ask as you go what were the updated uh numbers for uh sales tax uh I mean as far as the percentage the percentage well for fiscal year 2425 the sales tax Figures were coming in relatively um flat yeah so you adjusted uh I think it's down slay supervisor gu we we adjusted the public safety Public Safety sales tax down uh because we are seeing that Trend come to fruition as far as regular sales tax we've left that flat so no growth no problem okay as a reminder a little bit about what'

s not included in the budget just as of March 1st this is not a final budget yet um we have not included uh open space funding in the amount of $1.5 million we have not included um approved management salary adjustments that were about $830 estimated annually we've removed um a general fund Reserve uh for sick leave payouts um that we just held in reserve in the general fund in case there was any uh major large sick leave sick leave balances that need to be paid for departments for um employees

separate for the county no uh Department supplemental requests have been considered or approved yet in uh the department submitted budgets and we have not adjusted the the contingency amount that we include in the general fund which is the the one and a half% of um operating expenses that we we keep in case of um unanticipated impacts uh as a reminder um in the midyear update we did offer the the board a few alternatives to fund um open space funding um such as utilizing yearend fund balance fro

m the current year as a one-time contribution towards the open space fund or um just cancelling general fund reserves as projects or properties are identified for open space we can come back to the board at any time to do that as well so as previously noted we are working to resolve the $7 million uh deficit as um a priority in our office just just kind of as frame of reference um a $7 million deficit is relatively small deficit for the general fund the general fund expenditures are $440 million

um for fiscal year 2425 so I don't want to raise too many alarm Bells but um some of the potential adjustments that we're considering to resolve that deficit is up stating our assumed property tax uh growth rates to 6% for fiscal year 2425 that would add an additional two uh $2.4 million in um general fund discretionary Revenue sources um we we feel confident making that uh adjustment because uh we're working with the assessor's office to monitor the tax assessment role growth and currently so

far in the fiscal year it's trending about 1% lower than the previous previous fiscal year which was about 7% growth uh some other uh potential adjustments that were considering at this point in time is reducing major maintenance funding to facilities by $2 million uh this is uh related to the vfa study that you heard uh previously what one of the reasons um we're considering doing this as you might recall the general fund did give facilities an additional $5 million in the current year um towar

d major maintenance for a total of $9 million and so um we feel pretty confident or we've been working with facilities and identifi that they can use Uh current year fund balance towards those projects to continue um working on the major maintenance for fiscal year 2425 uh the assessor Pro West software is included in the department submitted budget that amount is $930,000 um it's a a shortterm contract for that software so it will be funded for uh with general fund reserves and then the remaini

ng deficit we expecting to make up with just adjustments to Department expenditure and revenue budgets as we do their review so after that preview of the highlevel um overview for the Department submitted budget uh we want to get a little bit into the department supplemental request that you'll be um reviewing over the course of the next couple days so Department supp supplemental requests that you'll hear about total 166 million for fiscal year 2425 of which about $7.7 million will be um reques

ted to be funded with additional general fund the department supplemental requests include a request for an additional 69 a half funded fdes countywide and of the $16.6 million about $1.8 million would be onetime uh funding request and $14.8 million would be ongoing request that would be con uh included in all subsequent budgets moving forward uh for the general fund component of those requests about $1.4 million is one time in nature and $6.4 million would be ongoing and um so you know in light

of the the budget picture that we painted for you today um if you do have any supplemental requests that are priorities of the board that you would like to give your feedback uh on as we go through these presentations we'd greatly appreciate it okay and now I'll give you just a brief preview of uh the format for the Department slides that you'll be seeing in these presentations our offices work to make the department uh presentation slides uniform and M nature to help facilitate the discussion

on the budget the first slide of which you'll be seeing is a departmental budget org structure uh as a note this is not a Personnel org structure for the Department it's uh simply just going to be the Department's name the cost centers of each department and the programs for for each cost center so you can kind of see the budget overall budget structure for each department the Departments um will give a slide to discuss their accomplishments um achieved during the year using budgetary resources

uh they'll be able to detail the emerging issues and departmental priorities for the Department that may impact this budget period and future budget periods moving forward and give a brief overview of their objectives and performance measures that might be uh relevant or pertinent to the budget the expenditure budget for each department will be broken out um for you to see uh by operating expend expenditures and capital expenditures so you can see the distinction between those two categories and

then um the fiscal year 2425 budget will also be compared or Revenue expens expense revenues and expenditures for the fiscal year 2425 budget will be compared to the current year adopted budget and prior two years of actuals so you can see the overarching trend line um for for each Department's budget as a note once again these tables are still going to be uh using working budget figures as of March 1st uh 2024 and some adjustments may have already been made to these Department budgets subseque

ntly following that table the Departments will detail their major variances That should kind of help explain that story in both expenditures and revenues they'll give a uh a brief overview of their historical approved funded positions and talk about any changes in those positions over time and then finally um go over each one of their supplemental request for your review if you have any feedback on those again and that's it for me did you have any questions on any of that information no great th

en thank you guys thank you while I'm still sitting here would just like to invite the first Department up for their presentation so we'll welcome Sheriff Wayne woo uh to present for the pler county sheriff's office okay okay welcome Sheriff good morning Daniel thank you for your time today um pleasure to be here kicking things off I suppose for what's going to be a long two days for all of you um but I want to thank Daniel and his team Amanda everybody at the CEO's office that's not only helped

us you know navigate this process but uh you know has helped us throughout the entire fiscal year to get us where we are today so for uh for our presentation I'll turn it over to our administrative services manager uh Jerry Rogers and then I'll take back over Midway so take it away Jerry all right good morning bordon okay here here we have the Sheriff's Office uh budget and under these under the Sheriff's Office budget we have cost centers and they consist of the grant program Tahoe operations

protection and prevention Administration Support Services in Auburn jail and the South plaster jail and under those cost centers uh are roughly around a little over 40 programs uh throughout those and they are supported by the public safety uh sales tax AB 109 realignment as well as uh general fund contribution of which is 51% of discretionary Revenue which we share a portion of uh that along with da and probation and then down at the bottom you'll see the DMV special collections fund that is a

fiduciary we're a fiduciary agent for that DMV collection fund so historically it has been just unbalanced and um I'll make note of it in a couple other slides and then new to the uh the structure here is the inmate welfare fund so uh recently it was transitioned from a custodial uh fund for uh down to a special Revenue fund and that was to realign with uh AB or I'm sorry with gats b84 and so for fiduciary activities and so I will move over here to the next one and here we have operating expendi

ture budget for 194 million that basically consists of 70% or 134 million is for salaries and benefits and then we have about 25% or roughly around 48 million which consists of a887 ISF charges as well as uh Services charges like well path and uh Summit contracts for the corrections facility and then which leaves about 5% which is just under about 9 million for day-to-day operations and then we have the capital expenditure budget which is about 2.3 million of that consists of about 1.7 million f

or vehicle replacement and also mild out Vehicles that's due to the uh per the DSA mou and then also included in that is about 300 ,000 for Grant related communication equipment and then also about $200,000 for uh air Ops equipment as well and then here we have the revenue and expense comparison as you can see in 2324 adopted budget it does show a little bit of a variance between expenditures and revenue we did submit a balanced budget but because we have those two uh special funds those the the

DMV collection fund and also the IW UF that's also included in this and because historically it's been on balance that's why it's a little bit um off where expenditures are a little bit higher than revenues and that goes for the same for 2425 we did submit a balanced budget uh but because those are also included that's why it's a little um off on that one and then the variance the major variance that you can see between the 24 adopted budget to the 2425 working budget is roughly around 17 milli

on and that pretty much consists of due to the salaries and benefits increases for the DS say in the correction officer wage increases and as well as an increased contract for uh well path and here as I mentioned for the uh major budget variances this will kind of give you a little bit of a breakdown as to those uh variances from the prior year you can see about 13.4 million increase for salaries and benefits and that was attributed to the DSA and the correction officer wages and then we have a

4.1 million increase for professional and special services Health which is the increase to well path contract for jail medical services and then we have a 1.3 million uh dollar decrease to state aid Public Safety sales tax and when you put those together that's where you can see the 18.4 million increase from the contribution from the general fund which is the portion of the 51 uh perent of discretionary general fund Revenue which is allocated to the public safety and here for the funded positio

ns major changes from 2324 adopted to the 2425 working there was one uh FTE which was the sheriff Sergeant position which will be mentioned later on in the presentation uh due to the uh fentanyl crisis and I believe that concludes my presentation for purposes quick question oh yes absolutely yeah no it's my um again on sales taex I'm just interested in any projections or thoughts moving forward on the public safety portion of the sales tax have you heard from your counterpart Sheriff Wu or other

s um as we look at this what we can anticipate moving forward is this a trend we're going to continue to see I know it's Crystal balling but yeah I would probably defer to Daniel's team and the county Executives office for that I mean we did see a unique Spike I think uh through the pandemic and then I think you're starting to see the the return to normaly and and the flattening out of those funds uh with jurisdictions like pler County who remained open for business during those times um whether

it continues to Trend down or not I I whether this is defer you know is it more stable now or not yeah supervisor guson and thank you Sheriff um your answer was spot on you know during covid we saw a spike uh a significant Spike increase in Revenue um during those times we uh worked alongside the office to preserve those funds in reserves uh which we're using um today and and throughout the last year or two into the future for Capital project needs U for the sheriff's office um what we have see

n is the reopening of some of the major sales tax um areas like Anaheim San Diego San Francisco which is decreasing our share of the pooled sales tax so while sales tax receipts may stay on par where they have been our share of it has decreased um so until something switches in that Dynamic of the county taking a higher share of direct sales tax revenue I think we would expect to see our portion at least staying flat but maybe a possible continue slight decrease as well so right so this should b

e the final year of any downward Trend and we should be stabilizing at least unless there's a yeah yeah and that depends yeah that's all that's all built on the allocation um percentage that we're that we're given so anything can cause an adjustment cdtfa is now adjusting almost on a monthly basis now the the allocation percentages rather than just doing it once a year so we're seeing these Trends change monthly um slightly um you know small smaller increases but so I I would expect that maybe t

he any decrease would be smaller um and not larger than it had been so okay sorry just trying to get a handle on where you know we knew this was coming but how how much more could we see change okay thank you all right um I I would like to add too that when uh we did work with Daniel and his team through that time uh we did you know start our Capital asset replacement fund we utilized it for Capital Improvement projects and we really tried to focus on a one-time expenditures knowing that it wasn

't going to be a consistent Revenue stream uh when we saw those spikes so I'll take back over and uh go over I some of our highlights and accomplishments over the last fiscal year I think uh one of the first ones I'd like to talk about is really our ability to embrace and leverage technology uh as a force multiplier to help keep pler County safe and that was a re really a regional collaboration with all of our police Partners in uh rolling out some technology with some companies uh flock in fusu

s um with the regional partnership we can share information uh throughout each of our departments which um is nice when it comes to working together uh as you know criminals don't understand jurisdictional boundaries so it's nice to be able to share that data with all of our criminal justice Partners in the county um and then the fusus technology really is going to help us leverage uh standing up what would be right now almost like a real-time crime Center in every patrol car that the deputies h

ave at their fingertips some of the successes we've already had this fiscal year with rolling out this technology is um multiple arrests of the South American theft groups that have been targeting plaster County specifically uh areas of Granite Bay in the unincorporated areas of the county they're responsible for well over 30 uh residential burglaries totaling well over a million dollars in loss um and thanks to this technology we've been able to make multiple arrests of this International crime

ring uh we also had a homicide um out at the uh Ace Hardware Center off industrial that we were able to solve and have somebody in custody within hours of the incident occurring thanks to this technology uh as many of you know we stood up a real-time crime center for the World Cup to provide security and during that incident we did have a lost child and uh the real-time crime Center was able to locate and reunify that child within minutes of uh receiving the call utilizing that technology so th

at was pretty exciting and then uh we in the final stages of finalizing some M with all of the high schools within the unincorporated areas of the county that will tie in with that fusus platform um and give our deputies access and real-time information as they respond to the scene uh heaven forbid if there's any kind of critical incident at any of our schools uh so I really excited about those programs and moving on one of the other things that I'd like to highlight is as you know uh we have a

pretty robust vocational program uh in our jails that we uh will be improving and expanding upon over this next fiscal year but during this current fiscal year one of the uh areas I'd like to highlight is our culinary program um we started that from scratch with our vendor during the pandemic uh that did not exist anywhere in the country we've had a lot of success with that program to include uh working with some businesses that want to be second chance employers some of you may have seen uh a l

ocal restaurant in Rocklin Katherine's beer garden who has partnered with us and um has had some great success with some inmates coming out of that program and and giving them the opportunity to turn their lives around we've also uh partnered with a company called tro out of Sacramento they're large Warehouse commercial um culinary operation that provides foods to other businesses hospitals things like that and they're uh have been doing interviews on site once these inmates receed the certifica

tion and and having job offers um before these inmates are released so they have jobs lined up right when they get released from custody one of the exciting things uh looking forward for this next fiscal year is um expanding on the inmate programs and adding a vocational uh training manager or supervisor that'll be a professional staff civilian position that we want to add within the sheriff's office as uh I'll talk about in a little bit our 844 um project which was the 12 bed medium security jo

b skill training center is slated to uh be done in the spring of 2025 and uh we really think having somebody uh that's not an auxiliary assignment as a correctional officer that's just in charge of programming and really tracking recidivism rates and making sure we're being responsible with the programs and the resources uh that have the most impact on on these inmates in their future as they return to society um the positive news for that is uh we're to pay for that uh strictly out of the inmat

e welfare fund so there shouldn't be any budgetary impact um the inmate welfare fund is um through profits we gain through the inmate phone services Food Services uh other things like that and we're going to turn around and put that money right back into the inmate education program and so we'll try to add that position over this next upcoming fiscal year moving on i' another accomplish M I think it's worthy of calling out is is really our our Recruitment and our hiring efforts over the last yea

r a lot of our success is thanks to your board and uh finalizing some contracts with the deputy sheriff's Association and the correctional officers and and making us competitive in the region so thank you for that another uh piece of technology that we brought on board is All-Star talent and recruitment company which is really a specialized uh digital marketing company uh which is in my opinion the future of where employment is you know gone are the days of the Wads in the newspaper and uh reall

y the success we've had with that program has exceeded all of our expectations including the company's data that they've uh utilized with other law enforcement agencies um we've had a better turnaround with application rates I think you know dispatch as you know has been a position we've had a very difficult time hiring for even getting applicants for um they have what they call leads uh we've had well over a thousand leads s and I think the conversion percentage into applications is around 27%

so we have hundreds of applicants for our dispatch position um by utilizing this technology and not having to offer uh hiring bonuses and some other things that you've see some other jurisdictions uh doing so these two side-by-side snapshots are really about this time last year compared to this time this year so you can see the start contrast uh Deputy sheriffs we were running 25 vacancies last year when we came for our budget hearing and we're down to three now uh correctional officers 17 that'

s down to three administrative legal clerks were 13 it's down to eight and then we currently have a lot of people in the hiring process uh so you can see the deputy sheriff trainee numbers and and these numbers were as of a couple of weeks ago when we had to submit uh them to the county Executives office to put the presentation together but the deputy sheriff one to that one is really a deputy sheriff one who would have put themselves through the academy so in 2023 we didn't have a single latera

l applicant apply to the Sheriff's Office uh much of that was due to contract disputes and other things um I'm proud to say that so far year-to dat um you know in early April we've had eight laterals apply to the Sheriff's Office and we have three more applicants uh in the queue at County HR just waiting to be certified and sent over to the Sheriff's Office for interviews and um our unders Sheriff uh is scheduled to interview on top of these numbers 11 uh candidates next week to go to the academ

y as deputy sheriff trainee so very proud of um the progress we've made and how hard Jerry's team and and the whole team at the office has worked to overcome some of these uh staffing issues that we've had uh moving on another accomplishment highlight I'd like to talk about is our opioid Response Team here's some uh current fentanyl statistics as of about a week or two ago uh the bluish line is the arrest that we've made uh year-over-year so you can see that trend line continue up now those are

just arrest from Sheriff's Office Personnel it doesn't count other uh police partners and it doesn't include some of our narcotics units or narcotics task forces and then the red line is our overdose deaths year-over-year so you can see we're trending to uh still once again uh increase year-over-year last year was 43 this year we're current ly at 45 confirmed fental overdoses and two cases are still pending um waiting for Toxicology results yes supervisor ask a quick question um thank you and so

the the um overdose death that's countywide regardless of jurisdiction but the the blue line is the Sheriff's Office arrests correct correct so if you added rests from the PDS and our cities that number is probably higher far higher yes but that's really good news to see that number is not tring up thank you yeah um so one of the things I'm really excited about is our our partnership with uh you know district attorney Guyer behind me and and his office and his willingness to uh you know prosecu

te these cases in a way maybe they hadn't been looked at or prosecuted in the past every one of those prosecutions has been the result of an investigation of one of our Sheriff's detectives and thanks to uh you know Daniel and his team and your board support this coming uh Saturday the 6th we'll be going live with our opioid Response Team full-time that detective that's put the together those cases he's assigned to a Narcotics task force it's not his full-time job to investigate these style of I

nvestigations with fental overdose and basically complete a homicide or a manslaughter type investigation and he's being pulled different directions and he does not have the resources or the capacity and time to dedicate uh to these overdose investigations like we would like to see so we'll have a couple of full-time bodies um assigned there this Saturday that was the one increase that you saw on our full-time employee allocations that have increased this fiscal year and then we'll be reaching o

ut I know uh district guire is going to add some resources and some of our police Partners have expressed some interest in adding some resources to this team as well they've done a phenomenal job and uh I I can say I just talked to one of our narcotics detectives within the last week or two and specifically they brought up not only this team um and the opioid response team but plaster County as a whole um and talking to some confidential informants who said they've talked to at least two known d

ealers from outside of our jurisdiction that have said they will refuse to uh pedal this poison in our community because of uh plaster County's approach the resources that we've dedicated and knowing that this team is in place and that they could be held accountable in a way that other jurisdictions are not so very proud of our partnership with the District Attorney's office and the impact we've had in fact as we speak right now we have uh NBC national news is at our office doing a story specifi

cally on pler County and how we've addressed the fentanyl crisis that's going to air Nationwide unfortunately fentanyl is not something that is just isolated to uh our community it's also uh found its way in our Correctional Facilities um so combating uh and fentanyl in our Corrections facilities has been a priority for us over this last fiscal year we've deployed um some narcotics detection devices called mx908 thanks to your board support for that and this allows our staff to test and get conf

irmed positive results for uh fentanyl without having to handle and and uh the narcotics or open the packaging like uh used to we used to have to do back in the old days um we've also had nine confirmed uh overdoses of inmates within the facility over the last year that uh were their lives were saved by our staff and the deployment of Naran our mail team and our Correctional canines um found over 600 pieces of incoming mail that were laced with fentanyl or other illegal narcotics uh those have l

ed to further investigations which resulted this last fiscal year in at least two convictions uh thanks to the district attorney's office and they've forwarded over 200 uh cases to our narcotics unit and our detective unit for further criminal investigation so we're not just finding um these pieces of mail coming in destroying them booking them into evidence we're actually putting resources to it um that the opioid response team will also be able to help with some of that and uh try to hold peop

le accountable who are uh trying to smuggle uh fentel into our Correctional Facility I think the other arm that uh should be mentioned is obviously the education component of our fentel strategy um thanks to your support we will be having uh continuous funding for our right choice program um if you've never seen the right choice program it's kind of a scaled down version of maybe the every 15 minutes it's targeted towards Middle School uh students the Sheriff's Office been running the program an

d partners with all of our criminal justice Partners behind me who participate uh since 2016 we we do have um a presentation coming up on April 26th I would like to invite any of you members of your board or the county Executives office that would like to come out and observe to please you're more than welcome I think you'll be impressed and uh it does make a difference um the district attorney and I were actually presenting at leadership Lumis within the last couple of weeks and there was uh an

attendee when we talked about this program um who remembered going through it and said what a difference it made in her life and the friend group that she ran with and how it had an impact and it kept her from experimenting with drugs as when she uh went through the program in middle school so we're pretty excited to continue that and get uh some consistent funding streams for that program some of the merging issues and challenges that I foresee us facing over the next fiscal year is obviously

it's exciting but it will be a challenge as well and that is the completion of our 863 844 uh jail housing unit additions uh the 8 63 project to refresh your recollection is uh the lease Revenue bond with the state where uh the county had a 10% match this facility will be a 45 bed acute mental health facility uh currently uh the last time we checked I think it was maybe a 68 weeks ago uh 177% of the inmate population is diagnosed with a serious mental illness um we need a facility like this to o

pen up in uh our plaster County jail to start to stabilize some of these inmates who are control problems we'll also be looking at expanding our jail-based competency treatment program and we're currently in uh conversations and negotiations with the Department of State hospitals to make that happen um and then like I mentioned earlier the 844 project which is that 120 bed medium security job skill training center will be open potentially right now Target is spring of 2025 um one of the other ch

allenges that we continue to face is the increase in public records act requests that o o overextend um our staff at every level within the sheriff's office but I would also argue over burden's uh Karen's staff with the county council's office who has to review all of these public records act requests and the responses before they go out you can see the trend lines of what we've experienced I mean in 2018 we had 16 office-wide and if you looked at our year-to date numbers and extrapolated and pr

ojected those out this current year we're uh we're trending to break a thousand for the first time and uh I I don't see them slowing down any soon and and the issue with us is those responses have become more and more complexes we've added body warn cameras each patrol car has three cameras so you have four video cameras of footage that has to be reviewed maybe for every single Deputy on scene um so and and incident and requests can turn into 80 160 man hours to review redact and get released an

d then I think our final challenge which is not isolated to the Sheriff's Office um is the really the West plaster ex expansion you know one of the things we've been currently in in conversations with is our mou with the California State University Sacramento campus more uh specifically the police department Department um you know that is their property um they have specific reporting requirements for types of crimes that have to be reported federally because they're it's a college owned um piec

e of property so we have M with them now but as they continue to expand and open up that campus this will most likely turn into a fee for service contract model um I don't believe the university has any plans to staff their Police Department out there until they actually have on campus housing and students actually living on campus so U my guess is the sheriff's office will have to be the main service provider out there for quite a few years until until they get to that point and then obviously

we need to continue and to hire and keep up with the population growth out there I think what's unique with our office I mentioned that the unders Sheriff has 11 Deputy trainees coming in next week those trainees take on average of about 18 months to start the hiring process go through the Police Academy go through field training go through jail training until they actually occupy a spot and so you know my goal was I would love to see um government and specifically the county and the Sheriff's O

ffice be a little more proactive in hiring than waiting until uh the revenue comes in after the houses have been built the citizens have moved in they finally pay their tax bill and then it rolls in and then we start the 18-month hiring process and and we're we will already be behind the curve in my opinion potentially two to three years of where we should be of providing uh Public Safety I talked about 844 project and the needs assess or the um job skill training center the other thing that uh

I commissioned as soon as I took office was A needs assessment that I think is going to be crucial to the Sheriff's Office growth moving forward as as you know the Sheriff's Office provides services some specific to unincorporated areas and some are countywide and I would argue that one of those that's countywide is uh operation of the plaster County Jail it's a Cornerstone of the criminal justice system to have that accountability and you know we've made decisions that maybe weren't always uh d

ata driven so I've we commissioned uh with thanks to the county Executives office who split the costs A needs assessment just to project Corrections needs within the county factoring in growth crime rates um our federal consent decree and how many inmates we have to Fed cap what's going on with the criminal justice system so we can make sure that we have adequate bed space to keep that accountability that we have here in pler county and and and keep our crime rates down so I'm excited to see tha

t report I was hoping to have it before this meeting but uh looks like it's going to be done in May and then finally uh our priorities and asks for this coming fiscal year uh the first one is our aeds or the external defibrillators I think everybody pretty much knows what those are the ones we have at the Sheriff's Office have uh reached or exceeded their manufacturer warranty um they haven't been replaced since we first got aeds and began to deploy them and that $220,000 ask not only replaces a

ll the aeds we have now but it's my goal to put them in every patrol car I think um we've all seen instances where aeds have been deployed even on a high school uh Sports field um and saved someone's life um and so I think it's important we've never done it before but to deploy these uh life-saving measures in in every patrol car we have the next one is a West plaster substation you know there's been a lot of talk over the years about what the sheriff's footprint looks like out in West plaster a

s we continue to grow we do have allocated um land in the santui Justice Center which is uh our ultimate um preference to land on but I think that South classer substation is maybe in the 5 to 10 year Capital Improvement plan um really the way I see it we don't have that kind of time um we're already built out we're deploying over 60 staff in 8,000 square fet at our South plaster substation over across from Ares on on Horseshoe Bar and that is pretty much responsible from Newcastle all the way t

o the Sacramento County Line um we're all familiar with the the traffic issues at 65 and 80 and as West plaster continues to grow I I don't have a locker space now at the South pler substation and as I continue to have to add staff as population increases we really need to look at maybe a temporary landing spot something that the Sheriff's Office can lease 7 to 10 years by the county some time to where we don't feel that pressure to have to have a capital Improvement project out at the sanui Jus

tice Center um and and get us a footprint out in the west Roseville area so our response times don't continue to go up and and we have uh some kind of visibility out there as the population and and the expected urban service level uh goes in surprisingly uh I thought commercial property would be really easy to find I want give a shout out to facility services and uh Real Estate Services who we've been working with for 6 to8 months I realized that and I guess it's a good thing in plaster County r

eal EST uh commercial real estate is not readily available and then when you look at our needs specific to the Sheriff's Office most importantly secure parking even at that uh South pler substation our employees don't have secure parking for their personal vehicles um they have to park in a different parking lot the secure parking is extremely difficult to find we do have a really good lead on uh one landlord one space that I think would um get us an immediate fix they'll allow secured parking u

m and I think it's something the Sheriff's Office could easily uh between the Luma station and that station reside in for a decade until the county is in a position to build something at the sanushi Justice Center and that's the cost you see there the two additional Deputy sheriffs those are basically just math calculations that again in my opinion will put us behind but they're math calculations off of data we've received from cedra and the building activity and the calculations used by sedra o

n the amount of population per household and the development agreements that the county made that the sheriff's office would provide 1.2 deputies per 1,000 residents and so um that it's actually a little higher than two but we rounded down understanding that we are uh you know the the budget is tight this year so um that's what those two Deputy sheriffs are and then the last ask probably the biggest ticket item is um to really add three Sheriff's lieutenants to the organization and I understand

that that is um a pretty large price tag but I will say not proud to say but I'll say that in my time with the plaster County Sheriff's Office our Watch Commander deployment model really has not changed um in the 30 years I've been here watch commanders for us is a lieutenant level that's a manager otherwise a sergeant is a firstline supervisor not considered a manager um the last time we changed it was when 2017 after uh dayshift went home at 4:35 o00 we had no Watch Commander coverage or Lieut

enant oversight in any of our correctional facilities in 2017 we obviously had our jail use of force issue that came up where we unfortunately had to arrest some of our employees we used existing resources to make a modified swing shift and have Watch Commander coverage in field operations countywide from approximately midnight to 1:00 a.m. you have zero management oversight from Tahoe all the way to the Sacramento County Line and if you total all of our stations our Correctional Facilities you

might have 50 to 60 staff on duty during those times and not a single manager I feel like uh this is overdue for an organization our size and a county our size um it's a risk management issue it's really when all of our high liability and low free frequency events happen I our last officer involved shooting happened during this time where there was no Watch Commander on as far as I can remember our last in custody deaths several in custody deaths have all occurred during those hours when there's

no management oversight and then unfortunately the sergeants that are on duty are usually the most Junior inexperienced sergeants you have because we're a seniority based organization and so when they're newly promoted they go to night shift and so you have no experience managers making decisions well we are planed to do if we were to receive three additional lieutenant allocations or gradually chip away at it over multiple fiscal years is we would we would make it a fixed post to where there w

ill always be 247 coverage with some kind of Watch Commander countywide that could deploy to multiple divisions they wouldn't be specific to the jail has 24-hour coverage or field operations has 24-hour coverage but they would be responsible for the entire County if something happened in Tahoe they would take off and start driving to Tahoe to start assuming that incident command role and start making key decisions that need to be made so that pretty much covers our asks I think in closing I know

there's a lot of um competing demands this fiscal year and um there's a lot of requests on supplementals um I also know that your board is has a lot of competing priorities and there's a lot of tough decisions to make when when it comes to making the entire County function and there's more things I admit than public safety but I appreciate your board's priority on Public Safety but you know one of the things that I really wanted to bring to your board's attention was some of the issues I discus

sed looking forward um that I really factor in as Growing Pains um you know by adding this Watch Commander coverage 24 hours a day again Growing Pains of potentially becoming you know a county of 500,000 people in fact fact uh the unders sheriff and I have already been contacted by the organization of uh major County Sheriffs who represent all the biggest counties in the entire country to potentially join their organization this summer based off of they have a cap of 500,000 people but they look

at how many staff we have and our geography and our growth projections they're asking us to join that organization early so we're not sleepy little plaster County anymore um and I think those challenges um my concern quite frankly is that you know there's a lot of competing competing demands and sales tax and Public Safety sales tax going down that doesn't just benefit us benefits other jurisdictions as well and I know the board receiv receives a lot of pressure um and requests from either loca

l municipalities that are struggling to provide for their Public Safety smaller jurisdictions that want a bigger tax share revenue or annexation or Special Districts that are in Sol and and need assistance and I just um want to thank your board for always prioritizing Public Safety and understand that um you know I know the Sheriff's Office and I think the district attorney will be getting up next and he has some things on his supplemental request that we're going to need to fill we have a crime

lab that I believe everybody in this room thinks is a key component and a key missing piece to the criminal justice system here but maybe not this year but next year we might potentially have to have some serious conversations about how that's staffed and fun funded and that um we really prioritize funding our Public Safety here um before we have to start trying to help out some of our neighbors not that I don't appreciate them and want to help them any way I can so with that I'll I'll close my

presentation and open up for any questions or comments or concerns from the board okay supervisor Landon um I have a question going back to your PR slide um because I'm sure this impacts departments across the county and not just yours do you know whether legislative fixes would be helpful with that or is would it not be helpful I I think it would be helpful I don't I believe the legislative changes are what got us here so I'm not super confident we will get there but yes I think they would be

helpful I think um even some minor legislative fixes to get us some cost recovery even partial cost recovery uh it the dollar amount of manh hours is extraordinary and and I think what you're seeing is um Clearing Houses one that comes to mind I believe is called muckrock um and these are nationwide Clearing Houses that will just blanket Pas all across the state of California specifically to law enforcement agencies asking about every use of force um every single thing they can and then get the

data and they'll Mill them out either to news sites or um litigators for civil action of what they see could be potential litigation so um you know I have staff working hundreds of hours I think U through these to help people make a profit and and I think the system is being abused uh in a way outside of the legislative intent when they they made p a lot easier to access and limited our ability to uh get some cost recovery okay well I just uh wondered if maybe there are some creative ways since

we have an assembly member who's and a senator who are very supportive in this area and obviously I've worked with our DA's office than you before so just kind of mulling that over in my mind um and then I wanted to ask to you kind of just mentioned hundreds of hours but do you happen to know an estimate of what your staff has spent I don't off the top of my head we do track it though on every PR it's all the manh hours are tracked so I could get that for you and and follow up okay thanks and th

en just one other question um how many unfilled positions do you guys currently have do you know as of today uh total or deputy sheriff um yeah I would say deputy sheriffs SL lieutenants I don't know if you have any open right now that you're recruiting for vacant counts currently right now are 70 but that's agency wide I don't have the uh current breakdown breakdown okay be super helpful maybe see a breakdown 70 M vacant 70 vacant positions but um as the sheriff mentioned currently right now we

have three deputy sheriff vac V encies and and three Co vacancies okay thank you okay supervisor Gore thank you appreciate the presentation um just a couple of questions for the folks who are going through the academy so 18 months is that a paid position are they being paid to go through the academy at that time yes they're paid as a lower classification it's called a deputy sheriff trainee um so they're compensated they start about a month before they academy starts there's a pre-academy that

occurs to to prepare them then they go through the six-month Academy upon graduation and getting sworn in they're kind of automatically promoted to a deputy sheriff at that one at that point and then they start the the training process okay that's helpful thank you and you know I appreciate you looking forward at all the growth that's happening in West plaster because we really do need to provide um Public Safety for the communities that are growing out in West Roseville um and so we're gonna ha

ve to figure out how we move forward with that um so I appreciate you thinking about that and then another question and it goes back to the question about the gang um robberies in Granite Bay M from South America M would those be people who are on visas or no uh not all of them some of them have crossed the border illegally um what you're seeing and this is not just a problem unique to pler County it's Nationwide Orange County has really felt the brunt of it over the the last couple of years but

they're starting to make their way to pler County we've found uh evidence where they've specifically search our area for highend neighborhoods Gran Bay pops up then they search houses and drive right to uh to them um but a lot of them are on what are called tourist visas I think law enforcement across the United States has asked the federal government director Homeland Security to um revoke that tourist visa process uh specifically with Chile that's where the majority of them these are Chilean

uh organized crime um but so far we've had no success but over this last year is the first time we've really seen um this type of organized International theft groups hit pler County and I think we've made seven different arrests to date interesting appreciate that and then um just a supervisor Landon to your point about the pr I know that at um California State Association of counties it's countywide everywhere those PR have gone up and they're always looking at like legislative fixes um to try

to figure out what else can be done but I think that's something that we probably do need to start highlighting because the amount of time for all of our departments and the public certainly has right to access information but maybe even cost recovery um would be really helpful because the amount of time is just too much yeah it takes away from your needed Services yeah I would agree okay supervisor Holmes thank you thank you Sheriff who I appreciate your U presentation very thorough uh last ye

ar we were able to make an agreement with the deputy sheriff's Association at long overdue uh were was that increase uh for those salaries is your budget able to absorb that without any additional funding from the county uh we needed some additional funding for this current fiscal year because it wasn't programmed uh part of it was I think but not the the full extent of it and then um which working with Daniel and his team we were able to accomplish uh for this fiscal year then next fiscal year

that uh is kind of what uh Jerry covered in the first couple of slides which showed that increase in uh that discretionary general fund that we were receiving um or at least that amount that came from that 51% discretionary general fund uh but between our inmate healthc care contract and um the salary adjustments that increase pretty much ate up all of uh had to cover all of those things so I really looking forward we're pretty much maintaining status quo right now at the Sheriff's Office and go

ing to be doing last year's business at kind of this coming year's new costs we're yeah un unless some of these supplemental requests were to come through we're pretty much status quo with even with with the revenue increases if that answers your question yeah thank you that the salary increase has allowed you to recruit more deputies is that correct oh yes it's been a noticeable increase both uh which is why I wanted to highlight that slide in in the correctional officer and deputy sheriff Recr

uitment and specifically the lateral recruitment which is going to be key to us continuing to grow as an organization as the county grows and get in front of that uh deficit that we were facing last year we we really I I I want to have a hybrid of both I don't want to be too over reliant on any one classification I I also don't want to bring in all lateral Deputy sheriffs because I think we'll lose the culture of the Sheriff's Office and who we are as as the Sheriff's Office and and therefore pl

er County um so I want to have a hybrid approach and and that we're bringing in laterals at a very measured Pace um but also that they're being indoctrinated with the plaster County way in our expectations I expect no less thank you thank you sir okay supervisor J thank you and thank you sheriff and Jerry thanks for a great presentation and most important thanks for all you do to protect our residents um I wanted to ask specifically about dispatch and your vacancies there they're still very high

correct they're still high but we've actually turned in a corner I Jerry's sending me some numbers but I have to admit I don't have my glasses and I can't read his handwriting that small Jerry um I know that in a April we're going to have six um six dispatchers in the training program okay um later this month and that does not include the almost 300 applicants that we've received through the All-Star recruiting program that will start to hit the testing cycle coming up in the next month uh our

office is hosting an openhouse invitation for all those folks that's going to help speak to them about the job expectations and help prepare them for the testing process so I'm fairly confident you know it is a numbers game at some point that with uh six in the training program and almost 300 applicants that are going to start the testing process in the next month that will we The Dispatch Center will look better than it has in probably a decade in about maybe 8 to 12 months well I really apprec

iate the approach you've taken and going I know it was a question will it produce results and certainly it looks like it has that's great um and then uh you've given us two ideas for legislative policy advocacy that we could work on is there anything else oh I have all kinds of ideas okay you know make us earn our living up here so no but you know one of the things I would put uh on um the board's radar is really some of I I think some potential exciting changes in criminal justice that could be

coming over the next 12 months which is why I'm excited about uh this needs assessment which really won't Factor these two things in but you know going to the Supreme Court is uh going to be the Grants Pass case um which is going to really look at that Martin V Boise case when it comes to enforcing trespassing and homelessness on government property um I mean you're seeing people on both sides of the aisle including our our state's Governor get behind uh this case the state sheriffs and I know

the state district attorneys associations have filed amas briefs behind it um so I'm fairly optimistic on that and then there will also be a ballot measure most likely that could be um hitting the ballot in November to potentially um undo parts of of proposition 47 and the impacts that that has had on the criminal justice system unfortunately for me as the sheriff uh that will just create more demand we need that accountability arm but most County Sheriffs their jails are full of violent offende

rs and most sheriffs are like me they're under a federal consent decree and we're having to fedc cap people on a regular basis when they're only in for property crimes so if um this ballot measure were to pass in November uh you know there will be some probably Correctional demand needs in order to make uh some of these changes in the law successful and bring that accountability back for you know what are what are looked at as property crimes but I'm very optimistic on both of those issues that

I think could could be gamechanging for criminal justice um and quality of life issues I think in communities across our state not just here moving forward over this next year great well thank you and keep us posted if you need us to to help in any way my pleasure thank you okay and I will add that um at least this is looking better than last year with with recruits and and lateral transfers and and such and and I'm amazed at the number of people that are applying for your dispatch after having

taken the tour yeah and see what dispatchers have to take care of I was just was heads spinning really the the responsibilities that your dispatchers have so I want to say that you're this is looking great keep up the good work and I appreciate all the explanations on personnel and Staffing and requirements and everything it gives us a much better idea moving forward you know in the way we think about our planning planning for all of these um challenges well thank you and once again thanks to th

is board for your support for our office and Public Safety as a whole and really uh the decisions you made over the last the course of this last year with the contract negotiations and and things that occurred in our correction division is a really a key component on on why we're here today okay one more comment I forgot to ask one question and I appreciate the information about the having watch commanders manager level yes 247 is what's typical in most Sheriff's offices as far as Staffing it de

pends on size but most organizations our size um will have 24-hour Watch Commander coverage okay that's helpful thank you yeah you'll see smaller jurisdictions like like we've been you know like I said our ours hasn't changed in the 30 years I've been here um that do not or have a gap at some point um and I think what this will for me it's not not just the 24-hour coverage but it makes it a fixed post by utilizing all our lieutenants across every division to where there will always be somebody o

n so right now even though we have swing shift watch commanders if they take time off go to training nobody backfills them that goes uncovered as well so there's a lot there's a lot more gaps than just maybe that midnight to 7 a.m. if that makes sense yeah thank you okay well want to thank you both for your presentation and your time and and we really appre appreciate thank you good luck over the next two days thank you for that okay so so shall I announce we are going to be moving on to the Dis

trict Attorney's budget um W welcome and good morning Morgan good morning and staff we'll try and make up a little time here I see we're it's like that first airplane that starts late you know the whole rest of the day is that's right well it'll we'll we'll be suffering the repercussions at the end of the day that's right well thank you and good morning Morgan guy your district attorney it's a pleasure to be here thank you so much um I'm honored to have our administrative and fiscal operations m

anager Kimmy yamanishi here with me uh as well as Dave telman our chief assistant and some other members of our team that I'll introduce as we get into their sections as well um but first let me let me Echo some of the things that sheriff woo had said when he began uh it truly is an honor to have the the support of the board our chief executive's office uh and our Allied Justice Partners uh that we collaborate with to to help our mission it really makes pler County unique our ability to to colla

borate and support one another and I truly appreciate it um this board has been incredibly supportive of all of our efforts that we've tried to tried to accomplish over the last several years at the District Attorney's office and I can't thank Daniel and Amanda enough for their constant support and guidance uh as we navigate through these issues um budget wise so w with that um let's talk a little bit about the District Attorney's office um I had once again tried to get Kimmy yamanishi to uh del

iver more of this presentation um but it turns out only when it gets to the numbers uh will she be doing any of the speaking um but but uh not much has changed to our cost centers um we'll go through some of these in a little more detail when we get into into some of the accomplishments um but our our day job our general um criminal case determinations our investigations division our administrative and fiscal our victim services and our M multi-disciplinary interview Center um our forensic um ch

ild interviews um these I believe were the same as last year um uh included uh in there as well but not listed as our sart program our sexual assault response team that is included in uh in here as well um let's start with the fun stuff uh I love nothing more than an opportunity to brag about the good things that our team uh is doing at the District Attorney's office um some of the cases that make the newspapers are are our bread and butter some of our violent crimes um these are what we deal wi

th day in and day out uh as you can see um this is just a a snapshot of some of the the larger cases we've had cases that we've had um that have um either resolved or gone to trial as you can see we have a number of of murders a couple of sexual assaults these are large prosecutions um I will I will note that the Frank and stub's case was a life without parole um sentence on a on a child abuse case which is pretty rare those are incredibly um graphic those are as bad as it gets in order to obtai

n a sentence for a life without the Poss possibility of parole on a casee that does not involve a homicide um it's only available in in these sexual assault cases and they are pretty intense so uh when we go through uh the rest of uh the presentation and I talk a little bit about some of the the stressors and uh and and wellness issues that that come into the DA's office it's cases like these that put put a burden on just about everybody who works on these uh we had a number of of relatively hig

h-profile locally high-profile murder cases um the Brant and shade cases um the Bryant case was prosecuted by Lisa botnick behind me um it was a a son who had murdered his father and attempted to murder his mother uh Mr shade was a resident of Roseville who was murdered by a family member uh and as you can see uh the first two are dare uh and kabak kunan um sort of echoing what Sheriff woo had said um the funeral crisis is continuing and we will con we are and have been continuing our efforts on

aggressive prosecution uh as I tell people that I speak to um our DA's office is doing things that this DA's office has never done before and it's doing things that no DA's office has ever done before uh and and the fentanyl prosecution is um a perfect example of that uh Mr cabacungan was the first person in the state of California convicted of murder for providing fentel to someone who later died um and Mr dare was um the third there have been three prosecutions uh and convictions for murder i

n the state of California for fentanyl two of of those have been in pler County um the other was in Riverside County and we have a third case of ours that had started trial and then had a little bit of a hiccup and we'll be resuming trial in the next couple of weeks um but these as you'll see consistent with a theme uh when we get into some of our challenges these cases require a lot of work um particularly our fentanyl cases and and as Sheriff Wu was indicating with his fentel response team our

fentanyl prosecutors our major narcotics prosecutors are involved more in these cases on the front end than most other cases um traditionally DA's offices tend to be a bit more reactive meaning the investigation is done by the law enforcement agency they submit the case to us and we prosecute it from there fentanyl is different it requires much more um groundwork being done by the lawyers on the front end in these investigations um meaning our narcotics prosecutors are as much a member of those

of that fentanyl team as as any of the law enforcement officers on there as well um so when we get to get to some of our issues that we are dealing with we'll we'll talk about that because it really is um an enormous amount of of man-hours that go into um these fentel prosecutions and then um one of the things I I'm most proud of uh in our office are our ability to handle the Statewide issues that are thrust upon us through bad policy and bad legislation uh we have U obviously talked about the

fental process prosecution but organized retail theft has been on the Forefront of everyone's mind been constant in the headlines um is something that affects every aspect of our quality of life in Placer and throughout the state um this board was gracious enough to allow us to apply for Grants um to develop a team specifically designed to deal with organized retail theft that came with a dedicated organized retail theft prosecutor uh a dedicated criminal investigator and a crime analyst that wi

ll work with our Frontline law enforcement to try and and develop um those areas that are prime targets and and how much like Sheriff W was talking about with the realtime crime centers will allow our office to work and interface with our law enforcement agencies uh it it is been something that has caught the attention of of the rest of the state we are frequently asked by news organizations from across the state about why when it comes to fentel and organized retail theft when they do their res

earch little old pler County keeps coming up uh and it's a source of great pride that that we serve ve as uh much of a model for for other states or for other counties and and even other other jurisdictions and then we continue to to engage and and even lead in environmental crime uh we our prosecutor is actively involved in a number of Statewide lawsuits um dealing with all sorts of environmental issues from um negligent storage of underground fuel tanks uh to to all of the other environmental

crimes that we prosecute as well as we build are building out our uh circuit proc prosecutor program that this board graciously uh authorized last year um to allow us to have a dedicated prosecutor to work in conjunction with some of the smaller counties that do not have access to uh prosecution services and their environmental crimes so it is uh something that continues to keep pler County uh DA office leading the way our public uh Outreach uh the one of the things I am I am most proud of um sp

earheaded by Lisa botwinick and Steph Herrera who are seated behind us um have really you you've all heard me say this so I won't spend too much time on it but it is as important as the prosecution of our cases to spread awareness and education to reduce the amount of crime that occurs if we can prevent victims uh then we have truly accomplished our mission uh I would I would rather prevent uh crimes from occurring then have to prosecute them on the back end and the way we do that is to build th

e trust uh and enhance the education of our community and nowhere has that been more apparent than in our fentel campaign that continues um we have continued our efforts to provide our um our assemblies as you can see we we were able to reach over 30,000 students We are continuing to provide those assemblies to our middle schools uh and we are um continuing to spread the word and I think one of the most impressive things about pler County in general not just our DA's office but but our ability t

o collaborate with people who have been affected by these tragedies um you don't have to go very far in this County to learn the names and see the participation of our bereaved families who have lost people to fental poisonings and overdoses who have become part of the mission to educate our community and that's one thing I think that really separates us from a lot of other counties uh and has really changed the face of victimization and Trauma in pler County um you no longer have to or need to

be silent um you can be empowered and you can use that empowerment to help others and to keep others from being victims as well and I think you'll see in the days to come with the Advent of the plaster Justice foundation and our Empower and resilience project to the DA's office you will see even more of this sort of victim empowerment um and collaboration among uh some of our bereaved families some of our um folks that have been affected um by crime really using their voice to help partner with

us and to help other people um to either navigate that situation should they find themselves in it or to avoid it altogether we continue with our criminal justice pathway field trips those are fantastic opportunities for uh our Juniors and seniors in high school to come get a front row view of the Criminal Justice System they they come to the DA's office we have partnered with probation the Sheriff's Office and the courts to really give uh students in forensic classes government classes uh a fro

nt row view uh even those who don't anticipate or ever have a desire to work in the criminal justice system find themselves being uh moved by this program and and uh they will help shape the future of our criminal justice system and these programs are critically important um and and consistent with that um one of the things that our goal was with our with our community outreach unit was to was to be present um we attend Career Fairs we attend events you will see the DA's office being a fixture a

t most of the community events that occur uh throughout town uh and we have volunteers in our office those who aren't even assigned as part of their uh assignment in our Outreach unit volunteering to be there um it's not it won't it's not surprising to find Das at the the Mad walks or uh any sort of uh event that's going on uh in our community the DA's office is there to help spread awareness and build trust in our criminal justice system and our pler protect is thriving um we have our two resou

rce fairs each year um the one in Mau and the one in Tahoe um in addition to the protect fairs we will have this year for the first time the inaugural Mental Health Resources Fair um put on by our office and in collaboration with a lot of our Justice partners and mental health service provider Partners um similar model to the protect fair that will provide much needed Mental Health Resources for those who who participate um we you have we have also seen the um Family and Child Services Fair um t

hat occurred through our pler mdic uh and you'll see another one of those this year as well so lots of things are happening in the in the community outreach uh space at the District Attorney's office um and this is a space that that not a lot of DA's offices operate in larger offices that have the ability to do it do um but offices our size typically don't have one as robust so again one of the things I'm I'm incredibly proud of we continue to collaborate with our criminal justice Partners uh ou

r wonderful probation department uh has partnered with us with our pre-filed diversion program along with HHS this is the program that is designed to identify those who have a one-off intersection with the criminal justice system don't necessarily belong uh in the criminal justice system and is designed to identify those who with no prior record uh this program was originally designed and is now being expanded but originally designed with firsttime uh offenders who are charged with theft or arre

sted for theft to try and siphon them out of the system for those of you that have heard the presentation on organized retail theft that I have given um you will know that it was hard to get this program up and running uh because a majority of the people who were arrested for theft in pler County it was not their first time uh and as Sheriff woo was talking about potential changes with ballot measures um one of the problems that we face in our organized retail theft space is that we have people

repeat thieves who are uh doing it over and over again and the consequences are not we are not able to impose stricter consequences based on the number of times they continue to do it but this program has been a success anecdotally we have some we have some successes and we will continue to to uh to build that out our fental response and training we have talked about that I'm excited uh for the sheriff's uh response team we are excited to participate in it uh the detective that investigated the

the cases that we obtained those convictions on is phenomenal uh and him being allowed to continue that with the support uh of a team is going to be I think a game Cher for fentanyl here in pler County we have already made tremendous inroads and I think this has uh the recipe to be a phenomenal success and we are excited to partner along with the Sheriff's Office uh as part of that we contined to uh expand and um highlight our collaborative courts I've said this before often times um the average

citizens uh view of the criminal justice system is of often shaped by the collaborative courts these are our rehabilitative courts our drug treatment Court our mental health court our veterans treatment Court our community Court which used to be known as the homeless Court um th those are the the areas of the Criminal Justice System where we try and seek Redemption and try and put people back on their feet uh and we have worked diligently with our stakeholders um to try and uh educate and expan

d the uh the ways in which people get in and the ways in which people succeed in our collaborative courts our community prosecution unit um we we have Lisa who supervises that we have one prosecutor who uses it most of that of our Pro Community prosecution resources have been have been devoted to uh homelessness issues um but over the next five years it is part of our plan to continue to expand the community prosecution unit uh and in hopes at one point to have prosecutors assigned to different

geographic regions in our County to be available um for the specific needs that occur in those in those areas uh we have continued to focus on increasing Staffing based on community-driven crimes I mentioned our organized retail theft I mentioned those people uh on that team that we have added um so let's talk a little bit about uh the e issues and priorities we continue to deal with understaffing uh just as a little bit of context when I first took over we were critically under staffed I think

the second year of the of this is going almost my fourth year as the district attorney here in pler County the second year I asked and thank you I asked for and graciously received from this board an allotment of six prosecutors to help us bring us up to speed uh with sort of the numbers that are similar throughout the county um we were about 12 behind and then um last year we had not filled all six of those positions when I had submitted the budget so we didn't ask for any more um we since then

did fill those positions so we are at a point in time now where we are being faced with more and more demands on the criminal justice system if you if I can use the the example that sheriff woo gave uh in a PR context when you have a couple of police cars respond or Sheriff's units respond to an incident you have three or four deputies all wearing bodyw cameras maybe the incident only lasts an hour or two but if you consider all of the amount of information that is generated for one case in tha

t instance maybe it's a relatively low-level simple crime but we now have hours and hours of body camera footage we have hours and hours of of Technology cell phone data um all of those sorts of things that increase the amount of time on each criminal case the volume of cases is not increasing significantly we're not dealing with exponentially more of certain kinds of crime what we are dealing with is an exponential increase in the amount of time that each case takes uh and when you compound tha

t with changes that the legislature well I'll just say thrusts upon us uh it adds to the complexity of each case uh in particular and I think this year has highlighted it there was the passage of a of a statute that allowed for mental health diversion on just about all cases except for a small um exception every defendant is allowed to submit to the court uh a doctor's report that says there was a mental health issue that contributed to this person's criminality and therefore they should be dive

rted from the criminal justice system that usually results in a motion being filed by the defendant it then needs to be responded to researched and responded to and often times a court hearing where our prosecutors are having to cross-examine doctors this is before we even get into the Merit of the case this is on just about every case now that is coming into our office requires a separate mental health component on each case it is a relatively loose standard we are successful in defeating many

of these but it all requires a lot of work to do uh and trust me if there are mental health issues that are severely driving someone's criminality we are equipped to deal with that um but unfortunately what this law did was to allow for a lot more litigation on the front end and it has created uh quite a burden on our particularly our felony units where these are relatively serious cases and we have to litigate these issues so that we can continue to hold someone responsible the other the other

demand that is being placed I mentioned earlier on our staff our our major narcotic unit we have two prosecutors um assigned to that unit that are um primarily responsible for the prosecution of our major narcotics crimes this this unit the special prosecutions special prosecutions unit also encompasses our human trafficking our organized retail theft and our postconviction unit meaning everything that happens after someone is convicted all that litigation we have one primarily dedicated narcoti

cs prosecutor and a supervisor of that unit who also assists in the prosecution of these narcotics cases and they're overwhelmed um if you can imagine by seeing the slides just on the number of Sheriff's arrests and Sheriff W's presentation add in the rest of the uh law enforcement agencies in our County those all come to us um all of those arrests all of those investigations as I said earlier are Narcotics prosecutors are generally involved in those prosecutions early on it becomes an incredibl

e burden um so one of the things we'll be uh asking for is to add a position to that narcotics unit so that we can handle um these these fentel cases as I mentioned before uh actually I'll I'll leave that there for now um another another issue we're running out of room we have a uh a temporary building that we are now I think 15 16 years in um and we have we are getting creative uh our assessor Matt Maynard was gracious enough to allow us to have the space below um our office on the first floor

of the sanui Justice Center and we have now been in plans uh we talked a little bit about this last year but we have been in in plans and and have now actually finalized the plans to turn the downstairs of that area what was the former assessor space into our multi-disciplinary interview Center it is in need of an upgrade it is in need uh of becoming more efficient and and it will allow us to add about 12 more offices in our DA's office where the mdic center is now so we are in the in the proces

s of of doing that but once we get to that point we'll be all full up I I don't know what the solution to that is at this point uh and it's a little early to talk about it but but we had for a period of time we had lawyers that we were hiring um being placed in cubicles which we don't do this job for for the pride but it is we would like to have our attorneys in uh in in offices because they have a lot of stuff and they need an area to be quiet and they have a lot of things that they need to dis

cuss and work on that shouldn't be available to anybody who is walking by um so keep that in mind we are we are running out of space in our office uh another issue that we are constantly faced with are the legislative and decisional impacts to our operations the legislature uh they are busy they like to keep us on our toes um post conviction litigation which I have talked about before continues um this last legislative cycle was not as bad as years before in terms of vast sweeping things but we

have a couple of things on the horizon that are coming to fruition that will severely impact um our operations I talked about the mental health diversion um one of the other things I will I will mention we will effective January 1 of 2025 we will have to implement what is called race blind charging this was a pilot project that occurred in one county in California and then was passed Statewide it requires us on the vast majority of our of our cases to have to review them twice the first time we

have to review that case completely redacted from any racial identifying information and then we have to assess whether or not we would file that case if we would file that case we then unredacted information and we can look at it again it's a way to try and remain race neutral um frankly it was a a statute I don't think was necessary our prosecutors do what they do because they are sworn um to uphold the the the Constitution and the laws of our state and they do it because they have a strong mo

ral compass um but the legislature thought we needed an extra couple of layers um to to do our job um so that they could prove that we were doing it for the right reasons somewhat insulting but we're here nonetheless so we have been working with a couple of different companies to try and figure out how that's going to be done because if you can imagine someone having with all of the reports the thousands of reports we get every year someone having to redact that with a pen and then make a second

copy it would be unworkable so we will be trying to get creative on how we Implement that and then the following year we will Implement another statute that was uh given to us by the legislature that requires us to report about 58 separate metrics of data that have never previously been um captured before in District Attorney's offices and it and it's an incredible uh lift to try and capture it and Report that kind of data everything from the number of cases in a particular lawyer's case load t

o all of the reasons why cases are filed or rejected things that that were never broadcast before to uh on a Statewide level will now become um something that we have to record each year and and we have to have a system in place to do that so lots of changes on the horizon for the operations of the DA's offices that will that will create a lot of hardships uh and then as an example uh again just as we've seen with our sexually violent Predator uh the one that we've been dealing with uh most rece

ntly uh changes in the law as of January have created confusion and some some issues um that we have tried to navigate and do our best to educate our public and and and get engagement from everyone on these issues um our objetive objectives and performance measures I don't think much has changed um I will comment just on a couple of these but I'll I'll leave them to you to to take a look at we had uh a major Milestone with the uh advancement and development of of the crime lab thanks to this boa

rd with the execution of of the common interest agreement uh between uh our County and saak state thank you very much for your dedication to that uh and I will just point out we are still number five down there we are still in need of a service dog I am committed that this year we will have a service dog in our victim Services Unit but we were unable to obtain one last year so uh I have said yes but we have to find the right person to be the Handler and it comes comes with a lot of training and

and a lot of requirements but uh for those of you that might be disappointed that it's still on our performance uh measures as as unachieved uh hold hold on we're we're going to get there uh all right operating budget versus Capital expenditures all right I'm going to toss it over to you I'm GNA let Kimmy do a little bit of talking here just to go through some of our numbers thank you Morgan so for year 2425 operating budget versus Capital expenditures we have operating expenditure budget of $31

million Capital expense budget is $1 135,000 this is the two vehicles that we asking plus one radio total budget of $32 million nearly $32 million this one sure so next slide uh we have revenue and expense comparison and we are about the same so 2324 adopted budget was $31 million and we are little increase of um 32 Millions nearly for 2425 working budget so major budget variances $2.1 million of increase for salaries and benefits that includes five alloc ation approved in 23 24 um so those are

five allocations as more mentioned three allocations for ortt Grant one DDA for Cal EPA EPS excuse me and also we got one investive um in IA for opioid Grant also that 2.51 Mill million dollar includes salary increase for ddaa mou that's settled and also General wage increase next bullet point is $410,000 of a decrease for a887 cost the third bullet point is $735,000 of increase for other program for state aid those like I mentioned or t grants and Cal EPA grants and we don't have that in here

but we also have um $ 1.5 million of decrease that is due to uh reclassification of uh Ledger account from the revenue ledger to the Contra expense ledger so that decreases that line of expenditures by $1.5 million and then our snapshot of the last several years our funded positions um from 130 to 135 including the ort the EPA and I think two of the unfunded positions from uh the prosecutors from that six that we had gotten two years ago our supplemental requests um I'm going to go through these

I I having conversations with Daniel and Amanda and obviously listening here today I understand the challenges we face this year um I'm going to tell you why we put these on here um just very briefly and then do my best to try and prioritize uh these as best we can the investigative assistant is for our multidisciplinary interview Center um and I wanted to give you the numbers just by example uh in 2022 we did 228 forensic exams those are forensic interviews of children who are um either have b

een maltreated have been victims or Witnesses of crimes in 2023 that number increased to 285 um forensic interviews um and those are all done in the DA's office we have a small staff there uh the forensic interviews and the investigative assistants run run the center uh and it is becoming more and more challenging um with the increased number of um interviews that we do um as you can imagine uh and as you've heard with the Advent of all of these new technologies that are affecting the criminal j

ustice system everything in our it department is increasing uh and we are we have gone from a oneperson IT person when I started to an IT unit now uh and it needs to to operate as a unit um a and that means we have to have an IT supervisor uh and a couple of levels of um of both management and it support uh and we are we are lacking that and that is something we would like to try and build build in um a as with um everything else our administrative and fiscal operations are expanding um which is

why we have we started with uh very little and now we have one of the best uh administrative and fiscal teams I think anywhere around uh thanks to Kimmy and her team's efforts um but adding some structure and some movement uh within that unit is is is important uh hence the request for the uh accountant senior and the four Deputy District Attorneys one of those is designed to handle nothing but those mental health diversions that I talked about right now each lawyer in their case load has to de

al with these mental health diversion requests the idea would be to add a lawyer to do just that um it's inefficient because the lawyers have so many cases that they're working on if we could funnel those into one lawyer that handles the mental health component of those cases to allow the lawyers to work on the substantive portion of those cases would be much more efficient uh and much more cost effective the second Deputy district attorney would be for the narcotics unit um our as I said before

and I won't spend much time on it but our our major narcotics prosecutor is drowning um he has the support of a supervisor who's doing more narcotics Prosecuting than supervising uh because it's just that busy um and with the Advent of the U fentanyl response team it's only going to get busier uh and this is something that is obviously a priority um and to to accommodate the increase in volume and complexity of the cases that are being handled by our felony units um then the following two Deput

y District Attorneys are for one we have two felony teams to add to add a felony prosecutor to each of those teams to handle the volume they are working too much um the the case loads are too big per person um they are they are too big comparatively around the state and they're just too big for each of those lawyers um and as I've said before it's hard to it's hard to innovate when you're in triage mode and we just are still short um so the the narcotics prosecutor and the mental health uh diver

sion prosecutor are critical um because those are each day those are a drain on us um so I I I understand the challenges this board faces this year I understand the the the ambitiousness of of a lot of Department's asks including our own so I I appreciate your your consideration for these um but I will just say um we don't ask for things we don't need um last year we didn't ask for anything um because we knew we hadn't filled the positions we'd asked for the year before so um we try and be good

stewards of the public money but we also need to operate the DA's office in the best way that we can in the most efficient way and in a way that reduces stress on everybody so that we're not um constantly uh risking burnout for a lot of our for a lot of our staff um so with that um I thank you very much for your time today I truly appreciate the support of this board it is it is a is an honor to come before you uh each year to do this uh and say a few things about the good work that our team is

doing um while I get to be the the face of the office and I can hear Ryan Ronco saying oh there's a scary thought um it it is our team uh that truly makes this DA's office what I truly believe is the best DA's office in in the state if not if not the nation and that is some of the people behind me and the people back at the office so um thank you for allowing us to do the good work that we do and thank you for the support along the way with that I will happy to answer any questions that you may

have thank you Morgan supervisor Holmes oh thank you chair uh thank you Marg Morgan thank you for your leadership uh in our Criminal Justice System it's much appreciated um you've got these supplemental requests for additional staff members and you talked about being crowded for space uh where would you put these wherever we can fit them uh but I never want our lack of space to override our need for people uh uh but we are in the process of that construction as I mean we haven't started the cons

truction yet but once that's done we'll have a little bit of breathing room because it does free up some space um but in the meantime it'll be tight um we'll have some folks in cubicles and that's okay um but better to have the people than then not know where to put them then the other way around would you you have any locations that you've been looking at uh to house these people sure that you have enough space for you to do the important work that you people do did somebody say the domes no no

no offense but uh okay they need to be close to our Central operations in Roseville there we go um good we we do have a few offices in our Auburn Justice Center office the problem is most of the people that we need uh have to be close to the sanui Justice Center it's just not feasible to ask people to drive back and forth for court appearances and you need to be able to be close uh so the satellite offices is difficult to do we haven't started looking at that um until we're absolutely out of sp

ace um but we haven't we haven't started looking but thank you thank you okay supervisor Landon well first of all I just want to say thank you so much to you and your team because you're amazing and you do such great work and just really appreciate that you are always looking for opportunities to be Innovative and think outside the box and creative so thank you for that and then I have a question um so with the sheriff's department having a a target number of 1.2 deputies per 1,000 people is the

re anything that exists on the prosecution side of things for um targeted prosecutors or targeted I guess maybe cases per prosecutor for when that growth is happening there there are and there have been attempts to try and correlate it I mean there is a sort of general population to prosecutor ratio the problem is cases are all different so it's hard to say you know you may have a murder case and you may have a couple of theft cases and it's hard to say you know this case is going to take expone

ntially more time than the rest of the case um so it's difficult because a lot of these are nuanced to sound like a total lawyer in your answer um but I've I've been trying so that I could give you a little bit more like a a data driven uh number that correlates to it instead what we look for is okay how how are and we all know as career prosecutors okay if you've got you know 30 cases set for trial that's too many it needs to be down closer to 15 or 20 you may have 200 in your case load but you

know in various stages in this critical stage that's way too many and so we all kind of know what the those are um it just is hard to to replicate that across the across the state but I'm I'm I'm working on trying to give you a better sort of number view of of how many prosecutors we should have um you know a couple years ago I think it was the the I just did correlated it by population size uh and there were most of the counties that were our size had 10 to 12 more than we did uh and some of t

hose that only had half our population had only two lawyers fewer than we did um so those are the metrics that I've tried to use uh but I'll try and get some better scientific ones okay thank you for that I did hear when sherff said that I I turned to Dave and said I need numbers like that that's that's a good way to do it okay supervisor guson thank you and I'll Echo U supervisor Landon's comments and supervisor um you've done a great job and we really appreciate the team that it takes um to pr

otect our citizens and to prosecute those individuals um I should remember this but I don't percentage of your budget that is general fund I don't think I caught that or I should know that but um based on the uh the actuals on 202 22 23 that was 61 60% 61% okay general fund and then the out of the total revenue okay thank you and then you know a thought keeps coming up because we heard it with the sheriff as well as your presentation Technologies wonderful but it's placing this incredible burden

the same time technology should be trying to help us be more effective in our jobs have you seen any of any oh it it absolutely I didn't mean to go ahead go ahead uh and and redirect me if I misunderstand your question but let's take body cams for example it'll ultimately help cases resolve um because the issues that you would ordinarily fight about in trial are clear one way or the other the problem is it still takes all that time to get there right um so it's not a timesaver but it is more ef

ficient because ultimately what we're after is the truth of what happened on a particular instance and anything any piece of technology that gets us closer to the truth helps us ultimately in our mission which is to do justice and to do the right thing the problem is the technology doesn't save us time because we still have to review those hours of body cam footage or we still have to we still have to analyze the cell phones or we have to still do the warrants to try and figure out what that tru

th is uh and that still takes a lot of a lot of time and and on the on the fentel side of it those cases are so intensive in the in the digital forensics that that even on the cases I mean as as you've seen we've had how many fentanyl poisonings or overdose deaths and we've charged four total with murder which means there's a lot I mean that's probably the biggest variant of any crime type uh I mean most of the residential burglaries that occur we prosecute most of them but there's such a variat

ion and that's because we have prosecutors and detectives going through hours and hours of of digital technology only to come to the conclusion that we're not going to be able to file this case and No One Ever Knows okay it doesn't reflect on any number but no one knows that somebody just spent 400 hours on a case that never saw the light of day but that was the right thing to do because that's what Justice demanded in that particular case Okay if that answer question thank you very much appreci

ate it supervisor Gore just one thing thank you thank you for the presentation and for the explanation of the changes and challenges with your um Department it's appreciated I did notice yesterday um a supervisor from another County was promoting um information about one pill can kill and I just so appreciate the fact that it started here with you and your team with Lisa with Stephanie um to see that not only locally but Statewide is just something that I think you all can be so proud of because

clearly it's making a difference and seeing the data that the sheriff showed earlier about fewer number of deaths in our county is is just tremendous and teaching our young people about this is just great so I just thank you it really really matters and I know that that's above and beyond but like you said preventing it Upstream is so important thank you okay um I would like to thank you very much for all of that I did want to point out though that I think you've increased your workload fortuna

tely for us because now the fental prosecutions that's something we never really did prior to your term as our as our da organized retail theft now on the on the rise and our prosecutions as well as the environmental crime and to the addition of our body cams with for the sheriff that has created another workload for you so I mean even from last year your presentation here on what you're responsible for doing and what you are doing has increased immensely I would say um perhaps if you could capt

ure some hours spent going through those videos whether you know you can it doesn't really matter to us whether it goes to court or it doesn't it's workload that has to be completed um anything like that a point you know anything like that that you can help us capture as far far as your duties and responsibilities because I know you're doing so much more even I think than last year it's it's incredible your your staff your team um it's amazing the work that they that they can do and and and you

get around Morgan I do which is a wonderful thing as my wife says it should be home a little more often but hey it's a big benefit to plazer County and we really appreciate that very much we appreciate all of you back there plus everyone else at the office that isn't here today well I appreciate it thank you all very much good luck over the next day and a half thank you okay we're going to move on probation um welcome Marshall good how are you all right well good morning it's always a pleasure t

o follow Morgan thanks a lot anyway um chair Jones members of the board I'm Marshall Hopper your Chief probation officer um it's a pleasure to be here today A couple of my staff here in the audience as well um first off I'd like to thank the board for your support um over the years and your support and commitment to to Public Safety and to our citizens I also want to recognize our CEO's office Daniel thank you for your support Amanda um it's been a pleasure to work with you over the last year an

d I think we've accomplished some great things so thank you for that as well um I also wanted to make a couple brief comments I think it's important to emphasize that all of our accomplishments here at the probation department are truly a direct result of our Workforce of our employees um because our employees demonstrate their commitment and their ability to do the job on a daily basis in the office in the field and in the community working with the difficult population so all of the accomplish

ments and things that we do would not be possible without their dedication so thank you to all of my staff I appreciate working for you um now moving forward Jeff's going to pass out a brochure to give it to you guys it's our 20 uh 2023 annual report business summary you can take a look at it whenever you have some time um and uh for anybody interested there is a uh copy out front and it will also be posted on our um website later today now looking at some of our cost areas um uh really we're br

oken down into two to simplify into two categories um our Adult Services you know with our adult Court our alternative sentencing programs Community Supervision programs and of course our prep or re-entry programs as well um in addition to our juvenile Services uh early intervention programs um juvenile supervision and of course we do operate the Juvenile Detention Facility which is um operating 24 hours a day seven days a week so primarily um our cost areas have basically remain the same um as

years past now looking at some of our um accomplishments I um wanted to emphasize over the last year that we've continued our Outreach Services with the unsheltered population um enforcing court orders of the individuals that are on probation or supervision but really connecting with people connecting with them to provide them services and um possible housing opportunities and to really get out in the community because this we all know this is a um high priority of everyone um it's a significant

priority and we are committed to doing our best to to Really continue our efforts there in fact just last year our Outreach team made over 6,300 contacts um each time engaging with people making appropriate referrals and trying to promote some positive change in that area now we also um I know everyone's familiar with our probation Outreach vehicle um we now the grant that went through last year we will we were able to obtain additional grant funding and we've purchased a second vehicle so now

we have a full-size Sprinter van in addition to the probation Outreach vehicle it's currently in the process of getting um all the bells and whistles set up on it so we can do some increased um uh Community contacts so really between the the larger vehicle in the primary areas and then the Sprinter van will increase our ability to really get throughout the county to connect and engage with this population now looking at our next item our Professional Standards Division I think I think it's impor

tant to note that uh our professional standard division really is a the backbone of our organization it is a division that is responsible for recruitment background investigations and training and this plays a critical role within our organization and really helps to find the culture within our department because we all know that hiring qualified applicants and um individuals truly makes a difference not only in our ability to do our job as probation officers and a probation department that real

ly allows us to remain neutral and bring our balanced approach to the justice system and how we interact with people how we support the court and how we support all of our Justice Partners as well um you know I think that um the success really involves or revolves around that and we're going to continue to to do our best to hire appropriate people I think in the training area I think it's important to note that this last year we completed over 10,000 hours of training um in our department um and

from a wide range of topics um but a couple this stand out are motivational interviewing mental health and deescalation tactics that really brings us to the key components of the justice system is really bringing a balanced approach to help people get to a better place and where they need to be because I think that providing a a diverse range really brings that balance and I think that it is is is a key component to our justice system in general now looking at our next item and this is a kind o

f a continuing item that's been on uh on before but really I think somebody had a question earlier about how do you how do you measure um a certain number of people with staff that kind of a thing this is really our Crux of probation is our risk assessments meaning that that that our staffing pattern for Community Supervision revolves around that risk assessment and our ability to have highrisk case loads at lower levels like 30 to 50 and then the medium risk case loads and so forth so the abili

ty to continue a risk-based approach um really emphasizes the importance of of how we categorize this and we're very proud of that I will note that we are one of the few probation apartments in the state that actually supervises misdemeanant um many don't that's because I believe that a misdem unit can be just as dangerous to our community as a felon because of the history and that's where we get back into the risk score just because you might be a person on probation for a misdemeanor doesn't m

ean that your risk assessment makes you a high risk to our community and a high risk to our citizens so that's one of the categories that we're really um emphasizing that we're focusing on and we're very very proud of that um and I think the next component really is our continued engagement um because based on the risk assessment like we were talking talking about um we need to be able to keep seeing these individuals um making sure they're complying with the conditions of Probation and doing wh

at they're supposed to and we made over 13,000 unannounced contacts last year that means that we are out and about you probably see our cars driving around town checking up on people but 13,000 is a pretty phenomenal number um that means that you know on any given day in 2023 for example that's over 50 unannounced contacts a day that's 50 surprise visits that's 50 probation searches in fact if we were to go figure out the math there's probably been a dozen or two probation searches since I've be

en here sitting in this meeting this morning so that's the Crux of the supervision is to make sure that we are making sure they're held accountable for the conditions of probation following court orders but at the same time each one of those contacts is an opportunity for a program um assisting them in getting to a better place services Mental Health Services our Partnerships with HHS so the key component to that is that balanced approach of supervision balancing the court orders and providing t

hem Services as well now in regards to some of our challenges emerging issues um I think that we have to look at our pre-ra services program uh we were one of the second or third departments in the state of California that developed a pre-trial program back in 2010 and A lot's changed since then uh um just recently um there was a grant that goes through the court process that we're involved in and designates us to perform pre-trial services and that kind of emerged in the last two years I think

it was um so we've moved to over 700 people currently on our our pre-trial programs and those are individuals that may have or would have been or have been released from from our local jail so this pre-trial program provides a relief valve for the court so we can have a little bit of space in our in our jail system which we heard from our Sheriff earlier we know it's crowded um so this is just one of those tools for a justice system to help alleviate that and help balance that it also provides a

n opportunity for the individuals that are that are pending court um who have not been convicted yet allowing them to participate keep their jobs keep um being part of society while they're pending court and going through the process but an important note here is our pre-trial programs uh have increased 40% over the last four years um and in fact our reports every single court hearing that are pre that those 700 people have we do a report that goes to the court talks about what what's their stat

us what programs are they in have they seen us that kind of a stuff that kind of stuff that's increased by 21% in the last year so just this last year alone we submitted over excuse me just this last month 750 pre-trial reports a month just for this Division and what that's boiled down to is a a difficult process extreme burden on our clerical support staff and some of our probation officers who are actually submitting these reports now instead of relying on on on the support of our clerical sta

ff because the the the demands just keep coming um and I'll spoiler alert you'll see that at the end of our supplemental slide um another emerging issue I think uh really revolves around the closure of the division of Juvenile Justice DJJ we talked about this last year um this is uh meaning that the individuals that were sentenced long-term historically used to go to the state rent facility that's no longer an option for anybody so now they come to our facility very similar to peole realignment

that we're all very familiar with um looking in your brochure you'll see that the average length of of stay in our juvenile hall was 19 days as you can see that's changing because we now have uh an individual sent to juvenal for over four years um this creates challenges we're used to short-term um opportunities for these kids to get in get out get back with their families and and now we have a long-term individual and several others that are paining court that will probably be long-term as well

um but we're going to continue to strive to do the best possible things that we can to keep these kids um in a positive direction for example we've recently partnered with Sarah college and we have four kids currently housed in our facility attending college which I think is pretty cool um couple other uh challenging or emerging issues um one can't not think about the State deficit the budget um it's a point of everyone's conversation dealing with government and where it's at and where it will

go the probation department has several sources of revenue from the state um and there's always some question on the decreasing um revenues coming in and how that will change and affect some of our programs but in addition that to that you know there's always been some uh numerous items of Reform bills coming through um discussions at various groups of the capital and consistently and I think your uh board supported us on a couple of them this last year couple of letters of opposition regarding

changing funding structures and how some of that money gets sent um or diverted through the system for example our Juvenile Justice crime prevention act money our CCP dollars um there are some um targeted areas regarding the structure of those funds but I think it's important to recognize as we look at some of these issues the changing of those funds could be a uh emerging issue for all of us because some of those um funds pay for things like the crisis resolution center in Lumis they pay for a

portion of our Sheriff's Athletic League Roseville Police Athletic League they pay they pay for part of our casa program that have kids coming in into our juvenile facilities and they also pay for portions of our reentry program including our prep services so as those things that's emerging issue that's kind of like always on the radar watching that to see when it might happen if it's going to happen um and I think that's a pretty significant item because it affects pretty not only us but really

our entire Justice System as well and now continuing our um theme from last year we can't uh skip this section without talking about recruitment retention and succession planning um I think uh the revision of our profession Professional Standards unit that I talked about earlier um we made some great um some Great accomplishments in fact fact uh you know we've really um worked hard to to get kind of over the over the hump regarding our our programs our hiring staff and our training but in fact

this last year we've hired 29 employees at the probation department um these positions filled retirements some vacant positions a couple of the ones that we had um that we had previously and um we're really excited about this new process and we also brought in a couple other staff to sort of fill the Gap there and really work at it differently um we've also really focused on continuing our approach with um our internal promotions um I've always believe that to bring staff up through through the

organization um through our Juvenile Detention Facility as probation officers the best that we can and that really helps maintain the culture of of of our department and really helps us um maintain the Adaptive management of approach that we're used to here as well as our commitment to your board and our community and looking here we we have um our funded positions um not much change there was a couple changes last time but a couple of those were increasing um the uh Professional Standards unit

um a couple clerical staff and an IT staff during that time pred last year now our our um objectives and performance measures uh this is a difficult slide for us um because predicting this I think is pretty impossible especially when you really look into it and realize that all these numbers really revolve around crime rates arrest rates and prosecution and uh that's that's pretty difficult to uh to predict so we do our best in that area I I um continue to look at the numbers but you will know I

think it's it's important to note that there's a couple items here items two and three last year the year before last we went to a new case management system you'll see a significant adjustment on there our new our new system has the ability to truly capture things more efficiently and effectively and so when we came across these numbers in our new case management system we analyzed it and realized that these are the more accurate numbers so we just did the aster at the bottom and updated it to

kind of get it back up to where it needs to be instead of uh the old system so it's a positive now I I will note on on one thing real quick though before we go in here numbers don't always tell the story I I I've always emphasized um uh to many people the the number has a meaning but a lot of times it doesn't really portray the things that we do and the services that we provide and speaking of services and program programs um the numbers don't reflect the true outcomes uh because it's hard to p

ut a number on a life that's been changed forever you you can't really do that um so when you have some time I would encourage you to take a quick look at the uh the business summary uh this year's highlights in that summary um talks about one of our juvenile probationers Journey To Success there's also a letter from Mom in there um who was grateful beyond words um you're going to have to just read it for yourself because it's a pretty amazing story and I really think that that captures why we d

o what we do and and the things that we do for our community and I'm going to leave it at that and turn it over to our Master financer Jeff thank you Chief Hopper uh good morning chair Jones Bard Mr chatney Miss Schwab I'm Jeff Thompson I have the privilege of being the administrative and fiscal operations manager uh as you can see our proposed uh operating budget for fiscal year 2425 is a little more than $39 million and we have no Capital expenditures anticipated the this re this slide here um

we uh regularly review operations and efficiencies to ensure public funds are spent prudently on the services we provide uh and as the chart shows you'll see that probation's uh fiscal year 2425 working budget is lower than the current fiscal Year's budget largely due to removal of one-time Grant funded projects here are the major budget variances from year to year uh Grant funded one-time projects completed this year included implementation of court ordered pre-trial Services the mobile probat

ion uh Service Center that's the second vehicle that we we got and some uh Juvenile Detention Facility Renovations which was the first time I believe in about 20 something years years that that has been updated so it's it's looking really good there uh and you'll find more information about these in the uh very professional business summary that we handed out to you and uh let's see here probation does not have major one-time Grant funded projects anticipated for fiscal year 24 and 25 and that's

the largely why our budget has decreased by about a million dollars you also see in the slide that um salaries have increased as other departments have and some you know decrease of a87 costs with that I will turn it back to Chief hoer great and that brings us back to to Really our our one item our supplemental item is to add a administrative legal clerk um to um our position allocations um and that position will be specifically to handle those over 700 and something pre-trial reports that we'r

e doing on a on a monthly basis I will note that that grant that I mentioned earlier um uh the money that goes through the court system will fund that position and the court is on board with that so there will be no additional cost to the county it'll go through the grant through the court and be paid for by the court so that is our presentation and we'll be happy to answer any questions that you might have thank you very much thank you thanks Marshall and um I mean with you as well just such gr

eat work and um living within your means and doing just continually an amazing job at reaching out to people in the community who really need your services so um quick questions um one I was wondering when you talked about a shift having juveniles for long term in your facility um are there similar requirements when it comes to Mental Health Services for those kids like there are for adults in the jail and if so is that factored into kind of your long-term plans yes the hard part about that is u

m prior to DJJ closing we only averaged one to two kids sentenced to DJJ at any given time for the last 15 years or so so in order to establish a you know significant program for one kid it's it's not coste effective and so what we've done with the money that we've that we've received back from those commitments is um utilize that in a fashion on a individual basis um meaning if we have an a kid in the hall that has these types of issues and needs then we're going to hire out and bring somebody

into the Hall rather than hiring a whole counselor for one kid um that way it's more cost effective so that's kind of our plan if if that changes and we end up with you know a unit full of kids like this then we're going have to come back to the drawing board and really have a crafted plan okay thanks and then on the sp129 funds um do you is that um committed for a certain length of time or is it expected to be in perpetuity I know you said it's expected to be longterm do you right now do you ha

ve a an idea on that um I don't see that changing any anytime soon okay um I do know that you know in the event that it does uh we have retirements and people leaving all the time we would be able to absorb that and make it work but I don't see that being an issue at all okay thank you thank you supervisor Gore thank you thank you Chief appreciate the update um to add some additional questions about the juvenile facility so you said you used to have one to two kids at one time what's what how ma

ny people are using the beds now and what's our maybe vacancy rate or occupancy can you give give us a sense of the number of folks you're serving kids so the population in the hall um ranges around 20 15 to 20 um at any given time the facility capacity 78 so we've over the years have shut down um a wing that way we could you know um maximize um our cost and not have you know excessive costs that don't need to be there um we're currently staff for 32 so 32 is kind of our number that if if we hit

if we hit get up to 32 is when we have to open up a wing so we have some flexibility and some room in there for these these commitments that that'll that'll be coming but like I said the the interesting part about plaster County and I know you're all all familiar with with the smart collaborative and the amazing work that we've done working with HHS um we are one of the very few counties and we don't send a lot of kids um to that Avenue and we also have a good portion of the kids that come thro

ugh that are of significant crimes get transferred back to the county where they where they're from where their parents are from and a lot of times that's the Sacramento that's Sacramento County because a lot of those kids come up here so that's kind of working in in our advantage in this area but um I think uh overall there's capacity um we're we're doing fine um I don't see any issues at this point and remind me do you uh contract out to any counties to provide those services for juveniles yes

we house um four counties we have Nevada Amador Eldorado and there's one more I'm missing no we're looking to also contract with pus humus County and is that because they don't have a facility or they Nevada County shut down their Hall a couple years ago I believe um and the other ones don't they don't have facilities El Dorado does but it's in Tahoe so they they use theirs sporadically with us um the the law says they have to have a facility or access to a facility and so we charge them a dail

y rate for the kids that they bring to us great thank you um and I want to I have one question for Daniel Daniel I noticed um that the 87,000 decrease in the transfer the um a87 costs some other departments um showed that as well I I think I saw that in either the DA's or the sheriff's budget so why are their expenses lower for the do item supervisor Gore do you want the short answer about cost plan 87 charges or do you want me to take the rest of the afternoon short would be fine thank you so c

ost plan is is a cost that's derived basically from two years prior so it it fluctuates annually for a lot of departments so they we we project the New Year's cost based on two years actuals and then we readjust at the close of those years for the actual costs that were incurred then those roll forward into an account but basically it the short answer would be in something like this departments either used less of countywide services or the costs that were charged out or less thank you that's he

lpful um and then just um you I noticed a couple of your team members there um and I know there's been a lot of FOC focus on the unhoused the homeless and thank you so much for all the work that you do but as you were coming up I'm thinking about the fact that um we we see police officers or sheriffs and the tough work that they have but your team has um really challenging work as well right because these are the folks either going into the criminal justice system now that we're seeing these pre

-trial needs and folks coming out um and so I just really appreciate it because it's not easy um not an easy job at all um but your team does an excellent job and especially with looking at programs and making sure folks actually get trained so they can actually get a job um when they get out of the system that's it says a lot about how much work you all are doing because that makes a difference it changes people's lives when they actually get Services they need and the mental health programs th

ey need and then can actually have a new life um outside the justice system it's really appreciated thank you okay supervisor Holmes well well said supervisor G uh you still my comments but you know over the last several years I worked closely with your department and you've done a lot of innovation and uh your team is out in the community uh all the time I've watched them closely been involved with them it's really really refreshing to see the work that the probation department does and your st

aff uh does for our County and I I just have to say you're you're kind of like the unsung hero of our criminal justice system so uh any I just want to thank you for all all the work that you do in your staff well thank you I I I've often told the story like you know when they say what does the probation officer do and I said well after the police arrests them and the you know the prosecutor gets the sentence and then we try to fix them it's kind of that's what we do okay thank you supervisor Gus

uh I can't you've stole my thunder so Thunder all the way around thank you great Applause to all the efforts on the probation department provides and I especially wanted to call out the chipper program yes near and dear to so many residents and in our district anyway that uh use those services and are so grateful but again um the individuals that are going out I hear from the the residents how polite they are how accommodating are and you know just tremendous opportunity for them to turn their

lives around and get back into productive service to our community so thank you for that great thank you very much and I would like to add a few things as well um because I think I've seen how your programs have expanded just like the district attorneys programs have I mean you've added another Outreach vehicle so that's more let's call it vehicle miles traveled something none of us like to hear about but it's good for you guys but it's good for you guys and as well as your um work with our home

less population since we added the the uh temporary mobile shelter you know in the last year yes certainly and I think that's that's that's a that's a great point it's it's a it's a lot to to take on and we've got a good team we have our our new probation manager in charge of that team is Molly Ronco and she's doing a doing a fabulous job so we're really proud of the work that she's doing and the opportunities that our team has taking care of as we are as well proud of what you guys have done wi

th that and so I want to congratulate you on taking on more more work more responsibility and shining through it and um you guys aren't really been asking for more staff here it is perfect situation it is a perfect situation thank you so much for your reports today and for your time we really appreciate it okay so I believe we are ready for a short break um you're going to be taking a 20 minute break so a little off schedule but that's okay can shorten it it longer whatever you want to do I thin

k we probably could use 20 would you think can you guys use 20 give us chance to get more to drink and let's take a 20 minute we'll shorten it up later this afternoon anyway see you all back later in 20 minutes e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e my microphone good afternoon welcome welcome back from our little break good afternoon Ryan how are you I'm good thanks okay okay I guess we were we're on toer Rec okay Clerk Recorder elections with ra

n Ronco take it away thank you so much uh chair Jones and members of the board we appreciate the opportunity to be able to come here today I see it's no tie day so I guess I'm going to take this off this was gentlemen are not wearing ties apparently today so kind of like Casual Friday I love it fantastic uh I am Ryan Ronco your regist our voters Clerk Recorder regist our voters with me uh are Lisa Kramer your assistant County Clerk Stephen I your assistant recorder registar and Melissa G uh our

fiscal manager I'd like to thank Lisa Holloway and the CEO's office for all of her help uh getting us to this point uh preparing our budget with us and I also like to thank the hardworking team of the bler County Clerk Recorder Elections office uh in the time since our last budget presentation they have implemented a successful move to uh our South pler office and managed a lot of changes in the way we conduct elections here in pler county and they are amazing and we certainly appreciate working

with them go to next slide it says in my presentation thank you uh so uh as the cler recuit regist I guess it's not surprising that my office's budget is uh spread across clerk Services elections and recording Services uh however since I have a couple of minutes I guess 25 I'm going to try to do with this faster though so we can get back on time I'm GNA Channel my inner Paul Harvey and tell you the rest of the story uh and our numbers uh the recording division numbers are still pretty flat curr

ently we record around 300 property records uh a day uh we're slightly up from last year and roughly equivalent to the 250 documents a day that we would record uh after the econ economic downturn in 2009 uh we process uh uh we processed in this last year over 2,000 passport applications unlike the record's office our clerk services division has not experienced a Slowdown we uh last year just filed just over 9,400 birth records and almost 5,000 death records in the office we had just over 2,300 m

arriage license applications filed in our office last year and we performed 746 in office weddings and I know this is the stat that you're all dying to hear about how many uh Rings we sold in the office last year H we sold uh 83 uh point of sale wedding rings in the office last year as well to those couples those 746 uh people getting married and of course there's the elections office uh pler county is currently the 18th largest uh uh county in California in terms of voter registration and uh as

of the last secretary of state report of registration our County is the third highest uh has the third highest percentage of eligible residents who are actually registered to vote in the state just over 93% of our eligible residents are registered and that's quite remarkable for a growing County like classer uh so we had a ton of accomplishments uh this last fiscal year I'll highlight a few of them for you first off we certified the uh 2024 presidential primary election results yesterday our tu

rnout of 48% was just behind Sonoma County's turnout of 51% uh for highest turnout among counties over 150,000 registered voters and it was 13 percentage points higher than the Statewide average uh turnout next we completed the move to our South pler Atherton building but of course uh we have kept a team of Clerk Recorder folks here in Auburn to serve the central County region as well and we've relearned quite a bit about how to operate in two locations so it's been since the year two uh 1997 wh

en we've had an office split across two locations but at that time we were only about 900 yards away from each other so it's a little bit easier to manage so uh we are relearning uh how to work in a world where the offices are not in one Under One Roof uh thirdly we installed our new uh sorder for vote by mail envelopes this machine has increased efficiency in ballot processing because it uses an integrated laser to cut the area away from our ballot envelopes that hides the signature on our vote

by mail ballot envelopes in the past we employ a small army of people to sit there with taking off perforated tabs off of those envelopes and so we've been able to really create some efficiencies there and the last accomplishment I'll highlight was our transition to the voter's Choice act uh the election itself was very successful uh we were hoping for three outcomes by moving to the voter's Choice Act style of conducting elections more ballots in the count by the time we finished counting on E

lection night a faster end to the post report post election ballot counting and an increase to in-person ballot counting and we were able to achieve all three outcomes for the uh last few elections as more people were using vote by mail ballots to vote we were seeing only about 30 to 40% of our ballots counted by the end of election night uh leaving 60 to 70% of our ballots to count in the postelection period after election day this election we counted over half of our ballots by the end of elec

tion night which gives our candidates and the public greater certainty in what the election outcomes are going to be additionally we finished the count faster for the last few election Cycles it would take us three weeks or more after election day to have nearly all of the ballots counted uh this year we had the vast majority of our ballots counted within the two weeks after the election the last couple of weeks we've just been adding some ballots here and there not very much um and then uh fina

lly while there wasn't a huge change in voter Behavior we did see the inperson voter turnout increase from around 8% to 11% in this last election uh that was primarily due to the vote by mail uh voters scanning their ballots at the vote centers as opposed to just dropping off a vote by mail ballot and leaving it to be SC uh scanned later uh without those 8,000 or so people people that took advantage of scanning their ballots at the vote Center um we our inperson turnout would have been about 6,3

00 voters or under 5% of our total voters so we did accomplish our three goals by moving to VCA so now we'll move on to emerging issues and departmental priorities uh obviously we've uh We've conducted uh or we we conducting the 2024 election uh was listed as uh uh a concern obviously that's going to be a big part of what we do this year or this coming fiscal year is conducting that presidential election it's only 217 days away take a big sigh uh I'm still smiling uh next we are preparing to rep

lace our beloved or at least beloved by the people that watch elections closely in pler County uh online election tracker system it needs an overhaul as the current application was developed over six years ago and needs a version upgrade uh this upgrade will include better manageability by my it uh team and updated user experience for the candidates and the public uh in addition uh to the election tracker the entire pler County elections office website is in sore need of Redevelopment the site w

as also condu created six years ago and while it is a wonderful website design all websites need makeovers eventually including updated coding on the back end and ensuring the site needs that meets all a requirements which is necessary in my uh in my world on the other side of the house last year you approved our request to replace our current Clerk Recorder uh data management system with a new vendor we have been slowly working uh with a vendor on a contract we hope to start that project in uh

this summer and expect it it for it to take 12 to 14 months to complete so um we should hopefully be on the road to getting that finished um um and eventually finished in about a year and finally your board has already approved our use of trust funds to bring outside help bringing outside help to move 177,000 recorded maps to our new space saving s uh storage system in the Atherton building uh this entails removing each map from its old cabinet carefully removing the current adhesive on the map

uh those hanging strips that are attached to the maps place in the map in a new myar sleeve checking and when necessary updating the indexing information in our system for each map and then filing it away in the new storage hangers um so those are our emerging issues and and our priorities uh we're asking once again to you asked us again to prepare some objectives and performance measures um all of our performance meas measurements fall under the Innovative integrated County Services critical su

ccess factor in the County's list of uh strategic plan priorities I'm sure you've spent hours coming through uh all of these spreadsheets and so I won't really reiterate uh much of this you can see our objectives are to process recordings quickly to maintain a clean voter role to conduct elections accurately and with transparency and to increase access to our forms online and I'll be honest it's really hard to create meaningful measures of these objectives these should be our objectives and they

are but uh to measure it it's just in the proof is in the pudding right uh however we've done our best to create some measurements that uh we'll capture if we've hit our objectives or not and that's that slide um I'm guessing that this slide is pretty self-explanatory our total budget is all in operating expenditures with a breakout of 54% in salaries and employee benefits 40% in services and supplies and 6% in a87 costs and this slide is kind of ugly but it's for pretty obvious I'm not talking

about the blue and the green that's beautiful but the slide itself is uh not the greatest but it's for obvious reasons we had uh a pretty big bump in expenses because of the cost of extra help that we need to uh to hire to conduct elections uh temporary help expenses are much higher than now than they were in previous elections of course and I'm not talking about the number of people because that actually did reduce but the fact that we must pay the people we hire much more than what we used to

pay our temp help as for revenues uh they have been declining our revenues come primarily from recorded property documents and people are just not making the number of transactions with us as they were when interest rates were lower however we do historically experience an increase in election office revenue every other year uh when Special Districts school districts and cities reimburse us for election services for their general elections and that bump will occur in this fiscal year coming up

overall we are forecasting about a $1.1 million increase in expenses for fiscal year 2425 due to the presidential general election and our supplemental requests although a portion of our supplemental requests will be paid for with uh existing recorder trust funds and here's a slide that goes more into detail about what I just said an anticipated $990,000 increase in revenue for services rendered from the 2024 presidential general election $200,000 increase in expenses for temporary staffing cost

s $116,000 increase in service contract expenses and $121,000 increase in expenses for the election website redesign and for the expenses associated with supporting the Auburn satellite office and uh we're not asking for any new positions this year only to fill the currently funded positions that are vacant at this moment and as far as supplemental requests go we're looking to purchase some new equipment $20,000 to replace document scanners map scanners and other map plotters and recording Depar

tment uh uh equipment and $200,000 with $150,000 of that to come from the recorder's office trust funds to purchase additional servers and storage arrays so uh that's it for my presentation I got a little nervous when the sheriff came up uh thank you sir uh for being here uh Lisa Steve Melissa and I are prepared to answer any questions that you might have thank you okay board members questions yes supervisor guson thank you well first off compliments to the whole team I mean what an incredible i

n year and all the transition that you've handled so smoothly um I was interested how many because we've had kind of a variety of individuals provide testimony on concerns about election transparency and other things um how many observers did you have during the course of this primary I would say it was lower than in previous years I would say around 50 to 60 people came in we did have some groups that I'm counting as just one kind of body um uh but uh not as many people that came up to the coun

ter saying I just don't know if I can trust this and where we then spur the moment say to that person if you have a moment we'll take you back we would love to show you around and and explain what we do to protect the vote uh fewer of those people more um scheduled visits or recurring uh visits people that came multiple times to watch different uh activities uh um but uh it's always great and uh always a great time for me to tell people we really encourage that and we are more than happy to have

people come by to uh see what we do ask their questions and hopefully walk away with a better understanding and a and appreciation of the uh protections that we have in place for the vote well the individuals in when I was there um the individuals the staff the incredible work and and you know you know the the new facility and the transparency that provides as well but I did direct a few who question uh you know Integrity election integrity and uh to come by and I don't know if they took me up

on it but I'm glad to hear that some did and that your staff is so welcoming and transparent about everything they do and full of energy on uh election day that's sure thank you so much for all the compliments I really appreciate tremendous tremendous efforts and and work so thank you thank you and was this was the number one election for candidates for County Supervisors that's right many years I believe yeah it was uh I think we had just about as many uh back in boy it was 2012 is or something

it was when uh there were quite a number of candidates also in District 5 that year yeah and uh and it's yeah it's it was it was quite a number of candidates we um we appreciated it though because it makes things a little bit more exciting especially when um if you'll forgive the term the top of the ticket uh the the presidential contest didn't really have the same type of draw because a lot of people saw that as decided so it was nice to have uh some contested races in the supervisorial area s

o that it could drive some more turnout no it's it's great part of the de Democratic process so thank you you're bet thank you um supervisor Holmes uh thank you for your presentation I think in 2012 there was three Johnson's in a right that is correct that's right yeah thank you for the correction yeah 2012 that's right yeah so it's a little confusing to the voters um you said there's 11% of the electorate actually went to the voting centers yes I'm surprised I would think that you know people t

hat are afraid about their ballots not being counted that they would take them to the voting centers and process them there right I guess it's just too much trouble so they can just drop them off but actually on Election night uh when I was going back and forth from my home the line was lined up to put them in the box outside of the so anyhow was just surprised about that so do you expect that to raise yes we do um not because I again I I would agree with you I think that here I don't know if it

's because of plaster County or because of our transparency or just because people became a to it but before the pandemic we had almost 83 I think we had 83% of our voters signed up as permanent vote by mail voters and then the law changed to create Universal vote by mail and more people jumped on the bandwagon so I think people trust it here uh despite what we hear in in certain circles and and all that but uh what we've been seeing is a number of Voters taking the convenience of the vote by ma

ilbag ballot but also wanting to turn it in on the last day on Election Day and I think a lot of Voters don't understand that those ballots don't get counted on Election Day if you're just dropping it off in a box or dropping it off in my office uh or at a vote Center those are not being counted that evening so this turn to vote centers allowed for people to take that vote by mail ballot check in as if they were a poll voter and open that envelope so that they could have ballot scanned right the

re in front of them and the satisfaction of seeing that happen in front of you I think will only increase and I think more voters will take advantage of that which also conversely reduces the amount of ballots that we have to count post elction so I think it also increases people's feeling that oh okay more ballots are now in the system so more ballots are being have been counted so it's a win-win really for all of us I don't think that people are afraid of their vote by mail ballots not being c

ounted hopefully not because they feel like they can trust us but I do think that seeing it counted and the added benefit of us not having to count it after the election is a huge win for everybody right I voted by mail for years and the main reason I do is to make sure my wife votes for me serious there you go supervisor Landon uh no questions I just wanted to say I'm so excited that you guys are redoing your website I feel like it's maybe this is no offense to you personally Ryan but it's like

the online version of the domes I feel like I am so excited for you to be like you know more 20 first century even though I know it's only six years old but [Laughter] anyway I know I'm sorry I take that with the love that was intended that's right thank you so much it is time and uh there are uh features that we could incorporate that we need to incorporate and we we're looking forward to that and uh Steve will be working closely with all of you to uh make sure that we hear what you see out th

ere and that we can incorporate the same in ours thank you so Ryan I guess I will add on to all of that is that I think the voting centers were a huge success thank you and I know I've told a lot of people who inquired about them is how exciting it was that we can vote take your ballot out and vote right then and there and I think people were amazed because I was hearing back from folks like wow we could do that now so many people wait till the last minute to drop their mail in ballots off you k

now either up there where at the elections office but that was that was really really um a great thing that we did with the community and everybody thank you so much I'll may I add just a second uh on that the uh we had um in raw numbers it was around 15,000 uh voters who went into a vote Center and and cast a ballot that way uh and I mentioned 8,000 or so that actually took their ballot out of the envelope and and and were able to count it there about 63 6,400 that uh requested a traditional da

y of election ping Place ballot but the sen the as far as the breakdown um in when they came uh we want to get out to voters to let them know that these places are open some of them as as early as 11 days be well actually 10 days before the election or 11 days if you count election day uh we had about 4,000 of our voters of the 15,000 vote in the days before the election and 11,000 show up on Election Day and while that's great and we want everybody to participate uh we're we're mindful of the f

act that come November those will be some significant lines and so we're incorporating some ideas on how to be able to uh service people that want to just bring their vote by mail ballot uh with a special line like an Express 15 items or less line right and we're we're hoping to be able to incorporate that for November um and take some of the pressure off the other uh stations that need to check voters in and uh we hope to be able to be ready for what should be roughly double the amount of peopl

e who participated this election participating in November so that there you know there will be lines we're that's unavoidable but we want to try to make sure that people know we're we're addressing what we see are some concerns and making it better for November right right you so in addition to that I wanted to mention the folks that did go to the elections office to watch counting of ballots and the reports that I got back were they were very happy with the service that you provided that you k

ind of did some handholding and you know and help helping people with with that and so well I am single so yeah I'll grab a lot of a l a lot of handholding you did for everyone and a lot of compliments really on everything um I think it was great this is going to be a preview though of November that now that people realize those of us that did that you know had our ballots counted right then and there word is going to spread so you're right a whole bunch more mail and ballot folks are going to b

e coming there to have their votes counted absolutely so we want to be ready for that so and we appreciate hearing all these great stories we are um we're we want to constantly improve and uh hearing feedback uh about what we're doing right also helps us so we appreciate that and uh thank you very much for that we do think that the vote centers were uh um went very well we know internally some of the things that we want to fix and make better too but uh but really it was a very it was successful

and we're uh we have to tip our cap to not just these people that are here in front of you but the people that are that are the staff of the clerk recter Elections office uh were just dynamic they they saw issues they thought of solutions they worked just as hard as any of the people that are in front of you today uh to make sure that that was a successful election just so thank you yes and I agree I think personally I need to thank all of your staff behind the scene they've all been extremely

helpful and I'm sure as well to the other candidates you know that ran have been running and will continue to run the services is is wonderful and you've been very helpful to all of us but I still have more questions thank you no offene offline yes absolutely Madam chair I had one more comment if I could if you're done um I just I was negligent in in you know the old adage about the postal service neither rain nor snow or sleep well those election workers at the voter centers in Tahoe over that

weekend oh my gosh and hats off to them and one of my sons did go and vote on one of those days I said oh you should go down today I bet they're not busy and they applauded him when he walked in the door and you know I just I think it is amazing the dedication that that took and you know our county is diverse and so thank you for the efforts there absolutely you're so welcome thank you for mentioning that because I should have probably mentioned that it was such an exciting time with all that sn

owfalling and uh we were we were nervous right that things wouldn't open but every vote Center did open uh and uh even the Ala Center which was dealing with Fallen trees and uh no power but thankfully uh because this is a community that conducts an election not just my office but the sheriff sh's office OES uh libraries uh all everybody just jumps in and helps us be able to conduct elections we did have um a generator on uh standby there at that location so we could be able to power that up we h

ad Sheriff's Office giving us uh um uh uh ferrying us to locations our people so that they could be there on time to service people and of course the people of Tahoe are so hearty they were not going to let that snow stop them from getting there to work so we did have a problem getting ballots over the hill and so some of our ballots did have to spend the night in jail I don't know if you know that but I knew that but I don't know if they all knew that we we had some ballots because of Don pass

just being so snowed over uh that we could not get the ballots over the hill Sheriff's Office thought it was just a little too dangerous to do that and so we literally put the jail the ballots behind bars for the evening and I kept them there until we could be able to safely get over the hill collect them and bring them back and it we have a picture of them literally sitting in ja uh you know but it was great and just the Partnerships that we have we're just very blessed here in pler County to t

hey everybody realizes how important this job is and they know that I can't do it all by myself and so we're lucky to have everybody jump in and help so thank you well thank you very much Ryan for your report thank you to all your team that's here as well as your team that's behind the scenes that have been of service to all of us thank you so much sh johon appreciate it okay thank you thank you okay we're GNA move on to the assessor's office Welcome Matt there you go take the did Ryan leave his

phone Ryan is that your phone well we'll turn the volume up for you good good afternoon and welcome yeah good afternoon good afternoon everybody how are you yes you guys have you guys have made it I no heard that is yeah leave it on it looks great would you like me to take it off hey uh thank you everybody for uh allowing us to be here Madam chair and members of the board it's always great to uh see you um we have a little presentation here to go over our budgets and I know that you've had a ve

ry busy day and have another one tomorrow um so I will try to get right into it it's always very difficult to follow uh the incomparable Ryan Ronco um but I will do my best to to do that um so first I just like to go over uh our office is split up into five different um divisions really um uh the bulk of the work is done in our appraisal and assessment um teams but we do have the um support groups as well that also play a major part in our office and some of our accomplishments um in the last ye

ar that uh we're we're really proud of um we actually the last tax R it was the first time that plaster County exceeded the 100 billion dollar Mark um so that just shows how much our County continues to grow um and that we are not as you've heard from other uh people we're not a small County anymore and we're starting to really face some of the issues and and problems and challenges um that some of the larger counties do have um the other thing that we've been we began working with proest and As

sociates um to remap the county uh we we went before your board last year and and received approval to actually remap the entirety of plaster County from the ground up from scratch um so that that is looking at creating the most accurate and detailed maps um that would be available um it it it really was time to upgrade our GIS abilities and pler County um and it it was also imperative that we get ahead of this growth that we all know is coming to the West plaster area the most accurate Maps wil

l really Aid everybody with that um development and growth from the constituents that we have out in the public and the development Community to our staff here in on plaster County as well the other thing that we'd like to talk about is we also launched the property tax portal so this was an idea accelerator winner from uh a little while ago that somebody in my office had presented um and actually won with and it's a collaborative effort between uh my office the tax collector's office and the au

ditor's office um to create kind of a One-Stop shop for everybody U to to come and and answer all of their questions or take care of all of their property tax needs and it has taken some time to put that together we did soft launch that um in January February we haven't done um a major announcement yet because we wanted to put it out there and try to see how it's working um and if there's any issues that we need to address before we start hammering it with everybody but this allows people to to

do the common things that they often go to all of our websites for whether it's looking for property information or whether they want to pay their tax bill online um there's there's just a lot of different things that they can do all under one link instead of having to jump between our offices which as I I I don't know about you but very um frustrating for me when I have to go do that um with with some of the other uh State offices I guess um so we're we're very happy with that moving on to some

of the emerging issues and our priorities the big thing that is overreaching to all assessors offices in every county in the state is the administration of the recently enacted proposition 19 um so that's the Intercounty baser transfer law as well as the intergenerational transfers of of property between family members it's it's created a huge administrative burden on every assessor's office in the state but ours I think is actually impacted the most as far as value so there are other counties

that have more proposition 19 um requests than we do like La obviously um but they have uh the vast majority is taking the Bayer value out of their County um and so they're getting to enroll full market value on a purchase price um when a Property Transfers in their County in our County um people are bringing their low bassare values into plaster County when they buy new homes here because people want to live uh in plaster County so um they're leaving some of the other counties and they are brin

ging those low values with them here so um I do have some numbers to kind of share with you because I figured that you would probably be interested in that um so the the proposition 19 law went into effect April 1st of 2021 um the the majority of it anyways there was another portion that that went active in in February of 21 um but since Inception we have had 2,269 people use a Prop 19 um exclusion on their transfer but of those 22 69 59 of them um have taken um their values out of plaster Count

y so the rest of that is people that are bringing their lower base share values into plaster County and so that has impacted us quite a bit um as far as uh value on the tax role so we are showing a deficit since Inception of $677 million um and change off the property tax role so it we are feeling it um it it it it's not devastating because we are able to offset some of that with some of the new growth construction that we've seen um in the South plaster area but um it is a huge administrative b

urden on my office to the point that we've had to create a separate division that just does proposition 19s so um there are five count that the majority of people that are coming into our County um so they are from Sacramento Santa Clara contracosta Alam and San Mato counties those are the top five so people people want to live in plaster County and with the new you know work from home abilities and some of the offices actually closing they're able to do that and so they they'd rather work from

home and plaster um another thing that we continue to to be challenged with is just the amount of assessment activity in the South plaster area um they're they're growing at a huge rate um and that does put a big burden on our office as we have to assess um we have to process the um the splits of the maps the partiel splits we have to process the transfers of the Lots we have to process the new constructions of the homes and then The Ultimate Sales of those homes into the secondary market and ea

ch one of those phases is something that we have to be uh that we touch and have to put a value on at those different phases and the third thing that is going to be a challenge for us um is the ongoing mapping project so this is a a four-year project of that remap I talked about it is going to strain our resources and we're going to have to have some staff that dedicate some of their time to this project um we're in the the planning phases right now so it's very difficult um to um to to know exa

ctly what that's going to do or how that's going to impact Us and how many people um but we do know that that is something that we do need to plan for and moving on to the next slide are some of our objective on our performance measures um the objective number one uh it's always going to be our number one objective uh because that is what I am statutorily required to do and that is to to accurately And Timely complete the annual and supplemental property tax roles um so that's that's the majorit

y of that's why we exist so that is always going to be something that that is our Target is to get that done timely so that we don't have things go um fall fall uh behind on that the second thing we have is the expansion modernization of GIS mapping systems we've talked about that that is an on Ong goinging thing that we're going to be tracking and we're always looking to um enhance our customer service and our web presence um and allowing access to the public um we' we've created a lot of forms

we we're continuing to update uh those forms to people can sign them electronically um and so it also as as as Mr Ronco mentioned it is kind of hard to kind of put a uh measure or or what are some of the measure points that you would do on that um but um they are on this slide I won't I won't put you to sleep with them as well for tracking those as they go by moving into more of the actual dollars and cents behind the budget I wanted to take a minute and uh introduce Ashley Gabriel who's my adm

inistrative and fiscal officer and um she'll be able to go over uh some of those things for you and um we I will turn it over to Ashley hello good afternoon new at this good afternoon um so on the slide our operating um expenditures budget is um 19 mil 79,000 um 80% of that is our salaries and benefits um with 18% of it being our services and supplies um operating expenses there and then we have about 2% in our a87 costs and no Capital expenditures um our Revenue and expense comparison uh we hav

e you can see our revenues remained flat I'm happy to report that as of today um our actuals are higher than our budgeted so that's good for this year but you know with the fluctuating real estate market it's hard to see ahead of ahead of time to see what we're going to be looking at for 2425 and then our major variances we have our 93 increase in our professional and special services for our it and majority of that is due to our um contract with proest for our mapping project and then we also h

ave a million decrease um for the assessment and tax collection fees Revenue again that's just due to our fluctuating real estate market uh for 2425 we're sticking at 87 um employees and now we have three vacancies that we're hoping to fill with this next year and we're happy to say that we have no supplemental requests for 2425 thank you for that Ashley U is there if we we'd love to take any questions if you have them okay board members supervisor guest Citi in thank you madam chair um Matt gre

at job Ashley thank you um it's nice not to have a supplemental request takes one we get to check one box we the first today first today um but I did have a a question if you don't mind going back to the revenue and expense chart because your revenues are how are those derived that that you're actually down below where you were in 2122 um yeah so I'll try my best to to answer that U the revenue that we actually you know the revenue that we get is actually a reimbursement of administrative costs

right to administer the supplemental role and and tax role and so that does fluctuate very much with the real estate market and so you know the the 22 and 23 years uh were a big boom um as far as the real estate market in plaster County and then this last year um it's it has slowed and that's the interest rates have gone up people just simply they don't want to sell their home um because they have a lower interest rate loan already on the home that they own and if they were to sell that and buy

a new home they would have to take on that that interest rate at a much higher rate so we've seen a slow as far as like secondary and third you know uh sell sales of of existing homes but the the New home builds are holding fairly strong but but that's why there's that that fluctuation that doesn't seem to Trend with anything else other than I guess the real market and it's also I I think you I think I mentioned this last year but uh it's not good for us to charge people to tax them so so we don

't have uh we don't have expenses that we that we pass on to the public to actually assess them uh we figure they're probably paying enough property taxes as it as it is great well with the additional workload and not to have any supplemental requests again this year I just appreciate that but um I know that that that Prop 19 is and and just the number of questions we respond to it I'm sure other uh offices do as well with constituents trying to use it trying to figure out a way to use it how ca

n we take advantage of it and uh it's significant impact and it will continue on and grow so and and that is the problem with Prop 19 or I guess challenge with Prop 19 is um you know there's the initial savings when the base sh value is transferred but then and every subsequent year it it just exponentially increases and we have to track every one of those until the Prop 19 is no longer uh the property is no longer eligible for the Prop 19 which which could be in into perpetuity right because it

could continue as a generational property right correct well it's a significant impact and I don't know if any other counties or other assessors offices are talking about this with the legislature was it anticipated to make this profound an impact and well and that was the the law did pass and that it took some time um it passed with no administrative rules of of how it would be implemented it was the idea was passed it was voted on it narrowly uh was voted in um by the citizens of the State of

California and then they were kind of like okay now we have this thing how are we gonna actually administer it and that's usually a a a challenging way to actually pass laws is has been my experience um and then that just gets forced on to uh the Board of Equalization and the assessor offices to try to figure out what makes sense and so there's been different iterations of okay here are the rules of how we're going to do this and then as soon as they get those published people go well what abou

t this case and what about this and this is a weird one and you didn't think about this and then they go back to the drawing board and come up with some new rules and then again it's yeah but you still haven't addressed this or this one and so it is a a evolving and constantly changing way um that we're trying to deal with these um strange transfers that you know every one of them is unique and so to try to put them all in the box is is what everyone is finding has been very challenging well I r

eally appreciate your staff's um support and diligence and trying to respond to these issues that come up and you know your professionalism and dealing with it because it's it's a unintended consequence right of somebody's Grand idea but we earlier today talked a little bit with the sheriff about some legislative issues that we should consider uh weighing in on at times uh and if this is another one if you hear of some efforts in other areas where we could weigh in let us know to help support yo

u yeah thank you uh and I will definitely do that um I know that the California assessors Association has um you know is always concerned with this and is trying to come up with kind of a United effort as well to to address some of the the challenges we're all facing um it's you know the the one thing I would like to say is um you know my the staff in my office uh the way that they've handled this challenge has just been um amazing to watch um and so there's no way that we could have done this w

ithout the amazing people that we have in that office it's definitely not me I mean it's it's our staff so I want to give a huge thank you to them well they deserve it thank you and your leadership thank you thank you supervisor board thank you Matt appreciate uh your presentation and just a quick question for you about vacancies you said you have three vacancies I'm curious as to um what those positions are I know everyone's struggling with hiring um higher level folks actually probably any lev

el folks it's a challenge so I'm just curious what the position openings you have are thank you Ashley had this for me so that was it's very nice U we have a a vacant it technician uh position and that's after a retirement an appraiser one two which is an entry level appraiser position and my chief deputy assessor who retired um so that's a that's a big hole Yeah that we currently have all right thank you very much thank you other questions okay I guess it's my turn then so thank you very much f

or your presentation um going back to Prop 19 our favorite subject how many times can uh a party transfer their tax base is it each person can do it three times in their life and so if you are a married couple you can do it six times so so that means for each person in a marriage both husband and wife gets three times to transfer that that's kind of crazy wow that's a lot so you yeah essentially you can get your you know there there there are requirements um with age and things but you know afte

r 55 your base your base value is basically your base value forever and I mean unless you move seven times I there's some people that do that I guess I can't imagine trying to move I look at the stuff I have in my house and I yeah do not tell my husband that I don't know I'm like or me wow I can move it's kind of amazing though really that people can come up from the Bay Area and have a lower tax base than you would get here in a new home probably primarily because they've been down there 30 40

or more years yes it's it's very common that they're selling their homes down there at a huge gain um and then transferring that low base up here and they can buy a substantial home up here right and get that L very easily qualify because of how much they were able to sell their initial home for is there a limit to how much you can there is there isn't a limit but it's um it's it's a very complicated it would be very complicated to try to explain it but you basically anything that's over and abo

ve gets added on to the base that you are transferring okay okay well that's clear as mud but and we have to track that difference too forever and report that that's amazing to me so this Prop 19 has created an extra burden for you to keep track of absolutely these things and the and the GIS mapping is the other thing that I was curious about how long is the total duration from start to finish to to doing all the maps in the entire County I believe that the estimate is four years so because ther

e's there are so many uh assessors parcel maps that have to be redrawn and remapped we right now we've actually just finished uh phase one which is the figuring out the uh requirements for the project so that's getting our our hands on all of the recorded documents um that the county has in its possession that we have um anything that we might be able to find from the federal government or the state government as far as points on the map that are good points that everyone has agreed that this is

a a very accurate point point and we have completed that and so now they're beginning to actually map the first area which would be a pilot area so they've tried to find an area in the county that they thought would be a great representation that has a little bit of everything and then we'll have to figure out as issues come up how we're going to address that and then that would be the standard that we're going to um work across the entire entirety of the project so do you think since you're ju

st starting the mapping part you've done all the pre-planning for it it's going to take about four years from now I believe so yes okay that's hopefully faster but and and hopefully not longer well Matt I say you're doing a great job as the as the department chair and and um in light of all that extra work from Prop 19 and the gis remapping you too have taken on an extra load like several of the other department departments so um good luck with that and we would like to thank you all for your pr

esentation and your time I have one real quick last question um does this it applies within the county too right you can trans Prop 19 you can you can transfer within the county not just Intercounty right yes okay yep thanks yeah they change the law so that you can transfer it to any county in the state before there was before you had to actually the Board of Supervisors had to approve um that you would accept people bringing in their Bayer values um and plaster County was not a participating Co

unty at that time because at the end that was a one time only deal formerly before this law yes yeah one time you could only transfer one time yeah okay well thank you again thank you very much and have a great afternoon thank you you're welcome okay moving on to our next we're going to have the treasure tax collector welcome Tristan all right Madam chair is they're switching out I might note that all of our electeds are wearing red ties That and Andy's back there that's right you guys the Power

House of uh County operations right without you guys we wouldn't operate it be better if we had planned that but apparently not Daniel you're missing out on your tie today I wouldn't say I'm missing good afternoon chair honorable board uh thank you for having us Tristan butcher Plastic County treasur Tax Collector uh we're going to walk you through our B budget presentation uh let me start by saying thank you to the CEO's office for working with us on putting this presentation together and provi

ding some of the information and we will just kind of cruise on through it uh here is a breakdown of the office uh are major divisions treasury cash flow uh obviously making sure that there's enough funds available for not just the county but the school district Special Districts fire districts to meet all of their obligations uh Bond Administration for uh the county uh also our jpas that have um issued bonds and then cfds throughout the county uh Investments that's where we're investing the fun

ds in the County Treasury um to provide a rate of return uh to the constituents in the treasury tax collection obviously you guys understand property tax collection and then Revenue Services this is new for 2425 uh and we will get into that and just a little bit there's a I guess a sixth bubble here that we're not really including uh but it's really Special Districts and jpas um we do a lot of work with them we're involved with them in all a lot of different levels um and so they do take up uh s

ome time in the office and we do have staff that work directly with them regularly our accomplishments for the past year um we managed the property tax volume of a$ 1.3 billion tax charge uh over 235,000 bills uh there shouldn't be a dollar sign there uh that's 235,000 printed bills uh that we've mailed out that includes supplement Al and secured um that went out and our unsecured bills uh we manage all as aspects of the treasury portfolio this past year our high point was 2.7 billion as we head

into the property tax due date on April 10th uh we're looking at probably surpassing $3 billion um we launched our new userfriendly website I know that sounds odd but from the tax collector's um point of view the goal is is to make it as easy as possible for taxpayers to pay their property tax bill so we limited it as many clicks as possible so that way that the taxpayers can get to pay their bill without having to sort through our website um we also developed and deployed an online annual debt

disclosure training uh we previewed that last year we launched it uh to um people throughout the county different uh Financial uh management members throughout the county and they're able to take their annual debt disclosure training with the help of HR online at their Leisure so that way it's a little bit more flexible this year we are going to be launching it for the board members as the time uh during board meetings has now uh had such a premium that we feel that it's easier and more benefic

ial for you guys to be able to take that uh at your leisure when it's better for you and so that way that we're not taking up time during during board meetings and making it a little easier to get the training done um since you're all busy it provides a little bit more flexibility emerging issues and departmental priorities um so we'll Circle back to the Revenue Services uh the internal audit division of the auditor's office completed an internal audit they made a recommendation to the CEO and m

yself uh to transfer the Revenue Services Division under the treasure tax collector's office um in the entire State we were the only County that had our to collection outside of the treasure tax collector's office um so we're feel we feel like we're aligning it with the other treasure Tax Collectors we're providing uh Revenue Services the opportunity to be able to communicate with other track treasur Tax Collectors um share resources and um it should provide a a a stronger office and give employ

ees more of an opportunity to move up within the same field uh so in the long term I think that this is going to be very beneficial to both the Revenue Services Division and the treasur tax collector's office we also have possible County lease financings that are coming up uh maybe the crime lab Burton Creek they look like they're on the horizon we also have enhanced infrastructure Finance District formation uh that's coming before your board next week I believe as a for your consideration and i

f that moves forward that will be uh an increase in workload in my office to help pull that stuff together along with cedra and the CEO's office we also have the development of major cfds uh like everybody else has talked about growth here in plaster County it's growing everywhere and um we have the Bold program which handles the majority of infill cfds um but major projects are being taken inhouse and and they're either starting in cedra or they're starting in the treasur tax collector's office

uh and we kind of work with the different departments to bring them through the formation process and before they come to your board uh so as these projects kick off uh plaster Commerce Center had its first meeting last week plaster one I think is scheduled in a few weeks to start the kickoff process of forming these cfds objectives and performance measures um our objective ensuring the responsible collection management and investment of public funds uh that's strategic plan priority of the boa

rd is The Prudent and comprehensive financial planning uh the performance measures these are all statutory requirements uh that are required by the office uh for my position so we either meet or exceed all of those targets our operating expenditures budget makes up majority of it we have no Capital expenditures budget required for this year or requests a revenue and expense comparison uh you can see that our expenses are growing we'll go over that in just a little bit uh revenues are staying pre

tty flat overall uh you see a little bit of a uh a jump up in 22 23 uh where we actually increased and that was due to the new um short-term rentals business licenses that were acquired that year last year those were no longer required so you see a dip in our projected revenues of 23 24 I think we are outpacing our current Revenue projection um and we're looking for a modest increase in Revenue projection for next year uh $550,000 increase uh are other fees and charges $440,000 increase salary a

nd employee benefits just like everyone else and then an $80,000 increase to our a87 charges Staffing this is a little bit misleading just in the sense that uh it looks like we lost two positions from 2223 through 2324 those were ow positions from um the program and during the wind down those positions were not filled we just closed out those positions um so we've been holding steady at 32 positions we have four vacancies currently we have no supplemental requests for the fiscal year 2425 with t

hat I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have okay board members questions supervisor G thank you very much appreciate it Tristan um first of all I want to say thank you um actually wrong Department but I do have um one quick question and that is um and I don't know if we've moved forward with this you know California State Association of counties has that opportunity where um people can pay their tax bill online in a much reduced rate um and didn't know if we've had an opportunity to ta

lk through the issues we had with those folks and look at implementing that that program if it makes sense I'm still talking with uh I believe it's Chase over there and um there's still running into the same issues that they have been uh they haven't been able to make any Headway on that and once those issues are resolved that might be something we can offer but at this point it's been about a year and they still haven't been able to to fix those issues um would you have a CH a chance offline ma

ybe share with me what those are I'd like to be able to maybe sure approach it from a different way that would be helpful okay great interest supervisor Landon thank you I have one kind of random question so uh do you see um blockchain or crypto anything in that realm being in the future of the treasurer's office um maybe in the Far Far distant future when things have changed greatly but at this point I I don't see it they fluctuate so quickly their their values if we accepted it say today in a

tax payment based on certain value it could change before we have a chance to exchange it into Dollars um so I don't I don't see that currently yeah okay thank you supervisor guson um thank you and thanks for the great work it's a pleasure working with your office and getting all the answers I need like that thank you um I agree you know and support fully support the transition of the to revenues to you it it was never clear why we we had two different departments you know collecting tax dollars

and it was hard to track you know calling different departments for sales tax data and then transi and occupancy tax data trying to put together that full picture so it makes a lot of sense and um sure it will do well under your leadership um thank you I know we got rid of Empower for certain projects but we have had interest from some homeowners at looking at a home hardening opportunities or other types of opportunities that you know financing could help people stay in their homes longer beca

use they can't control the insurance rates and some of the burden of replacing roofs and some of the other work I don't know if there's other methodology or or thoughts behind that if other counties are doing that um uh I know we have unique circumstances always in plaster with so many people living in the wooi and and needing those services but i' be open to hearing about that in the future not to put more workload on you but maybe you get a couple positions back if you needed them um just so t

hat we could um consider whether that is U something that might make sense it's definitely something I I can Circle back with you on y thank you okay and so I'm curious as far as our residents paying their taxes are their property taxes do we have a delinquency rate or how's how's that going with the we're not seeing anything that's out of the norm um just a reminder property tax due date April 10th is coming up yep throwing it out there thank you heads are due the 15th pay your property tax on

April 10th so you don't get a penalty um we're not noticing anything out of the norm at this point uh we did um the State started a program during uh covid that was um a property tax assistance program where they actually helped people pay their their payments for property taxes that were way behind because of covid uh it's something we really pushed really hard through the office to get out to people that were having a tough time it's been very successful for the county uh to keep people curren

t on their payments that program is is expected to come to a close in the next month or two um so at this point our delinquency rate hasn't changed okay so I was thinking that um regarding the incentive program is is that something we don't really need because we don't need to incentivize people to be timely with their taxes paying their taxes or uh which part is that that that incentive that Bonnie was talking about where you could get a discounted rate for paying your taxes online or or anythi

ng like that that was actually that's a monthly payment installment okay instead of plan instead of just making the two payments yeah okay you could also put it in your house escrow yeah and that that's what we commonly see right that's that's a large majority of those um payments are done through the escrow that's the easy no-brainer method yeah um okay well I think that uh you guys are also suffering from some additional workload on on you guys as well and we appreciate you're being able to ch

arge through it and uh that's part of what I think is really good about the way we're we've planned this this year so we know about workloads and and everything and how how you're dealing with it and that we're busy just like everybody else we're bouncing all over the place um we're working to fill vacancies we're restructuring where we need to restructure with inside of the office um we've got some legislative challenges coming uh that are working their way through the Senate that could restruc

ture a portion of the land sales so um we're trying to be as proactive as possible in the office um to make sure that we're able to to accomplish those what ways are they looking to restructure land sales just curious so chapter eight uh which is a a land sale where we would be selling to a nonprofit uh organization uh they're looking at making it so that we have to go through a chapter seven typical land sale which has an increased costs uh to the land sale and then you'd be able to go through

the chapter eight and then there's some other things that they're looking at doing with the chapter eights where we would actually have to take any of the excess proceeds that aren't claimed and transfer them directly to the state well that's a whole bunch of extra steps there's a few things there so uh we've got our challenges and we're working our way through them trying to be proactive well thank you very much for your time and your presentation and thanks to all your staff as well because yo

u have a big engine behind you we do keeping keep very thankful for the staff and I I failed to mention Katie kale is our administrative fiscal operations manager yes to and she handles all of the budget and so well thank thank you for that thanks again trusty have a great afternoon okay so we are ready for you Andy auditor controller welcome let me see there you good afternoon chair Jones down the chairs we haven't had that microphone on all day I don't members of the board Karen Daniel Andy SE

S your county auditor controller uh thank you for allowing me time to present our budget I always like to refer to our department as the non- sexi department because we're just numbers driven uh it's a very boring budget and if you just go back to last year it's almost like a replay of last year's budget so with further Ado I will jump right into it uh we can maybe jump to the next slide it talks about the two cost centers that are in my office we've got the auditor controllers call center uh an

d we also have the workday support org um for those that thank you there we go Tristan doesn't have any supplemental request um so the auditor controllers uh budget uh basically is funded by the general fund uh then we've got the workday support organization which is an internal service fund where we charge our cost out to all the users and I want to reinforce we also charge our Special Districts and jpas about 5 to 10% of the support organizations cost some of our accomplishments um and they're

lengthy uh this last year uh again we attended and continued the Outreach to colleges and universities uh we attended career fairs at William Jessup University California State University of Sacramento uh we were going to go to university of Nevan Rino but it snowed so we weren't able to get up over the summit uh to do UNR but they've got a good a business administration program there uh we've been out and had meetings with Sierra College we've been talking to their faculty uh we're going to ne

ed a little more assistance from HR to kind of push forward maybe some kind of internship program with Sierra College in a partnership with them uh to continue to build on some of the work I'm doing at sack State uh we attended the meet the firms event this is where accounting students get a chance to meet firms and usually it's the accounting firms but they get an opportunity not only to talk to counties but the state controller's office Franchise Tax Board to name a few I also had the opportun

ity to speak twice to the beta Alpha saai group and the accounting Society so getting my foot in the door and talking to students a little bit more about what we do in plaster County and more importantly what we do in the accounting area not just in my office but we talk about accounting countywide if you don't get on a position in my office you can go work for the sheriff because they need accounts I think I saw Morgan had a need for a senior accountant at the District Attorney's Office earlier

today uh and then we also participated in Youth and government uh that's a program that's being sponsored by HR uh pler High School uh was the high school chosen we did two tours and we actually concluded the tour in the treasurer's Vault uh so we included Tristan in the the tour that was done with the students and I think they got a little kick out of getting into the Vault and seeing uh what was in the vault in the Treasure tax collector's office we work very closely with the treasure tax col

lector's office probably why we all dress the same right um we provided extensive Education and Training to our County users uh I took the leadership role provided four individual sessions on governmental accounting budgeting and Reporting and workday I also did a special training uh with HHS to talk about revenue and expenditure recognition I also rolled that same class out to all County uh uh employees on revenue and expenditure recognition my staff are also taking a leadership role I got my g

eneral accounting manager who's providing yearend A supplier contract role forward and you may think what is all that about well that's just rolling the contracts over from fiscal year to fiscal year once you enter into a contract and you don't expend all the funds you roll that contract into the next fiscal year so we provided some training on that process because it's a very timeconsuming tedious process but very important because you got to get the numbers right I have my financial reporting

team that's going to be providing some specialized training on Capital assets at the end of April Capital assets are things like equipment land Buildings Construction and progress and then along with our external Auditors and myself and my internal audit manager we conducted some single audit training uh the third bullet successful financial and internal audits uh we're definitely proud of the fact that we're now 22 years running of excellence and financial reporting for our audit annual compreh

ensive financial report uh we're also proud that we get the achievement of Excellence for Western pler Waste Management Authority I'll be making a presentation on Thursday to that jpa board to talk about that accomplishment uh We've conducted a number of I think successful internal audits uh one of which you just heard about uh was the wrapping up of Revenue Services and the recommendation that Revenue Services Division move in to the treasur tax collector's office uh we also did some extensive

audits in with the purchasing department uh some of the outcomes of that I think will come to fruition in fiscal 2526 uh that's a little teaser but we'll see how that plays out over the course of this fiscal year there's also been a number of department head changes so in ter aice is very involved with the DPW Department had changed the cedra department had changed and more recently the HR department changed so that keeps internal lot is pretty busy and last but not least uh we provide outstandi

ng customer service to the public our Special Districts and jpa uh I thought I'd take an opportunity to share some of the training I do with some of my staff I know last year I got in front of the board and talked about dependent Special Districts and independent Special Districts well now I'm going to take it a step further and talk talk about what's the difference between an independent special district and a jpa so with an independent special district you have a separate governing body it's e

lected by the public jpas are different because they're not elected boards they are appointed by other bodies and you must have two government entities to form a jpa and many of you know because you serve on some of those jpas uh but please keep in mind jpas are not elected they are appointed by members of the city councils or your your Board of Supervisors and you assign them to work or to be on the board of that jpa I thank my staff all the time uh they again provide excellent service and I kn

ow what really resonates with them is when they get that type of acknowledgement so thank you supervisor Gore for the email you sent uh to my financial reporting manager on the job well done for Golden Sierra job training agency that's just one sliver of the great work that my team does uh I know I don't have my afo here L lips Meer does a great job putting our budgets together for both the workday support org and the auditor controller's office and I've have to of course mention my assistant au

ditor controller Nicole Howard they're just very shy they don't want to come present with me so they'll let me do all the heavy lifting so that's our accomplishments emerging issues Department priorities uh the number one priority for me right now is returning the county to a low-risk audit status and this is why we and I am getting out training departments we continue to have material weaknesses um in our financial statements and so anytime there's a material weakness it triggers us into this h

igh-risk audit status uh there's only so much I can do but I am doing all I can do to again try to educate train our users so that we don't miss material misstatements and are audited financial statements when the auditor give an opinion they are given an opinion the financial statements are free of material misstatement so that is our primary goal if you sit on the plaster conservation Authority board you will notice they are a high-risk audite but for a different reason they this is the first

time they've had a single audit actually the first time they've been audited as a jpa but they had Federal grant funding so if it's the first time you've ever been audited with a Federal grant program you're automatically deemed highrisk by the federal government just as an FY keeping up with the demand for accounting and auditing service from County department Special Districts and jpas uh this is why last year we had two supplemental requests to try to keep up with the workload that keeps comi

ng our way Lis Western plaster waste plaster conservation Authority now SSV EMS which is Sierra Sacramento Valley Emergency Medical Services Supervisor homes sits on that jpa board why are these jpas important they all must keep their money in the County Treasury unless they decide to do what Pioneer community energy dead and hire their own treasur so because they're in the treasury indirectly I'm impacted because then I must cut their checks their warrants this is what's happening with our fire

districts we are now bringing in South plaster file plaster Hills fire New Castle fire and we're currently working with Forest Hill fire to bring them all into the County Treasury as well and then conversely they'll be using the workday application then we've got our Cemetery districts and our Cemetery districts are struggling um they don't have a lot of resources and one area they struggle is to find Auditors uh Taho City Cemetery still cannot find a firm to do their audit uh kofax Cemetery I

was the one that did their last five-year audit through June 30 2019 they're going to need another fiveyear audit for through June 30224 and I'm sure Nancy hagman's going to come knocking on my door saying Andy could you do our audit again but that takes away resources from my internal audit division where we'd like to be going out in auditing departments but this is the reality of it I am going to work with our new CPA firm we have a new CPA firm uh starting with us in May and I'm going to see

if they could tackle Tahoe City Cemetery so I don't have to go out and do their audit but if I can't get them to do it then I will have to go out and do their audit because pursuant to government code I need to make sure they're audited every year or in intervals as defined by government code 269 9 employee Recruitment and Retention uh we're doing much better in this area we still have a couple vacant positions to fill uh we're constantly looking at the job specs uh I've been taking a leadership

role being a subject matter expert from many of these job specs starting with the executive secretary that got converted to an executive assistant I'm finally looking at supervising accountant auditor uh we've been looking at our analyst series primarily in the work support org but also could we have analyst positions in the auditor controller's office and we now have a property tax analyst and we're doing a study in the payroll division along the same lines I know the next step for classificat

ion and comp studies I know we just did managers and that came before your board recently I know the next wave will be our professional staff which I have a vested interest in because that's senior accountants accountants senior Auditors um and I'm hoping that we will Outsource that work as opposed to keeping that work inhouse because I know the management comp study classification study was done inhouse I think it' be better use of our resources to Outsource that work but that'll be a decision

our new HR Director will need to make last uh Su succession planning um continuity of operations is really important to me uh I've said it before I think we're one of the model departments that really pride ourselves on succession planning this is why I'm asking for certain positions below my manager so when my managers do decide to retire we've got someone that can step in and I think our office is viewed as experts uh people come to our office because of the expertise whether it's Nicole Howar

d who's the expert on the teep which is a travel employee expense policy uh we get bombarded questions property taxes it goes without saying it's a very complicated process uh people come to us and rely on our expertise in that area the work continues to get more complex it's more analytical uh heard Morgan talking earlier I kind of wrote this down uh things take more time things are more complex I I can't agree more and I and I don't have any supplemental requests I mean I know he's asking for

some Deputy District Attorneys you have the sheriff asking for lieutenants uh I just know the work continues to flow up the pyramid up the org chart and it flows up to my level and uh and I why I enjoy my work and I enjoy doing things I want to be able to take time off um so again succession planning is very important and that's what we're seeing even though we have technology it's made us more efficient it requires more analysis of the data so you don't have people punching in things that you d

id in the early 2000s late 90s where you're doing key punching and looking at paper now those positions are at a higher level require more analytical type skills which is why we're looking at having more analysts in our office people want IM mediate answers I mean it's just amazing you get an email you get a request and it's like can you respond to me like right away and if you don't respond within 30 minutes they're calling somebody else in my office trying to get an answer uh but that's the wo

rld we live in I will close um again thanking the board for the two positions I received last year I know as I move forward to the slides cu these are just a bunch of numbers yeah my you know my whole budget is salary driven so the increase in salaries is primarily as a result of the two positions the the board granted to me last year and then we also have an increase in our audit Services contract going out to bid for a new audit firm uh as I mentioned we're high-risk auditees so there's more F

ederal grant programs that need to be audited so that's the reason for the increases there and then our positions are at 58 they were at 58 and 2324 so uh this is just the way the budgetary process is kind of working right now but we've did fill those two positions and they're both filled and actively working on Special Districts and jpas and it's great to have a dedicated internal audit manager as well because that took up some workload off of myself and Nicole um and last but not least I I do

want to thank the board for recognizing the importance of having uh the CPA designation for elected officials uh this is something um and I wish my prior boss could she's watching uh 20 years in the making we've been trying to to get the elected officials pay for CPA incentive uh I've said all along this was never about Andy this was about the position and I've got six or seven CPAs in my office and I'm hoping one of them will raise their hand and succeed me in the future with that I'd be happy

to answer any questions you might have okay supervisor Holmes thank you chair uh thank you Andy as you know I've been on the audit committee since in deception back in when Kathleen Martinez was here and uh she sought me out for some reason I don't know anyhow I really enjoy uh getting those updates about what's going on in the county and important work that you do to make sure everything is above board and that they're accountable and I've got a shout out to Cole Howard for her exceptional work

uh and so I just want to thank you for uh the work that you do and your office does and again it's comforting to me to be able to sit on that and understand what's going on so thank you thank you supervisor Holmes supervisor Gore thank you Andy for your update and I I just want to say how much I appreciate the work you and your team do with the jpas and Special Districts and I know just of late right two jpa a new one and then another one sort of changing our model um and and having you there t

o help give us the dire about how to do this well is been very helpful so I appreciate that I know it's a lot of extra work and then at the same time U we we need your services to do the work that we're doing with the jpa so it's just really appreciated thank you Bonnie supervisor guson I just wanted to Echo what they've said Andy your team and your attitude to addressing this no one ever wants to hear the word audit right and yet your office approaches it in such a great manner and really tryin

g to be helpful to the various issues you take on and appreciate that professionalism and honesty and cander you always give me your opinion um and I value that I I value that very much so thank you thank you Cindy supervisor Landon I will also Echo what my colleagues have said um especially what Bonnie mentioned with the with Lisa and with the landfill Authority I know that those are um big heavy lifts so we really appreciate your work and I also just want to say you do have amazing staff that

are super approachable always willing to answer questions and um that's really a reflection on you as a manager I would say because um they do a great job and so uh thank you for all of your work thank you supervisor land and Andy I would like to say um that you're doing a great job um but you mentioned the tour of the treasure tax collector I want to see what's in the vault in the Treasure tax collector when are we getting our when are we getting our tour anyway it's kind of but um and I'm glad

to see you were part you participated and meet the firms at sax State I know I mentioned it to every CEO that I spoke with in the last couple months or so so I'm glad you got to do that was very it sounds like it was profit it was a good good outcome yeah I mean we're I think the goal is just to educate students that you can have a career in the public sector it's something I didn't know when I was a student at sa state it was all about working for the great eight at the time and now we're down

to the final four it's just a joke I make and it is AO appropo getting considering it's March Madness right yeah I I also have to thank you for being conscientious about you know making sure we're a low risk um for Audits and such that that to be commended and to commend you on your tenacity and your dedication to numbers I've never seen anyone quite so motivated by numbers and and thank you for that because it means a lot to us as the county and the Board of Supervisors as well so thank you ve

ry much for presentation and and uh I enjoy working with you well I appreciate all the compliments it all the compliments that go to my team of 56 58 positions uh they're tremendous they do they come in do the work um it it is you know boring and dry uh but at the end of the day you know we cut so many checks a year but people count on those checks coming uh so yeah I can't thank my team enough uh for all the great work that they do and thank you for acknowledging not only myself but my off yes

and now that you mentioned it please do pass on our thanks to all of them and I think you do an amazing job with workday that's another huge responsibility for for you to do and so thank you very much Andy thank you have a great day have a great afternoon uh you too okay so I think we're up for another 10-minute break we'll call it a a necessity break how's that we shall we shall return in 10 minutes e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e sure yes a timer let's two minut now I am looking

at the time e e e thank you chair Jones uh and good afternoon to you and to the other members of the board to Mr chatney and to miss Schwab I'm Laura van buerk your director of Child Support Services and I before I go any further want to say how excited I am to have my entire executive leadership team with me here today so to my left is assistant director Tammy uler but I also have two new ladies in my uh on my executive team sitting right behind me and they have both been in their roles promote

d to the executive team within the past year for one of them the other within the past month so directly behind me is Kristen Mendes who's our program manager as of late last year and next to her is Taran uggen and uh Taran was just promoted to afo last month so she's brand new and I'm really proud of both of them for being here I'm happy to have Tammy here with me but this is old hat for Tammy uh especially since she's been acting director previously it's brand new for the ladies behind me and

I just want to acknowledge them and say how happy I am that they are here um as a part of the executive leadership team oh welcome to your your executive board thank you for coming in today thank you chair Jones so we're GNA dig right into it and to begin this slide just very simply lists our core services in the Department of Child Support Services um establishment of parentage establishing court orders for the support of children when they don't already exist ensuring collections of those orde

rs and then also customer assistance of course and Partnerships and Outreach I will point out and I think I said this last year as well because it's really important to me um that while customer service and the Partnerships and outreach are core Services they really reflect fundamentally how we do the other items that you see up there the paternity establishment the establishing of court orders and then collecting on them we know it's really important to treat our customers like human beings wit

h dignity and respect and not as simply a financial transaction and we know that it's fundamentally important as well to have really solid Partnerships with our community agencies with organizations um the Human Service organizations that can assist our customers and we'll talk a little bit about that more in the slides to come I want to talk about accomplishments though and so we'll talk about collaboration you'll see it there is a second bullet point but what I really want to take a few minute

s to talk about is our performance because I was thrilled to find out um I want to say it was just last month so generally it's late February early March that we get confirmation of where we fall Statewide in the federal performance rankings remember again that the federal office of Child Support Services has five Federal performance measures that they use and so they're used state I'm sorry U Nationwide to assess the health and success of a Statewide program but then California also uses those

same measures to assess the health and success of a local County child support department and for the fifth year now in a row your plaster Department of Child Support Services has ranked number one in those Federal performance measures within the state of California yes that's wonderful but I think we also need to point out who got us start the ball rolling with our first in in uh when tamy you were acting as Deputy absolutely yes that number one so supervisor Jones you're absolutely right you'r

e pointing out um that I inherited a very high performing team right I am not uh blind to that I am very well aware and very grateful for the work the groundw work that was laid when I came in and was fortunate enough to be hired as your director of Child Support Services a lot of the work had already been done and so Kudos absolutely to the team these three ladies who are here were supporting me today were all there and a part of that team and a part of the laying that groundwork making the dec

isions making some changes um Personnel changes training changes communication changes I mean a number of different things that had to be had to happen successfully and we know change management is hard always um but they got through that and really and got us to a number one place when I walked in the door absolutely thank you for but you took over the leadership reins and you kept it going so congratulations to all of you thank you I what I want to say about this I appreciate so much your reco

gnition what I want to really emphasize what sets plaster apart is not just the performance and the first four performance measures which look at the paternity establishment the cases that get established and then collecting on current support and collecting on a rears paying cases those four are the first four the fifth measurement though that the feds assess and the state assesses is cost Effectiveness and what distinguishes plaster I think a number of things we occupy this very rare place and

this very unique place within the child support program not just in the state but across the country where we're both High performing in those first four measures and still cost effective I would propose to you it's much more common to have a child support program that performs really well in some of the performance measures or maybe even all of the first four but then they're not cost effective why is that the the performance measures don't exist in a vacuum and what you do to drive an increas

e in one performance measure may very well negatively affect another performance measure and cost Effectiveness is the trickiest one of all because if you think about it you could have a really high performing Program in those for first four performance measures but if they're overfunded if they're over staffed and that's the price that you're paying in order to get that performance then your cost Effectiveness is going to be dismal does that make sense because you're investing a ton of money to

drive that performance conversely you can have a program a child support program that doesn't perform well in those performance those first four performance measures but they're really cost effective why because they're understaffed they're underfunded and so they're going to be coste effective because they're not putting a lot of money they may not be receiving a lot of money to drive their performance but it shows in those first four performance measures because they just don't have the resou

rces they need maybe they don't have have the time and the training that they need to make sure those case managers are doing their jobs well whatever the reason may be what I propose to you is it's very rare not just in the state but in the nation to have a program where that secret recipe has been figured out where you're performing well and you're cost effective and I do want to take a moment I appreciate the board and supervisor Jones taking the time to acknowledge our performance but I spec

ifically want to take a moment to recognize my executive team who's with me today but also all of the folks back home um our case manager who's in Carnelian Bay and Tahoe and the rest of our staff who are in our Rockin office because they are truly the ones who do the work the folks behind me our assistant director these are the folks who really deserve the credit because they're the ones who are driving all of the efforts to make our performance exceptional and also keeping an eye particularly

the two ladies behind me on cost Effectiveness and ensuring that we're not performing well at the expense of coste Effectiveness and it is a rare and delicate and difficult I would say Balancing Act going back to the slide though we haven't just performed uh we haven't just focused on performance we've also focused on collaboration and so I mentioned uh from that first slide that that the collaboration the Partnerships the Outreach that we recognize in plaster Child Support Services how importan

t it is to have really strong Partnerships and it's an area that we're really starting to focus on even more and continuing to grow we've made a lot of efforts to increase our collaboration I want to highlight something very exciting for us that you may have heard about if you've spoken with Jarrett and it and that's that we very recently as in just last month March so lots of changes in March we just merged with the county it department so for a number of years we maintained our own IT staff an

d we were not under the county it umbrella it's a project that again to supervisor Jones's point this started way before I became the director here but we're really happy that after years of of identifying this as a change that needed to happen that we've been able to implement it and she may not like me calling her out um so I'm not going to turn around and look at her face but I want to tell you that Taran um who I mentioned right so after 11 years now um almost 11 years I think in June will b

e 11 years with our department she just became our admin and fiscal officer literally last month but Taran largely led the merger effort on our side now the IT staff Jarrett and his staff deserve a ton of kudos for working with us preparing us helping us to get to this point to make it successful but if I had to narrow it down to one person in our department who led the effort on our side on child support it was Taran nugan and due to her technical expertise her attention to detail her emphasis

and her awareness of the importance of relation relationships and that that cannot be missed when you're managing a huge change and communication it was a tremendous success we actually as a leadership team uh stepped back a couple weeks ago and evaluated the merger and we talked with the entire department and said how did it go and out of I think it was scale of 1 to 10 the consensus was nine for me it was a nine and a half things are always going to happen when you have that large scale of a c

hange but I can't imagine it could have been better on our side and I really just want to highlight taran's um expertise and just the incredible job and I know that she is turning probably bright red right behind me and I'm so sorry Taran but you deserve kudos for the amazing job that you did and I hope that you will have excitement like I do because watching her execute that change makes me so excited for her in that role and for the leadership team the executive team that we now have I know re

ally exciting really fundamentally amazing things are in our future because of who are sitting in these positions we didn't just have the merger though uh we also continue to partner with our friends at Plaster County HHS which I'm really happy about because you'll hear me talk a little bit later about some of the challenges we have in collecting so we are continuing what was initially a pilot that we um we kicked off last year to provide Employment Services to child's Port obligor who are unemp

loyed or underemployed so that collaboration continues we can continue also to share our Rockland office space with juvenile probation that's an agreement that we entered into with uh plaster County Probation in 2022 and let me tell you I cannot imagine a better fit those folks from juvenile probation I want to say you know I've been in the chort program for almost 20 years and I've been in both the private and the public sector and I've worked in places where it was more than just one Departmen

t under a house right in one office together it can be tenuous just coexisting right with multiple departments I would suggest it can be more tenuous when you have your separate spaces and then you merge together into one office space really tenuous I can't imagine a better change um in combination to bring juvenile probation into our space they have truly become a part of our family um and I want to just give a shout out to the assistant director over in probation Brian passenheim sent an email

to me and to Tammy I want I say two weeks ago and acknowledged this and said how happy he was to have their staff sharing a space with us and how well we all get along and that we treat each other like we're one big family so there's uh and he also talked about the positive energy I can't believe the positive energy in your department that is such an amazing thing for a director to get an email from an assistant director or a director in another department and to hear that I'm not just making t

hings up I'm not just seeing it through Rose glasses right but that truly we are functioning really well two County departments together in one office doing our separate work but working together as a team with dignity respect kindness compassion all of these positive values that we want to embrace and they really have they've just melded in to our office culture and it's a wonderful thing to behold there are some other uh collaborations up there I want to just highlight the Eastern Sierra one b

ecause it's important to note that we are uh providing legal services for them which means one of our attorneys on staff handles their legal matters attends their hearings as their attorney um does a lot of the answering of you know and Fielding of the legal questions that come from their case managers their staff actually also participate in our case management meetings we just had an all staff in a case management meeting earlier today and so the folks from Eno and Mono County they attend virt

ually so that they can learn the plaster way and participate and benefit from our services and we also sent our one Tahoe employee Dale Abbott who's based in our cornelian Bay Office Dale just recently went down to Eastern Sierra to help them out their director was out of country for a week and so she reached out because we have this agreement with them this mou for legal services and asked for some help and so one of our experienced case managers took the time and made the effort to travel down

to Eastern Sierra to physically be present in their office for that week to provide some training some support and to be there to help answer questions as they came up and it's really become I think a part of the culture that we have embraced and that we truly value in the department and so when I say embracing the future of the program that's not just about how we treat our external customers it's also about how we treat our internal customers one another we've done a lot of culture work to ma

ke sure that we have built and maintained a foundation of trust as far as our external customers though it is also a culture of working with those individuals not telling them what they have to do what they must do but understanding that they're human beings and not just a financial transaction not just seeing them as they relate to a child support order whether whether they are the person paying support or the person receiving support but seeing them as human beings and trying to build a relati

onship with them giving them choices um inviting them to be a part of the process certainly explaining the process because we know the legal process can be really complex and confusing but it's about working with them and being flexible and understanding that their life situations are unique to them and it's important to us that we treat them with kindness and empathy with dignity and respect that we hear them and that we respond accordingly and again I want to thank the entire department becaus

e we just talked about this this morning at the all staff um and I heard some feedback afterwards from some of the case managers they're the ones who have embraced this model of kindness and empathy and of helping people for a while there I had this um silly little hashtag here to help that we put on our social media and while that might have been silly kind of kitchy I really wanted to drive home the point that we are a helping agency that we are here to assist folks and not to punish them and

it is a change it's a change certainly from where we started many years ago as a federal program back in 1975 the employees of the department have without exception adopted that model and embrace that model that we help people and I think that also shows up that's also a secret to our success and why we perform so well because of these relationships and our flexibility and our willingness to see people as people I want to share with you a comment that was received just this month um by a person

paying support to the case manager in our office actually it might have been last month now that we're in April I think it was in March so this person's ordered to pay support they have a child sport obligation our job is to enforce against them so you might think it's going to be a little antagonistic from the get-go right this person said and I quote as always I truly appreciate all of the help that I receive from your office every time I call I always get the exact answers that I need another

person paying support emailed a case manager just last week to thank the team for treating him with patience and kindness this customer acknowledged that he does not always reciprocate in kind he doesn't always have the nicest words for the case managers when he calls but he said and he took the time to email the case manager after the conversation and conveyed his appreciation for the consistent service the patience and the respect that he gets from our department and if that's not enough just

this morning I learned of another customer who had been served so you think about that I mean getting all of us I can't think of any of us who think oh yeah I would love to be served papers right this person was served papers he called the case manager this morning and mentioned how much he appreciated our process server who we work with through anou with the District Attorney's office so shout out to Morgan and thank you to you and your staff for support of our department he actually had a gre

at experience with our process server and wanted to acknowledge it and let the case manager know that he appreciated the information provided y'all that does not happen I would propose to you I could probably count on one hand the number of times in an entire year across the entire country in the child support program at least where someone receives papers and their response is thank you but it happened just this morning with plaster and it points to the way that we are providing Services we are

committed to building a model child support department in this County where empathy kindness and respect are values of the highest priority and it's really showing up now in the appreciation of our customers and it's something that's truly just marvelous to behold as the Director and again it's not just me I can take no credit for it it's the people who make up the department who are embracing this culture in providing these services in such a dignified and respectful way to our participants we

are however not without our challenges seems like I say that every year um and I've listed here at the top of this slide our funding stream this is certainly not new but it does remain a challenge and I dare say the challenge may be a little bit more Stark even this year because of the State of the State budget um and so I I list that here just to point out and remind you that the vast majority of our funding streams through the state so while we receive an allocation uh that consists of 34 34%

of State dollars and 66% of federally ferally funded dollars we do have limited options for additional revenue and so we are trying to prepare we've been talking about this since Jan January um of this year and as an executive team the four of us here have had a lot of conversations about trimming back our budget and recognizing that we may very well at best not receive additional funding from the state come July 1 and at worst we may actually receive a cut and so we're trying to prepare for th

at we're trying to be cognizant of how we're spending money now and we've been doing that since January U and really I should say we haven't just been doing that since January in General our focus is to be very careful responsible stewards of State TA of taxpayer dollars but we've been more diligent this state fiscal or I'm sorry this calendar year recognizing that the writing is on the wall and that we're not sure what that budget's going to look like when we receive our allocation from the sta

te and salaries are a part of that right so Staffing is the other bullet there on that slide uh because we know the staff the salaries and benefits are the biggest part of our budget there are precious few areas in our budget where we can cut without seeing a negative impact on our customers and I just told our staff this morning and I will continue to tell them and we've told them for a long time that we will not have layoffs it has to be not even a resort for me because they do such good work

they're so important to providing the services that we provide to our customers that I have to protect them and their salaries and I can't let them be punished because of a budget situation that we didn't manage and it does put us in a precarious position because I can't control the amount of money that comes from the state but I don't want my team to worry about it that's what the four of us are here for to figure it out we did it a few years ago very soon after I came into this position as dir

ector after moving from Wyoming we got handed a 5% budget cut and I looked at Tammy and the other two members of the executive team at that time and said we're not going to have P offs we got to figure this out and we did but we're committed that if we're going to expect our team members our employees to treat our external customers with dignity and respect and kindness that we owe it to them to treat them in a similar Manner and part of that means letting them know we're going to figure out the

budget situation in a way that doesn't sacrifice their jobs case load Trends continue to decline this is a Statewide Trend it's not just a plaster problem so the slide says 200 cases roughly year-over-year have declined from uh this state I'm sorry the federal fiscal year end of federal fiscal year 23 compared to end of federal fiscal year 22 we were down about 150 cases so as of the end of federal fiscal year 23 which would be September 30th of 2023 our case load was 6,027 as of last week it w

as just below 6,000 we see this decline you've heard me talked about it for and yes it's a trend on the state and the federal levels within the child support program what I want to convey to you in part is you can trust that that number of our case load is a true number and what I mean by that is we're not going to fudge our case load in order to draw down more funding from the state the federal office of Child Support Services gives child support departments across the country a number of closu

re criteria that tell child support offices when they should close a child support case and those reasons can change the most recent changes were made in 2016 and became effective in 2017 but the idea is that there are some cases where you are not going to see a result or you have some cases especially with 2016's new reasons where maybe you shouldn't be spending your time trying to enforce from this person and so an example would be someone who is long-term incarcerated um someone who has enter

ed a long-term care facility and doesn't have any assets is not employed these types of things an individual whose sole source of income is uh Social Security so SSI or even SSDI these types of cases the federal government has told us are not efficient and that we're actually harming people by trying to collect through those cases and so they've told us we should close those cases they don't always get closed in every County we're going to close them in pler and we're going to close them because

the federal government has told us you should close these cases because we don't want you trying to collect from these individuals for whatever reason and we want you to focus on cases where there is a higher potential for collection and so we're going to do that honesty and integrity are critically important to me and to our department and to doing the job that we do we are well aware that we occupy a place of public trust and we know is fragile and it is tenuous and it's something that we don

't take lightly and that means with every decision we make we have to consider are we doing the right thing are we acting with integrity and so we're not going to keep cases open just because we can get away with it and draw down more funding the result of that is that you can trust our case load that when we have 6,027 cases as of the end of last Federal fisal year those were cases that can be worked under the federal regs my other concern with the case load is coming from an outside Source tha

t's telling us when we should not even try to collect and so we do we see this change you know I mentioned this morning to my staff at the all staff I began in this program in 2004 so 20 years ago I was an enforcement attorney in an area that was impoverished that had a high population of incarcerated individuals people with mental health issues that were being not treated folks with substance abuse issues that were undiagnosed and also untreated and our only option if people didn't pay support

was to throw them in jail and it was incredibly ineffective it didn't help anyone it just helped further draw The Divide between the parent who was supposed to be paying support and the person who was supposed to be receiving support and the child we didn't realize at the time we were not helping the child and it's supposed to be child support so we've come away from that side of the pendulum and I support that our entire team supports that we recognize we want to work with people we want to hel

p people it's about helping them to become sufficient so that they can pay not just their support but also take care of themselves as adults it is about helping them though to support their children and I'm concerned that both at the national and the state level in particular in an effort to make the program more attractive Ive in an effort to diminish that old reputation that we had of either either you pay or you go to jail I'm afraid we have swung way over here to the other side of the pendul

um and I think if we're not already seeing those effects we're going to start seeing the impact yes we have a reputation in this program Nationwide of inflexibility aggressive enforcement throwing people in jail if they can't pay support rather than helping them that's where we were over 20 years ago the program needed course correction and I've been one of the people of the national scale arguing for it pushing for it pushing for a program that's built on respect and dignity and empathy and hum

an kindness but as with many large scale system changes I am very concerned that particularly in this state our pendulum has swung so far that we are now limiting our collection's capacity and we are making it more difficult for my staff to do the work that they do to collect support from the persons who are supposed to be paying it limitations have been imposed by state policy by state legislation that hampers our ability to collect and so it's through things such as leans and levies where we'r

e told oh they have to have a certain balance in the account oh they have to have a certain AAR balance they have to fit this criteria that criteria and it's a policy decision or you cannot do a lean on that case you cannot attach a bank account if they don't fit these criteria so imposing these restrictions driver's license suspension is not anybody's favorite enforcement tool I get that and it's important people be able to drive to get to work to take care of their kids but I know that Kristen

would tell you my program manager behind me driver's license suspension notices are one of the tools that we use to get someone's attention if they've been avoiding us for years and years and not paying their support a lot of times that notice is the one thing that gets them to sit up and take notice and call us and then we can build a relationship with them then we can talk with them about making sure they don't lose their driver's license but that they also support their children that enforce

ment remedy is being heavily rest restricted based on income and so if the person paying support or not paying support but who's obligated to pay support is that 70% of the poverty level of the average income in the area where they reside then they cannot be certified for driver's license suspension just across the board it won't happen even if they haven't paid their support for their children in months or years it's simply been removed as an option we just had a conversation Tammy and I both o

n Friday were at the northern region director's meeting for the child sport program in this state and just became aware that there's talk about wanting to remove our ability to report delinquent obligor to the credit bureaus I'm sad to say I was the only correct me if I'm wrong Tammy I think I was the only director who spoke up and said I do not support this I don't want people I don't want to harm people my entire department the people who are here with me today we don't want to harm child supp

ort obligor but we also want to help make sure that children are getting the support that they need and we recognize that while we do our best to build these relationships and try to be flexible to work with people there's a small segment of the population who's not going to pay and it's really sad but it's the truth I don't know of any office in my 20 years in the program who has 100% of current support collections for children who are under the age of 18 who need to be supported it doesn't exi

st and so there is this segment where we need some tools and what really scares me is we are voluntarily in this state and in some other states too it's not just California a agreeing that we're going to completely remove these enforcement Avenues we support doing the right thing we support empathy and kindness hopefully I've assured you of that today and in my previous presentations but we are the child support department and I fear that in the efforts to rectify one wrong to get us away from o

ver here where we were 20 plus years ago with that overzealous enforcement we have overcorrected and a new wrong has emerged and now we're over here at the expense of children give you a moment to just let that sink in will I get some water thank you so much supervisor Holmes going to our objectives and performance measures despite the limitations being imposed we do try our best to serve our customers well our objectives and the performance measures mirror the five Federal performance measures

and so I won't go over that again you already know we're knocking those out of the park ranking number one in the child support measures for the fifth year in a row in this state our cost Effectiveness did decline from $4 and 14 to $388 this past Federal fiscal year it's important to note that that's also a Statewide Trend and even with the decline we still ranked number three in the state in cost Effectiveness with the number two County cost Effectiveness exceeding Us by only 1 cent per dollar

expended remember just very briefly from that accomplishment slide earlier that I mentioned what a delicate balancing act that cost Effectiveness piece is with the other four performance measures well guess what the county that ranks number one in cost Effectiveness for 2223 does not perform well and that other the other four Federal performance measures they are at $414 but there's something missing there um they may be underfunded or maybe just un not managing those resources well because whil

e they're cost effective they're ranked number 25 in the 47 local and regional child support agencies in the state I also want to point out to you I asked Kristen uh earlier in preparation for today to do some calculations for me and I asked Kristen what would our cost Effectiveness have been for end of federal fiscal year 23 if we had been allowed to execute on those leans and levies like we normally would do without those additional State imposed restrictions our cost Effectiveness would have

been $41 just 12 13 cents per dollar below the most costeffective child support office in the state so we're already starting to see an impact from those limitations on our collection efforts I know I'm running short of time so I'm going to jump ahead here and just say that moving to our budget our projected 2425 budget is around 7.5 million we have zero Capital expenditures so again like I just mentioned our working budget for 2425 is $7.5 million keep in mind that budget figure accounts for al

l positions in the department we do not fill all of those positions because again we're going to act with integrity and honesty and we're only going to fill the positions that we need to operate and to maintain our exceptional Service delivery it's important to note as well our final allocation again because because it comes from the state right it's not finalized until a couple of months from now a few months from now it won't be finalized until after the governor has adopted the budget for the

next state fiscal year typically we receive our final allocation from Cal dcss in late June as I've spoken about the state budget because of the situation we do not anticipate an increase in funding from 242 or for 2425 you can see in our expenses here we are trying trying to decrease costs where we can please trust that we are ever mindful that the state budget situation is precarious and it's important to us that we manage those taxpayer dollars responsibly I don't have any major variances to

report for 2425 um as I just spoke to our FTE so these are the funded positions that we have available 47 as of the end of March um CSS currently has 35 filled positions so 12 positions that are not filled we are going to uh try to do a recruitment I just found out this morning that HR has approved our recruitment so we're working on that to fill some of our vacant CSS positions we have a senior CSS position that we're going to fill very soon but we are not going to fill those 47 positions numb

er one we don't expect getting the funding from the state quite honestly to be able to support those salaries and benefits but number two right now given what our case load is we don't have the work to support 47 positions so we're not going to hire for them and the last slide we have no supplemental requests of the board I feel like I'm kind of ending on a sour note here with all this talk about the state budget and limitations from the state but I hope I've left you with a a picture an honest

picture of what it is that we're facing because we do have some significant and scary challenges facing the child support department what I want to leave you with though is of course the high note that this department I assure you is filled with dedicated public servants they are truly trying to do their best to serve the constituents of pler County and to do it with kindness and compassion and it is truly my honor to be their director and to appear in front of you today thank you so much for yo

ur time thank you for bearing with me I'm happy to take any questions you might have thank you for your presentation supervisor Holmes thank you Laura if this were an a job interview rest assured you've got the job thank you supervisor Holmes and I appreciate uh sharing all your success with your amazing staff as that's important and you recognize that they're the ones that are behind you trying to make sure that your department does what what five years in a row five years in a row now yes at n

umber one congratulations to that so whatever you need let me know thank you supervisor Holmes any other questions supervisor guson oh I just I wanted to Echo what a great job your team has done you make us proud um our residents our community is so um lucky to have all of you me so dedicated to to doing this to protect our children I um on your Outreach budget you do have a function there on Outreach I'm always interested in how we get the word out to women who may not know or men right that it

's not just women yes right that there is help available um because I myself went through a situation in which I had a a father of my son who did not want to pay child support and it was easier for me to walk away than it was to get the assistance I needed to to fight and so I was in a position where I could take care of myself and my son and move on with my life and get a career but not everybody has that and I really want to hope that our Outreach efforts can help um further the knowledge that

men or women might have in those circumstances where they have to choose their child or the child's support right that absolutely that was the option I was given we so we now have an Outreach a dedicated Outreach team which is something we didn't have a few years ago uh who's working together to really take advantage of these opportunities to appear in the community to work with other agencies and organizations to make sure that our presence is known there are a number um of events throughout t

he year that we are now showing up at um we did a trunker treat I think it was was it Trunk or Treat that we did oh no I'm sorry I'm thinking of the child support awareness U month event and we actually invited the public last year we gave out we had our usual backpack drive and gave those backpacks out but we had a whole event in our parking lot with games for kids to play we had snacks and treats um we had the some we had I think there were three little puppies from an from pler County Animal

Services that really were the hit of the day among not just the kids who were attending but among my staff and it was a great event and so I agree with you we need to do more of that and that's one of our focuses over the next year is to make sure we are active in the community that people know that we're available and that we're here to help I do think we had to lay some of the groundwork first of no longer being that punishing agent oh absolutely yeah because no one wants to be treated hostile

no one wants to be a part of a program where they feel like they're going to be punished or berated for their life choices and so we've had some important work to do there but I really do think we are in that position now where we can continue to capitalize on relationships with other organizations and agencies and engage in those events the other thing I would say to you is please if you have something specifically in your District please let me know and I will either come out personally or on

e of us here or some of our case workers will be happy to go out and talk about what we do we do those events throughout the year but we always do more I absolutely agree with you we know one of the statistics that I um quoted to you last year was about the number of children who are living in a household with only one parent in this country and it's the highest rate in the world I believe it's I don't have it in front of me but I believe it's three times um the rate in other countries it was 25

% in 20 and that's the that's the only data I have in my head right now I don't know if there's been research since then but 2020 25% of children in the United States were living in a home with one parent I promise you we're not seeing all those cases come through our doors to receive services but those are some of the cases where we want to reach out to folks I do have concern that we can help people but they either don't know that we exist or they are just willfully choosing not to access our

services and another part of that for that last segment there for the folks who like you are having to make a really tough choice we are working toward being more flexible in the services that we offer and that is to the credit of the state that is something that Cal dcss is supporting as well flexible case management so that it's not All or Nothing by signing your rights you're assigning your child support rights to us you're not saying oh do whatever you want in the past that's absolutely what

it was it was here's the case and then you all get to decide and I have no say so we are at an exciting place where we are understanding our parents who are supposed to be receiving support need to have more say we need to be careful with that because we know domestic violence is a reality in our society and we don't want to put someone who may be a survivor of domestic violence in the difficult position of being able to turn off or on enforcement so we've got to make sure that we have a staff

who are really well trained to understand domestic violence to scream for it and to speak to our cust customers about it because we don't want someone to have their life harmed or their children's lives harmed by virtue of participating in the child support program it's very complex the number of things we have to think about and prepare for but please be assured absolutely we are having these conversations and taking steps to make sure that we're engaged in the community and that people know we

exist and that we're here to help well I think a lot of the testimony you've provided today we can share in our newsletters and other opportunities where somebody might just read something and realize there is hope for them and they should reach out so absolutely I love that and whatever if you need a snippet if you need a quote or anything to share in your newsletters please reach out we're happy to help with that thank you thank you for that supervisor Landon thank you thanks and great work t

o you and all of your team I just have one follow-up question to her question on Outreach do you work with nonprofits and organizations like Acres of Hope and standup plaster those types of groups and um I'm assuming you do but just wanted we do and we have it's been a couple years now since we went up to acres of Hope but we actually got to tour the facility we've worked with kids first standup plaster and those are areas where absolutely our Outreach team in particular has identified them to n

ot just continue the work that we've done in the past but to really bulk up those efforts to make sure that they know how we can assist of course any other questions want to thank you all thank you all for coming and thank you for your hard work I know it is it it has to be hard work and your accomplishments are really they're wonderful thank you so much supervisor Jones can't argue with success right but thank you for taking the time and your presentation and everything so much really appreciat

e it thank you very much you're very welcome have a great afternoon so I was um we are having a little switch R this afternoon instead of HR we're having um libraries so welcome welcome Mary that's okay maybe last but not least well good afternoon chair Jones and members of the board I'm Mary George your director of Library Services thank you for your time this afternoon as we celebrate the library's accomplishments and present the library budget as we plan for the next fiscal year I want to exp

ress my gratitude for the support of your board and for the um expertise of both Dan and his CEO fiscal team and Daniel and his um CEO team thank you very much for all your help a big thank you most of all to all the library staff who in One Way or Another diligently labor every day to transform the library fund into books DVDs streaming services databases technology offerings excellent programs inviting Library spaces and First Rate customer service Library budget has one cost center and four p

rograms collection Services includes materials management division where Library materials are ordered delivered and processed and library Mobile service Community Services which captures the time that staff dedicates to supporting the library's partners and stakeholders including the friends of the library literacy support Council and the library Advisory Board Library Services is the time spent by staff engaging Library users by connecting them to materials information and programming like sto

ry times book clubs technology classes summer reading events and so much more and then finally literacy Services represents staff-led initiatives throughout pler County that reinforce efforts to improve literacy skills for low literate adults and their families I'm very proud to tell you about several accomplishments that the library um had this year one is that we expanded Public Service hours and Forest Hill and Tahoe libraries we added position allocations the library added seven new position

s to increase Public Service hours six employees were promoted keeping Department expertise and commitment to pler County inhouse while freeing entrylevel allocations for the introduction of new faces to library Services all staff enforced till and to had their hours of employment increased from part-time to full-time because of these efforts we were able to extend hours in programming in Forest Hill Kings Beach and Tahoe City libraries coming soon are increased hours in programming in both Aubu

rn and Rockland libraries to include Mondays and half days on Sundays increased hours also means more opportunities to expand programming for all ages ensuring that the library in both Auburn and Rockland locations have enough Staffing capacity to extend hours and programming is the library's number one priority in the coming fiscal year the library also redesigned its website in October of 2023 the library's website was updated to a more intuitive and userfriendly customer experience an improve

d website checks off several goals for the library including it addressed a recommendation of the 2020 2021 pler County grand jury to improve Library website offerings it reinforced your board's critical iCal success factors for Innovative and integrated County Services by strengthening Library it expertise and its partnership with both County it and County communications who help design edit and Market the website the redesign proved to be coste effective by utilizing internal staff and the Cou

nty's software program Civic Plus instead of looking outside the county for an independent website designer it supported an initiative in the Li Li's current strategic plan and finally it involved Library staff Friends of the library and the library Advisory Board as well as customers in the design and the evaluation of the website feedback from stakeholders has been very positive including appreciation for improved content for the visually impaired and heartfelt thank yous like it's a huge impr

ovement over the old site way too team two weeks ago Library Administration relocated and Consolidated with systemwide divisions including library Mobile service materials management Library it and executive fiscal team forly housed in the Auburn library the 6,600 foot lease facility in the city of Rockland is already proving to be more efficient face-to-face communication strengthens support for all seven library locations with administrative managers and their divisions Under One Roof efficien

cy of the consolidation and move are also occurring in the Auburn library where room is now available to house new staff hired to provide more Public Service hours in the next two years the Auburn library will receive a significant infrastructure upgrade to improve services and accessibility with systemwide Services now housed elsewhere there will be limited systemwide service disruption through the construction and finally the Auburn library Building forward Grant the Auburn library critical ma

intenance and modernization project made possible by a $4.9 million Building forward Grant from the California State library and matching County funds of 4.9 million invest $9.8 million into the Auburn library infrastructure over the next two years the investment ensures that the 50-year-old Auburn library building is able to move confidently into the next 50 years of Library service Library Administration is working closely with Capital Improvements to identify project Milestones track progress

and report to your board in the California State Library our successes and our next steps on Tuesday March 26 your board authorized the director of facilities management to execute step two with Consultants Hamill green and Abramson for architectural and Engineering Services as we speak the Consultants are meeting internally to kick off this schematic design phase of the project thank you very much for moving this project forward the library's emerging issues and Department priorities Recruitme

nt and Retention of Staff maintains or is continues to be a troubling issue for the library it doesn't exactly keep me up at night but I know that it keeps other people on my staff up um shout out to Kelly hiola who really deserves all of the Kudos along with a heroic effort from the human resources department for helping us move through these Recruitment and Retention issues but I just wanted to share with you a few um statistics and some observations in 2023 the library with human resources ra

n seven recruitments and welcomed 26 new hires 46% of the library Department was hired in the past 16 months hiring can sometimes feel like a revolving door particularly at the entry level library clerk position it appears despite a ladder of advancement that Library clerks are no longer becoming career pler County employees and instead are often choosing to move on rather than advance to library supervisor 39% of Library positions are Library clerks out of 22 library clerk positions 11 of them

were hired in the last 16 months the last clerical recruitment had 232 qualified applicants 209 of them in South plaster and 23 in Tahoe September held the highest vacancy rate for the library at 21% and for the past 6 months 25% of the library management team has been vacant thanks to an incredible HR Support team and liaison in the library Kelly hiola our vacancy rate is approximately 4% today whoops sorry oh no I'm just moving through slides like a crazy person okay now I'm now I've killed ev

erything I'm sorry so I wanted to talk a little bit about the library um facilities infrastructure thank you um in the coming year Library Administration will begin a new strategic planning effort for 2025 2030 one of the goals of the ne next strategic plan will be to add uh Library facilities um master plan component thoughtful strategic and fiscal planning should assist the department with moving forward on some of the planning um that we need to do with Capital Improvements and some of our ma

intenance needs as our facilities age and then in addition we um Supervisor guson has said this many times we need a Tahoe Vision some vision for the way that our library service can improve um in the Tahoe area both Kings Beach and Tahoe City libraries really lack adequate space to meet um our customer demand for service and programming and the department will continue to work with the Taho CEO team and Community to develop a vision for how to improve Library services in the Basin okay I think

I need to be at my objectives and performance measures just go [Laughter] backou okay yeah there we were gosh I'm sorry okay our objectives and performance measures um the library's objectives exist to strengthen your board's critical success factors by prioritizing services that our communities value from their Public Library including up-to-date collections easily accessible E Resources enriching and ENT entertaining library programs a robust and intuitive website and increased Public Service

hours our performance measures Library Administration continues to strategically allocate the library fund to increase customer use and satisfaction with our libraries successes shown here are in increased programming offerings visits to the library and use of both physical and electronic resources the library is an operating budget of approximately 10.5 million with no money budgeted for Capital expenditures at this time the library fund has relied traditionally on fund balance carry over typic

ally due to salary savings to cover the gap between revenues and expenses the 300 ,000 shortfall in the working budget seen on this slide represents the same gap between revenues and expenses the library has S as seen for a decade or more increased revenues are assisting and offsetting increased expenditures with a general fund contribution that remains flat the major variances in the library Department um our special Department expenses where we budget for Library collections processing program

ming expenses and everything we need to serve our public this year we increased the library materials budget by $50,000 for a total of $650,000 rent for the waren drive location in the city of Rockland um shows the increase of 132,000 and then the next two variances are increases to staff to extend hours in most of our libraries finally the library recognized an increase in estimated property tax revenues there are 49 um position allocations or I'm sorry 56 position allocations from 49 this year

bless you we have no supplemental requests and I am happy to answer any questions you may have or mess anything else up that you would like me to mess up thank you for your presentations supervisor homes uh thank you Mary for your presentation um it was last year we closed the penan library have you heard any feedback I haven't heard anything from anybody uh I haven't heard anything I'm I'm hoping that they're using library Mobile service and I'm hoping that they're going to the libraries where

we showed you that are close by them within that 5 10 mile radius yeah our statistics prove that or show that a bit and um in fact I just heard that the penin friends of the library are dissolving and they're giving their funds to the literacy support Council so they're continuing to support the plaster County Library despite the closure of their Library good that's good to hear because I I haven't heard anything then Y and Nei is Beverly so not good all right good thank you okay supervisor G t

hank you Mary H thanks for your hard work and passion it's great to see the Auburn library um project moving forward and really good to hear that y'all are already in the new space in Rockland and that it's working well so so I think that'll make a big difference as you do the um renovation but that's really good to hear and it looks like it well it sounds like it's a good space so I'm pleased to hear it it's a really nice space I hope you can all come to visit us there and and just take a a pee

k we also have a conference room that you can use any time for Mac meetings or we're going to have the library Advisory Board meet there for any County organization that would like to meet and um at some point we would like to open it up for public use as well okay and supervisor cson I I want to thank you Mary and your incredible staff um transitioning moving offices trying to oversee a major Capital project and increasing hours and filling vacancies that's a lot of Great accomplishments for a

year so kudos to you and your team and continuing to serve our public so well thank you thank you thank you Mary for your presentation and thank you for your continued hard work work with our libraries and everything um as supervisor gipson said you you you've done a great job with the libraries in thank you and so we're all very proud and and happy to support you well we've all done a great job you all did a wonderful job of supporting us last year and we just want to make you proud with the al

locations and the funding that you've given us so we will do our best this year to realize the things that we want to get done I think you've worked a little bit of magic because you have increased hours and stuff huh so that's a good I just think those recruitments are incredible you know I mean that's um for a department to turn over everyone that works there or at least half of the people that work there in 16 months is um you know pretty heroic effort so exactly well congratulations and than

k you thank you for all your hard work thank you thanks okay that brings us to the close of today's business so in tomorrow we will be will'll start at 10: I believe and not 9:00 because we have to the little pinning the pin wheel ceremony in the morning so anyway thank you all for attending thank you our meeting is adjourned for