Ladies and gentlemen, Denver County Commissioner's Court for Tuesday, November 18th is now session. Commissioner Andy Eads is out of town today and Commissioner Ron Marchin is stuck on traffic on 35 isn't that a surprise? So he'll get here as soon as he can but we're going to go ahead and get started. by Matt Richardson, who is Director of our Health Department, and our pledges to be led by Philip Lanna, who is the Deputy at our Sheriff's Department. Will you please stand? Well, our Father, we thank you again for the sunshine, for this wonderful day that you've given as a gift for us to do your will. Father, we thank you for the people here who serve others. We thank you for that service. We ask for wisdom and strength to do what's right in that service. And we thank you for your son's example and his sacrifice so that we can see that and how it looks in our world. And it's through Jesus' name that we pray. Amen. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Honor the Texas flag. I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state God, one, and indivisible. Thank you, gentlemen. We're going to first go to item three A on the agenda. Item three A is approval of a resolution recognizing Barbara Hancock's retirement. Barbara's with us today. Barbara, would you come on up to the podium? Barbara's in the middle of the... Bring your husband with you, honey. Come on. We like to look at the people we're honoring. It's a special day and I've asked Commissioner Mitchell to read your resolution. This is a resolution honoring Barbara Hancock for 27 years of service to Den County. The Den County Commission's Court Den County Texas doing a regular session on the 18th day of November 2014, considered the following resolution. Whereas Barbara Hancock was hired by the Justice of the Peace precinct III court on November 30, 1987, and is retiring on November 30, 2014 after completing 27 years of dedicated service. And whereas Barbara has faithfully and diligently disjoiced the duties and obligations of the office, worked well with her co-workers, and implemented the policies of the Justice of the Peace precinct III office in an honorable and responsible manner. And whereas Barbara has exhibited the attributes of an ideal employee earning the admiration and respect of her colleagues through her hard work, fall consistently maintaining a high level of dedication to the citizens of Din County. And whereas Barbara received her certified court clerk and master court clerk certification from the Justice Court Training Center. And whereas Barbara received the John A. Scott Employee of the Year Award in 2007. And whereas the staff of the Justice of the Peace precinct three office is grateful to Barbara for her commitment to public service during her 27-year career with Den County and she will be greatly missed and whereas Barbara plans to enjoy her retirement spending time with her granddaughters, Aubrey and McKenzie and happen her mother. Now therefore be it resolved that Den County Commissioner Court does, hereby extend to Barbara Hancock, a sincere and grateful appreciation for her dedicated service to Den County. We congratulate Barbara on her well earned retirement and extend our best wishes to her for continued success, happiness and good health in the years to come. And that's Aubrey and operating lately not McKenzie. All right. All right. Our research daughter. Done in open court this 18th of November, 2014, the point of motion made by myself. Motion by Commissioner Mitchell, seconded by Commissioner Coleman. On favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed to the city. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We also have Janie here with us from precinct three office. Judge Kerboh could not be here this morning. She's in school. And so are. All right. I'm taking the pictures. I try to get them to close the office today. That didn't go over. I said, but you're just gone. She won't know. It's right. She won't know. I've really enjoyed my 27 years. I just want to thank you all so much. We want to appreciate you and... I'll have to come visit new building now. There you go. There you go. We'll have to come visit new building now. There you go. There you go. We'll have to go. We'll have to go. There you go. We'll have to go. We'll have to go. There you go. We'll have to go. There you go. We'll have to go. There you go. We'll have to go. There you go. We'll have to go. We'll have to go to item 3c on the agenda. This is approval of a proclamation congratulating co-served charitable foundation on its 10-year anniversary. Representative poster here. Yes we do. Come on up to the microphone if you would please. If you'd further record if you'll introduce yourself. My name is Mary Worthington and I'm the administrator of the CoSurf Charitable Foundation. Thank you for being here this morning. You're resolution reads as follows. Whereas the CoSurf Charitable Foundation is celebrating its 10th anniversary and whereas the CoSSER charitable foundation was established in November 2004, and is funded through CoSERF members and customers participation in the Operation Roundup Program, Employee Contributions, and an annual golf tournament. Whereas today, the Operation Roundup Program, whereby CoSERF automatically rounds up its residential customers bills to the next whole dollar with the Roundup pennies going to the COSER Charitable Foundation is generating about $69,000 a month to the foundation. And whereas the COSER Charitable Foundation is celebrating a milestone of donating over $6.1 million to more than 200 area nonprofits over the past 10 years. And whereas the CoSER Charitable Foundation has awarded 642 grants to 189 organizations and 55 communities within the CoSER service area. Now therefore on behalf of the Denton County Commissioner's Court we take great pride in congratulating the CoSER Charitable Foundation on its 10-year anniversary and do by offer our sincerest gratitude for the contributions it has made to the agencies of Denton County award in 357 grants to 109 unduplicated organizations totaling $3,621,374 in 23 communities in Denton County alone and do here and do hereby proclaim November 20th, 2014 as co-served charitable foundation day. And call upon all citizens of Denton County to join us in congratulating co-serve chair of a foundation on his 10 years of service to Denton County For a claim this 18th of November 2014 the chair will so move Seconded by Commissioner Mitchell. We're all in favor. Please say aye aye Post-sitting motion does carry unanimously Thank you very much, Judge Horn. We look forward to partnering with all of the nonprofits for the next 10 years to come. Yeah, if you'll wait just a little while, both you and Barbara will give you some nice framed copies of your resolutions. Stop. Okay. Okay. Let's now go to item 3B on the agenda, which is a presentation by the Chambers of Commerce, the Denton County of the schedule of events for the 2015 Devon County Days honoring the 84th session of the Texas legislature February 23rd and 24th and We'll call and check Carpenter I believe we have a PowerPoint. Yep, he's got it up. Okay I have no clue how to make this work for somebody I think this works. Does somebody? I'm in it. Is this touch screen or what? Okay. Body, can you change the pages for him? The right arrow. Oh, on the keyboard. There you go. As in right there. Hi, Jane. Judge, commissioners. Thank you for letting us be here with you briefly this morning. in right there. Hi, Jane. Judge, commissioners. Thank you for letting us be here with you briefly this morning. We just wanted to give you a very quick update on a longstanding county-wide event. As you mentioned, Denton County Days in Austin. For this particular year, we wanted to fill you in and get on your calendars now on all your constituents. February 23rd and 24th. That is a Monday Tuesday. Real quick, just an overview of what this is about. You'll see a lot of very good language about heightened overall image and visibility of the North Texas area, helping to better represent the needs of their particular constituents. A lot of great stuff in there, but nowhere in there, are there any verbs that have to do with influencing legislation. We say that very carefully and we'd like for the record to read as an event and no money spent directly in this event is used for specific lobbying purposes. Now we would be very naive and you would be very foolish not to have 200 people from Denton County in Austin and Tech advantage of it for your very needs. But the specific points and key components of the event are basically to bring visibility to the North Texas area with you as our commissioners court as sort of the lead on this and then put, you might say on a pedestal, our six person, Denton County legislative delegation. Put in here, there is a little bit of heritage here. The first event we had was in 1987. It was basically an event that state representative Jim Horn encouraged us to do. And it was basically a two chamber event, Louisville, and Denton made that happen. And over the years, it's been expanded significantly, and I think very productively and successfully. We're very, very fortunate this year to have as our key corporate sponsor on this Texas and the Mexico power. The Project Committee met one day. We put together all of the criteria and the options for a sponsor in the next day I'd call it from Lori Walker that somehow, some way, we got Texas and Mexico power. So because of that and because the generosity of that particular company and Laurie getting after it for us, we can keep most of the amounts, the prices of this at a reasonable price and hopefully more people involved, directly individuals involved. Other sponsors so far, you as a commissioners court, at least the past 10 years, have been very loyal participants financially on this. And that's something we very much appreciate. This is kind of your party. So we appreciate you stepping up with the dollars on it. The University of North Texas has stepped up and our city of Denton has already paid as a sponsorship. There will be more. Count on it, you bet. Okay, the individual registration, and as I said, this is actually pretty low considered. It's Austin, it's the latest late of the session, and we're paying some pretty high dollar prices. But what do you get for your $100? And at my age, and with my glasses, I can't even hardly read that myself. So, but anyway, it's basically four major pieces to this. Thanks to the Flower Mound Chamber, we're going to be able to share with their leadership class on a number of pre-scheduled briefings with key officials on Monday afternoon. One of the signature events is Monday night, a legislative reception. The entire legislature, all 181 are invited to participate in that. Considering there's 50 of those on the same night, we've typically had pretty good response. Last year we had two members of the Texas Transportation Commission showed up so it's not just legislators. I believe you had a former roommate commissioner Markson that showed up from the highway commission. The next morning is the legislative breakfast and this features our six person legislative delegation from Denton County. Then we added a component this year which frankly I'm pretty excited about and I hope it turns out as good as what the preliminary discussions have said but we want to have then a closing event at lunch with a high profile speakers. The names that have been invited will be worth the ticket alone. So it will be anxious to see how that comes out. So those are the main four major parts of that. We are taking registrations as we speak. This is the Denton Chamber website, and I apologize. This doesn't come out near as close, but in the top upper right hand corner, you'll see an icon called events. If you go to that, you can follow through a whole series that can allow you to come on electronically, if that's the most convenient for you. Otherwise, we have registration brochures that you can fill it in. We'll take a hard check any day. That's why it looks like when you get down to the actual registration part. Also, an event we added this past year, thanks to the University of North Texas and the President's office. We had a post session briefing that was all part of the Denton County Day event and we had all six members of our legislative delegation participate in that. It was held at Apigee Stadium. My understanding is the President's office has agreed to help fund that again, which again having these big corporate and community sponsors helps us keep the individual prices at a price and an affordable cost for your individual constituents can participate that might not be part of a corporate table of whatnot. But that probably will be sometime in the fall, venue yet to be determined. But that tends to be a very valuable component of the overall event. As I said, while we go, we don't go down there necessarily proposing any one particular agenda item. It's mainly trying to build some cohesiveness. And I found this whole project in terms of working with my colleagues and the chambers of commerce across the county. It really does us more good up here than ever does in Austin. And I apologize you can't see this, but as you'll see, there's about 25 names on there, and there's just about every chamber in the county now that's been involved in that. Some of those people are joining us here today if we could if you're on the Denton County Day Project Committee rattled your jewelry. And we will be with your permission adjuring from here to go up to the 1896 room to put a few finishing touches on that. Also, just point out that in the past, most of the events have been kind of spread around. This year we're trying something new and that's to have every major sponsored event within the venue, the single hotel. And it will continue to be at the Sheraton. Some of you have been around, remember when it was the Marriott and we were frozen in 2003. But if you haven't made your reservations, I would recommend you do that. Again, it is Austin, it is a legislative session. We have a special rate. You may be able to get better than that. But now would not be too early to get that. The rooms are blocked for a three-day component. So why did we come here today other than a peperally? We made a concerted effort this June, past June, when we first started meeting on this, and we were real encouraged by the number of different entities that had come to the table and all of a sudden showing some some communities chambers that aren't totally didn't counting. We just feel like it's very important for this to be something other than central to the county that we need to make sure as many of our constituents and your constituents are involved. And so we just encourage you to talk it up. So far in looking at the registration, you guys are putting your money where you're mouth is. We're getting lots of great registration from your employees and other elected officials in the county. So we would encourage you to just help us get the word out to the civilians, so to speak. What am I missing, anybody want to add anything? Thank you, some did up well. Okay, thank you for your time. I'm not going to be able to make a decision. I'm not going to be able to make a decision. I'm not going to be able to make a decision. I'm not going to be able to make a decision. I'm not going to be able to make a decision. I'm not going to be able to make a decision. I'm not going to be able to make a decision. Okay. Well, item one is for public input for items not posted on the agenda. If there's any member of the public that would like to address the commissioner's court, yes, that you please complete a public comment form and want to remind everyone, of course, to turn off your cell phones and pages. Members, item two is a consent agenda. Are there items on the consent agenda that you need to have some discussion on? Or do we have a motion? Motion by Commissioner Marchant. Began and by Commissioner Mitchell. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed, sen. Motion does carry. Consent agenda today consists of two a, which is approval of the order making appointments. Yeah, a long list. We have a new hire in the county clerk's office, New Hire in the District Courts Office, and New Hire in Justice of the Peace Pracing 1. Promotion in Justice of the Peace Pracing 3. Promotion for District Court Administrator, New Hire in the District Attorney's Office, and Promotion in the District Attorney's Office. Two New Hires in the County jail. New Hire in Public Works, and Newire and Adult Prevation to promotions and adult probation, New Hire and Public Health and a promotion in public health clinical. 2B is approval of the Intra Departmental Transfers, 2C is approval of payroll, 2D is approval of specifications and authority to advertise, remulsified asphalt, bid number In the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of motion agreement for traffic regulation in the special district for a kind of fresh water supply district 8. Number 8C, this is first go ranch and excuse me, the preserve and first go lakes. I'm sorry, first go hills located in Denton, kind of commissioners court precinct 1. Move to open the public hearing. Thank you. We have a motion over the public hearing by Commissioner Coleman, seconded by Commissioner Marchen. On favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Opp opposed to any? Motion does carry. I don't think do we have anybody here from the pub who wishes to speak? I don't know. Is anyone in attendance with a like to address Commissioner's Court on the issue of traffic regulation in the special district? Anyone in attendance with a like to address Commissioner's Court on this issue issue either in favor of or opposed to? I believe that Both the public hearing second the motion to close the public hearing by commissioner Coleman seconded by commissioner marchin I'll in favor please say aye aye Posting This is one of the things we've been doing gradually. Thank you to Commissioner Mershant. He helped with the legislation done in Austin. Excuse me. It's a good thing for the residents out there to allow them to have us post and enforce traffic regulations and their special district's on move for approval of the agreement. Thank you. We have a motion by Commissioner Cohn. I'm sorry. I'm by Commissioner Marchin. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed to name? Motion does carry. We maybe should explain a little bit how this all comes about and well due to the legislation. We're soon to, you know, the special districts are in the entity of limited authority, mainly having authority over water and sewer. And so they were unable to promulgate traffic regulations. It's still in the unincorporated area, not in a city which would generally promulgate their traffic. So the legislature granted the authority for us to promulgate traffic regulations in that area. And based on that, I think through the agreement we work with the DA's office. This is going to be a positive act for the residents because now they will have speed limits that will help public safety. And I think greatly enhanced her quality of life. I don't think it will still probably want to affect the fireworks, but that's a good ease problem. But after that point, even the posting of a speed limit sign or a stop sign or a... Here's a suggestion. A mere suggestion of that was out of the... In other words, the water supply just didn't have the authority to even do that. So that new legislation gave them the authority through voting through the water supply board itself to bring it forward to the county. And if you look in the documentation, they have to within their petition or within their request, they have to identify each roadway that they are going to be posting a speed limit sign on and what that speed limit would be. All right. Well, I think that's a good thing. All right. Let's move on to 5A, which is approval of the bill report payments from CSCD, Community Corrections, T, Shares, Train Shares, Prop deletion and the six additions posted, I also point out that on page 16 of the bill report, there's a payment for training for the newly elected, just as a piece in precinct five. He has not taken office yet. And this training, paying for this training, is okay if you take action on that according section 152907 local government code. So just by your approval, I was going to point out to the training before the newly elected officer has actually taken office, but there is a statutory provision to allow that. So I just say a vote in favor of the bills will include that approval. And we do have the, just want to point out the payment for the radio tower site is one of the additions. That was approved on the second of November we're anticipating closing on both of those transactions before the next commissioner's courtman is willing to get that approved too. That's all I saw the changes I want to point out. Thank you. Go ahead. James when you said that there was that the opportunity to allow the expenditure of future money for training for that specific J.P. Is it for newly elected only or for any elected office within the county? Because I know that there has been some issue of conflict of us trying to pay for future. Let me just read the statute rather than funneling a limb and interpret it. This was passed actually many years ago, more than a decade ago, to address the problem of newly elected officials, there's a lot of time training is just sometimes even required training is scheduled before it actually take office. Chapter 152907 says the commissioner's court of a county may authorize payment of reasonable continuing education expenses incurred by a county or precinct officers. If the expenses are related to the officer's official duties, including expenses incurred by the officer between the general election, which the officer is elected and the beginning of the officers of term of office. So really between the election day and November and December, these people that are elected, but not sworn in, that specifically speaks to that. And it can really, it is any, again, appears to be in any county or precinct officer that's been elected. You have a motion? I'll move for approval. Thank you, we have a motion. The public policy to me. Second. Okay, we have a motion by Commissioner Collins, seconded by Commissioner Marchin. Here are the questions or comments. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, Cine? Motion carries. Seven a's approval, Budget Amendment quest 100280. We're fiscal year 2015 that will roll over funds to various county departments that were committed out of the 2014 budget, but not expended until after the fiscal year was closed out for a total amendment of $1,825,161. Is there a motion? Or do we have questions? Motion for approval. Thank you. We have a motion for approval by Commissioner Coleman, seconded by Commissioner Mitchell. Hearing no questions on the favor, please say aye. Aye. Post-synane. Motion carries, seven b is approval of budget amendment request, one, two, nine o. That does look like enough numbers down there. Is it? One zero zero, two zero zero zero zero zero zero zero. Two not five zero. Sorry about that. To transfer funds from tax assessor collectors or countywide technology, computer wiring in the amount of $430. Emotion by Commissioner Mitchell. Seconded by Commissioner Coleman. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed to the name. Motion carries. Seven C is approval of the proposed in County Capital Improvement Program for fiscal year 2015. Is recommended by the Capital Improvement Committee and a pro-o the Capital Improvement Committee membership revision to include the budget officer, county auditor, director of purchasing, chief information officer, director of facilities management, director of public works and two members of the commissioners court, kind of judge and Commissioner precinct three, McCollan, Donna Stewart. Thank you, Judge. I'll give a quick overview of the process and where we are and how we got to where we are today. The CIP committee, Kathleen Prudement Committee was formed and presented its first Kathleen Prudement Plan to Commissioner's Court in 2007. The committee members that are appointed bring a countywide perspective to this overall process and do a wonderful job. The plan continues to be revised typically on an annual basis and projects are prioritized, revised throughout the process. Committing revisions, updating the job titles are important. As you know during the budget process we changed to the titles of some of our directors. And then we are recommending that the county engineer position that was eliminated during the budget process be removed from that committee as well. The purpose of the committee or the CIP is to identify major capital needs for the county over the next 10-year period. This is done for planning purposes so that we are aware of the major projects for technology, building projects, as well as all the county road and what we call trip-away projects are funded. The CIP process this year including receipt of several new requests. Each project was summarized and the associated costs were included. We also asked departments to provide what the operating impact of these large projects will be on the county budget. The court agreed to hire HDR architects to assist the committee with some cost analysis regarding two large projects, which included the emergency management facility, as well as a records management facility. They provided two scenarios for records management. One was to renovate the existing space and the other was to build a new facility. The committee is recommending both projects to be included and is recommending the new facility for records management and lieu of the renovated project. Other cost analysis for the other projects have been provided either by the department has requesting that, Michael Tubiolo or Michael Tubiolo are Director of Public Works. Again, this is a long range plan that's highly recommended by our bond rating agencies and it's important for planning purposes for us to know what to expect in the future. This plan includes three new projects in the technology services area, includes some security upgrades for the various jail facilities. There are three revisions that were submitted. New projects for buildings include the two that I mentioned before, technology services garage that would be funded with leftover funds from the LUTU 88 Phase II Project, and a couple of other jail-related security issues. County roads, there were several new projects included, after receiving input from each member of the Commissioner's Court. That includes revisions to some of the projects as well. We took any access funds that were available from completely projects and moved those around accordingly. So the spreadsheet that I provided you should have notes to help you understand what all was done. The total proposed capital improvement plan that's being presented is $845,475,049. That's a period from 2008 through 2019. So it includes a lot of projects that we've actually already completed, but it also includes projects that have been projected out through 2019. In order for some of these projects to be funded, it's going to require a future bond election. And it's something I would encourage the court to start thinking about because if you'll notice the new projects that require voter approval, total almost $180 million at this point. The committee also discussed whether we were going to open up the process again for 2015 for any new project request and it's been determined that we will hold off a year on asking for that. And so what we have included so far is what you'll see other than what other projects may come to Commissioner's Court for approval as far as reallocation of funds such as road projects, et cetera. I do know that we had Commissioner Marksman has concerns and would like for the court to look at pulling a couple of projects that include the emergency management building and records management project and Commissioner Eads shared the same concerns about those two. So of course it's up to the Commissioner's Court on how you want to proceed with that. But again the committee is recommending the full project. If you do take those two projects out, the CIP that would be voted on today would be $805 million, $678,351. And again, I want to thank everybody that participates in the committee process. It's very time consuming project to keep up with and I appreciate everybody's insight into the process and all the players involved are to be commended. Commissioner Ease says that we pulled those because he'd like to have some discussion on them. And I noticed Commissioner Marchion has the same concerns. So I'll let you address it. I think that's understandable. I mean, you and I sit on the committee. So we hear all the preliminary discussion. And I know, for example, that Joe Egan's always tried to get all members of court, Commissioner Marchion. He wasn't able to get to you, but I think he had a chance to visit with everybody else. But even if we pull them, it doesn't mean they're dead in the water. I mean, we're going to have to continue to examine it and get more information and we will be doing so. So it appears to me that there's enough members of court that want to pull those two items. So I'm going to suggest that we approve it. I'm going to. It's told the total package with the exception of the emergency division and records management will continue to study those items and get more information to court members. And yeah. Even means coming back and doing a little workshop to bring us up today. I mean, my concern was 33 million dollars. There is a reason for that. You just haven't been able to do all the information. And I totally understand that. I will be happy to for it out all the cost analysis that HDR provided to the committee. It'll give you a better understanding of what the project is. And if at some point in the future, you'd like to invite HDR to make a presentation. I'm sure they'd be happy to do so, so that we have a, we want everybody to be comfortable with this of a cap on Prima program and fully understand it. So I'll be happy to send you out the worksheets that they provided to us as well. Always a work in progress. Yeah, this time we meet, we move things around. This plan will probably change starting next week with road projects and things that occur and as new projects become ready now versus others that can be delayed. So it's a working document always and can be changed. And it's real clear in our guidelines that even though something's in our capital improvement plan doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna be funded. It's up to this commissioner's court on an annual basis to make those determinations. I agree. Something that is this how the ordinary to bring it at this time, because I was looking at the calendar and the knowledge is marked. That's and we met in February and March. However, we were hoping to be able to provide you with the cost estimates on the two large projects because we hired HDR to do that. You know, it took a little longer than we thought. So that's the reason for the delay. There's nothing to prevent us from coming back and getting back on schedule in March to reconsider these two projects and include them in our overall session. Which is what I'd like to do. I have a couple of questions for you. Is there anything in your opinion or any reason we would need to act on the whole package today? Well, it's important that we submit this information to the GFOA as a part of our operating budget. It's a requirement. And so that's why I was suggesting that we go ahead and make approve the plan as the court is comfortable with so that we can include an updated document. I can include what we have now but it's very outdated, it's a couple years old so I'd certainly like to give them a little closer idea of what our real plan is about. You're in a rush for the memory. What is the GFOA? It's the Government Finance Officers Association where we submit our operating budget to them for review. And also this is also looked at by our bond writing agencies. And if we're looking at issuing debt for 2015 and all, it's better to have an updated document at that time. And I guess my opinion in regards to, I mean, you've done a lot of work and I really thank you for doing that and helping us with when we reorganize our road projects. I just am reluctant to go out for another bond election until we've spent the money we have already. I know I'd like to clear out the 2004 and 2008 before we decide to do another bond election. I mean, we were using up until a couple of years ago, or maybe I'm not sure Mr. Wells, but we still had money in BSRP from what year was that? BSRP was 1999, and it was when the election was. I want to make sure that before we go out. I totally understand what you're saying, and I'm not saying that I disagree that having worked on two bond elections. They don't come together overnight. It's a year or two process to pull all that together. As you know, each member of commissioners court points members to the citizens committee and every member of court has an opportunity to speak to those committees with their priorities and your respective precincts and then the committee has a lot of work to do to prioritize all requests. So all that takes a lot of time and it's not going to be, you know, in six months or two. I understand. I understand. I will. I'm well aware of the process. I just think we need to make sure we exhaust. For instance the project that we worked on that didn't can you rub and bridge facility. Those were bit funds that have been sold or sitting for a long time until I built this facility. I just want to make sure that we get you closer to the microfinals. I just want to make sure that we get you closer to the microphone. I just want to make sure that we consider what money we have sold and funds on hand and make sure that the money we're paying interest on before we go out for another bond election. And just so you know, the committee did bump quite a few projects out into and the first year that we have slated for a project to be funded with the future bond elections 2017. So we're aware that that's going to take a while and you may not be ready. The number I quoted before of $190 million is really only for buildings. It does not include anything for roads. So I know that y'all are going to have to talk about that for a long term plan on what you're going to want to do. And you know, those projects might continue out to starting in 2020 or whatever, but that process needs to occur as well. I don't want John to have a heart attack, but I'm hoping because of Prop 1, TechStyle will be able to fully fund a lot of their state highway projects instead of having the county subsidize a state function. Go on hold your breath. I can... Hey, we...look... I'm going to... You can dream, County. It was over a billion dollars, right? Yeah, but they also said they needed four billion. I know, but it's state, you know, it's the state highway, the state should be paying for it. Not the county. Most of the committee members are here. If they have anything they want to add or if y'all think I missed anything. That's for clarification. When we changed in redistrict, did you align the projects according to those new lines? Nothing has ever been submitted to me to do that. align the projects according to those new lines. Nothing has ever been submitted to me to do that. So basically what you see is what has always been in place for each present. Because I know that I would inherit some kind of projects because of redistricting what I picked up in little am or. We funded the WIT bridge and stuff like that most of them that were left standing. That's just not something that was ever submitted to the committee for reconsideration. The projects are still there we maybe put them in a different line but they're still there so the dollar amount doesn't change there. But like we said it's always a work in progress and it's very much a working document. And when is the talked about the calendar when when would be appropriate for a submission of a particular project that to go on CIP at any time. We typically only open that up periodically and like I had mentioned earlier, the committee was recommending we not open it up for 2015 but we typically send out an email to all the elected officials and department heads. Usually in January, February, time frame requesting requests for new projects or any revisions to projects that are already in our plan. Then is that happens? We're going to put that road that I was trying to hear in that little donut hole in there little ones for you. I hear another request coming in as what I hear. I take care of it, but it's in Ron's precinct and it needs to be done. But remember, we got to wait until they build on the house as first. Right. And just to clarify, any revision to any project or any movement, a funds from one project to another required commissioners court approval. And there's a project on today's agenda moving some money from Commissioner Wands' discretionary fund to a new project. So that'll continue and we'll continue to update the plan. Okay, well I'm going to go ahead and make the motion then to approve it with the removal of the emergency services and records management projects, but the rest of it being approved. And we have a second by Commissioner Mitchell, further discussion or questions? Hearing none all in favor, please say aye. Aye, opposed, aye. Motion carries, thank you, Donna. Thank you, Bill, the committee members. A lot of work goes into that. Okay, item 12 A is approval of an audit report of the Denver County Sheriff's Office fiscal year 2014 chapter 59 asset for future report is required by article 59.06g1 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. Motion by Commissioner Mitchell. Seconded by Commissioner Marchandt. I'll in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed to the seat. Motion does carry 12b as the pro of the Sheriff's Office 2014 equitable sharing agreement annual certification report for the U.S. Department of Justice. I'll move for approval. Motion by Commissioner Cullen. Seconded by Commissioner Mitchell. Hearing the questions, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed to the name. Motion is carried. 12C is approval of amendment number one to the memorandum of I'm disdainty between the University of North Texas and Denton County for a joint forensic lab. Motion by Commissioner Mitchell. Seconded by Commissioner Marchand other questions or comments? Any none? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Cine? Motion is carried. 13A is approval of providing nominations to the North Central Council of Government's Executive Board to replace Clint Blackman as one of two damn county representatives on the Norse-Central Texas Council of Governments Regional Aging Advisory Committee. I'll move for approval and I'll thank you, Judge, for soliciting the court for nominations. Well, can I ask you to hold your motion just a moment please? Sure. I would draw it. Thank you. We have two Dorothy Cannon and Edgar. I didn't see the answers. I only saw Dorothy's application. Dorothy actually contacted my office some time ago, probably over a year ago, interested in this position and there wasn't an opening at that time. And then when Kate and my office sent information out, Commissioner Marchant came up with the other name and I certainly appreciate his willingness to serve. But I kind of feel like Dorothy's been waiting the longest and I think Edgar is interested in another position also isn't he? He initially did the MHMR. Oh, MHMR. No. No, he's not. He would like to be. They're an opening on the MHMR. I don't think there's an opening in there. I think there is. Look at that, would you? They're an opening on the MHMR. I don't think there's an opening I think there is Look at that with you We can send two names to Cog, but we need to prioritize them I'm gonna suggest that we send both names, but prioritize Dorothy cannons name and let them decide what they want to do. They'll probably take our priority recommendation, but I want to express appreciation to Edgar Pilkington. Is that correct? Pilkington for his willingness to serve also. Mr. Mr. Mr. Mr. I'll just amiss it. I'll just amiss it. That's my motion. Do we have a second? Seconded by Commissioner Mitchell. Further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, Seneen? If you do have a forwarding MHR lending. Right. Not that I don't have any. I will see you. Well, Sherry. Okay. I think you know the gentleman. So he's with what was been a academy. He's. Yeah, educator. We're going to come back to 14 a moving on to 14 b is a provo of the agreement between Dan and Connie Texas and Ratcliffe constructors. I'll get it out. LP, RFP 06142262 for the construction of the San Diego Discovery Center renovation and expansion project in the amount of $2,556,350, inclusive of a contingency allowance in the amount of $100,000 funding for the project to come from 2013, permanent improvement bonds audited, line item 787-52090-2-0. It was recommended by Michael Tuvio, low debt and construction manager. Make a motion to approve, and then if we get a second, I'd make some contact. I'll second the motion. Go ahead. Members, if you remember, there was a bond election I can make some calls. So, I'll cycle the motion. Go ahead. Members, if you remember, there was a bond election that included about $7 million, over $7 million for an additional building on that Carrollton site. And after reviewing what it was going to be put in that building, which most of the space was going to be for a text. I'm not excuse me, the DPS and a new driver's license facility. After looking at it, basically I made a determination that rather than spend the entire over $70 million on that new building just to renovate the existing building to bring back some services that we currently have juvenile probation is currently in at least facility, expand the space for the services there currently there. And then at some future date when we approve, and if I understand this right, Mr. Wells is that if there's any left over money from an existing bond election on a construction project, it's at the will or it can be determined by the Commissioner's Court to reallocate the leftover funds to another project. Is that correct? It always depends on the actual wording in the bond and actually the election wording the quarter that calls the election and specifically the wording for issuing the bonds the general rule is yes money can be spent for like projects okay build up building funds can be moved to another building if they're not uninated road funds can be moved to another okay move to another building if you're not needed. Road funds, community funds. Got it. Got it. Okay. And so what has happened is in the meantime is when we, the commissioners court voted, sell the colony government center, then relocate that center to another location, which is at the corner of Lebanon in 423. After doing that, at some point, reallocate the money left over from that construction project to go to that project which is a light project. Just give you a little bit of so you say and take the money from selling the colony government center to use with the curlton government center yeah no I'm saying that's good the curlton government center had like seven half million dollars or seven point two million dollars in a bond election I'm taking 2.5 million of that to use on Sandy Jacobs. The balance. I don't use it on the new. Frisco government center. Along with the amount of money that we got from the colony government center. Which we used to, we haven't actually got the money but we used to purchase the land that the new Frisco is going. So it's all money coming out of the precinct too. Right, and then I believe the CIP committee could about to. We do, yeah, we do. It's all the same residents because it's along the 423 corridor. Or the corridor. So I think there's a, yeah, there's been a motion to approve and in a second. We have a motion in a second further discussion. Here none all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed, Sine. Motion carries, thank you. 14C is approval of the 2014 interlocal corporation agreement for property tax collection between Denton County, Texas and Oak Point Water Control and Improvement District number one is recommended by the Denton County Tax Assessor Collector. I move for approval. Motion by Commissioner Coleman, seconded by Commissioner Marchant. On favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, sen. Motion carries 14D as approval of the 2015 year local corporation agreement for library services between Den County Texas and the crime public library. Motion by Commissioner Marchant, seconded by Commissioner Mitchell. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, sen. Motion does carry. 14e is approval of the first amendment to the interlocal cooperation agreement between Dan County, Texas and the city of Saint-Eur, Texas for the McRannels road project with County, Green to contribute in an additional amount which will not exceed $3777,719. Towards satisfactory completion of the project for a total revised contract amount of $4,377,719. With the funds totaling 812,409 to be transferred from the trip, the late 2010 PI bond fund, gravel to pavement project, Auditor and Line, item 8575189050, to the new trip, O82010 PI bond funds, McRennel's Road Project Auditor and Line, item 8574119050. I'm going to move for approval and I have some comments. Okay, we have a motion by Commissioner Coleman, seconded by Commissioner Marchant. Go ahead. First of all, this is one of the many things like park ridge like we did in Corinth through the incorporated area, the anticipation of the development of 2181. You know, one of the projects I'm pushing forward to have that we've done the engineering and engineering on is 455 through the City of Sanger. We're going to try and expand that from the high school through downtown. McRennel's Road is a road that's shared by the Ditton County and by the City of Sanger and goes into the interior of their town, goes behind several schools and we're trying to get out front of development. So it's a project that I think is going to be very beneficial to the community and we're trying to get out front of development. So it's a project that I think is going to be very beneficial to the community and we're lucky to have a partner with the City of Sanger. To my or fact, Alan and Shik are one of our councilmen from the City of Sangers here. I've known them for a long time and they're very supportive of this. The project is on their agenda last night. Yes, the project is fully funded. I know you told me there's some questions about that. And from what I understand, the whether or not, there will be an additional lane to service the high school will be on the agenda next week. That'll be decided and recommended by the engineers that have been hired. So I think it's a good project for everybody. Hopefully the city of Sanger, once the project is completed, we'll completely take the road in the area into their jurisdiction all the way to 2164. And hopefully it will encourage development in the area, increase the tax base and help the schools. I know it'll be a big help in that area for sure. Okay, we have a motion in a second further. We do. Yeah, yeah I thought we did. I'll in favor please say aye aye opposed to the name motion does carry. Thank you Allen for showing up today I appreciate it. Item 15 is executive session 15 a is under Texas government code 551.0711A consultation with attorney in the closed meeting. In the governmental bias CC advice of attorney about pending litigation. This is Edie and Vic Burgess versus Dan Coney at all pending in the 16th judicial district court. 15B is under Texas Government Code 551.072. Deliberation regarding real property closed meeting to deliberate the value of real property where a duration and open meeting would have a detrimental effect on the position of the government body in negotiations with the third person regarding real property located in that kind of commissioner precinct 415C is under the same Texas government. The bill is not available to the bill. The bill is not available to the bill. The bill is not available to the bill. The bill is not available to the bill. The bill is not available to the bill. The bill is not available to the bill. The bill is not available to the bill. The bill is not available to the bill. The bill is not available to the bill. The bill is not available to the bill. The bill The commission's court is reconvened from the executive session. Under 15A, this is going to be my motion to authorize settlement in cause number 2010, 101, 7, 8, dash 1, 6, style, Victor Burgess, individually, DBA, ED, ED's bail bonds, and ED Burgess, individually, and DBA is Burgess bail bonds versus in kind of Texas at all in the 16th judicial court of Degon, kind of Texas, and approve payment of $15,000 in attorney's fees to the law of the Richard Gladden. That's my motion. Seconded by Commissioner Mitchell. On favor please say aye. Aye. Posting a name. Motion carries under 15B and 15C. There'll be no action today. Going back to 14A, we're going to not take any action on 14a today. That'll be reposted at a later date. Now, 21a is a workshop to discuss workforce strategies for Dittman County and we'll call in Amy Phillips. Thank you, judge and members of the court. I promise I will be brief. My intent today is to simply introduce and begin a conversation that I hope that we can continue in a half minutes to be exact, a very brief video. Just to make the initial point, it's called Did You Know? This is, you might have seen other versions of it possibly, but this particular version was made this year. I believe it was made in 2014. I can't get my cursor to move. I was made this year, I believe it was made 2014. I can't get my cursor to move. Now I'm like, I need to click it. I don't want to let me. So you'd be on paper. Okay, thank you. And we will make this full screen real quickly and we will all, we're gonna start over, I'm sorry. I turned my sound off for court. I'm looking out of that. There's nothing here. There. There's nothing here. There's nothing here. Yeah, there's nothing. I did this in my office. I mean, there was a thing that would come down up there. That's it. Right there. Hey, my babies. No, it's much cuter than anything that I have in my laptop. And a borrow down his laptop, because we were having some technical difficulties with mine this morning. So I appreciate or I apologized for the delay. I could get down there, but we know it keeps popping up. There it is. Oh, right. I'm just going to do this. Oh, the missing is missing. I'm going to do it. and I'm going to do that in the office so that Let me exit from the screen. All right. The point of that was just to point out how quickly things are changing today. Change is nothing new. But things are changing a lot faster than they used to in the world that we live in in an impacts Denton County and if you notice they talked about the The number of users in 2008 of Facebook compared to the number of users today on Facebook and almost seems updated even though it was made about six months ago because it never mentions Instagram or Netflix or Twitter or Snapchat or any of those because things are changing so quickly we're learning new words almost daily so I wanted to look back ourselves at what happened nine, five years ago, where we were in Denton County five years ago. And if you remember correctly, we had spent an unemployment at that time just here in the county nationally. It was a lot more than that, but in the county, board downstairs about half a dozen job postings representing about a dozen jobs vacancies. We had only 23 retirements that year and that was pretty much the way things were going about two a month. You know now that we do presentations in court, how many retirements we have some months. That then we had pretty rich benefits. And there was no new development going on. And that big news for our budget, because we had a real big increase in revenues as a result of the lack of commercial and residential development in Maccounny. That year we did a compensation benefit study because we felt like it was important to see where we were compared to the market. And the consultants told us that overall, we were about 8% below market in pay at that time. They also told us that our benefits were slightly above market and we were pretty comfortable with that paying benefit mix because what we couldn't offer in pay, we could offer in security and benefits and some other things. The consultants gave us very conservative recommendations because we were in the economy that we were in. Consultants always like you to be able to implement their recommendations. And so they took that into account and they made some pretty conservative recommendations. Five years later, we're here in Denton County with 4.5% unemployment. And I'll show you what that looks like in a graphic in a minute, but you can tell in your head seven-and-a-half to four-and-a-half is a huge draw in unemployment. We on our board routinely, if you've been in our building lately, I'm sure you've noticed. We have 25 to 35 job postings on the wall. The judge commented this morning that there were a lot of order making appointments and there have been for some time. Some weeks there might be only six or eight, but a lot of weeks there's 15 or 18. We know that we have a lot of job activity out there. Retirements have doubled. We're on track this year to have 46 retirements as opposed to the 23 we had five years ago. And that's really happened. It's gradual but more this year, bigger junk this year than ever before. Our average longevity I didn't mention before was about 10.4 years, five years ago, but today our average longevity is about 7.9 years. Our pay still lags the market. In my own opinion, I don't have any data for this, but I think the public's opinion of public sector workers has gone down in recent years. I think that may be a reflection of a lot of dissatisfaction at the national level, but it doesn't help us with recruiting new employees. And so there's some mix there. Looking at a recruitment and retention standpoint, there's at least three things that we need to take a look at when we analyze where our work force is going to come from and why they would or would not stay. And one is the external economic conditions, which are very different today than they were five years ago. Today as we said, the unemployment rates really low and the local job market is much more competitive. Look, our employee demographics have changed probably more than anybody in this room realizes. I was a little surprised at some of the numbers myself and I've been surprised at some of the training classes and what they look like today compared to what they looked like just five years ago in Denton County. As this county rose, it becomes more and more diverse in a lot of different ways. I'm going to show you what's happening with the ages. I talked about tenure. Gender pride hasn't changed much except that we added more jobs because we needed to a couple of years ago in this year that tend to not always but tend to be male-dominated jobs. Then we have probably jobs that more women apply for in the criminal justice system. So we may have more men than we used to have working for us, criminal justice system. So we may have more men than we used to have working for us, but that's the only real big change in gender that I have seen. Our job types have not changed and probably won't. We're using traditional pay ranges that we've used for quite some time now. We did used to have steps and now we have ranges that have a minimum, a midpoint and a maximum. And I think we all probably have employees in our departments that commute from somewhere outside the county. Our workplaces place conditions and there's a lot of conditions to consider, but I would suggest a few here. We have had pay raises in recent years. We've also had benefit changes. And I think this summer, that a couple of commissioners pointed out that our employees are having to pay more out of their own pockets for their benefits today. And we know our retirees are too. So that changes our compensation benefit balance. Also, I think there was some discussion that we needed to have a larger conversation and that's the conversation that I'm trying to start today. I think six or eight months ago probably our county auditor James Wells told you what some consultants have told you before, that our customer staff ratio continues to rise, and that means that our staff is serving more and more customers, and so the county is getting more bang for its buck when it invests in employees. Those are some pretty dramatic changes in five years. We always think in local government that things are slow to change. We think of ourselves as kind of a bureaucratic machine with a lot of older employees, but that's not necessarily always the case. This is just a graphic of the unemployment rate that I alluded to earlier or mentioned earlier and I think it makes it real clear How dramatic that changes in just five years? These are home sales. I don't have a graphic for commercial sales, but we know That the same or commercial development, but we know the same kind of thing is happening in commercial development It's a very different environment than it was Five years ago. This is really interesting. I came across this quite by accident, but it makes a lot of sense. When you look at, we know we always think of the West Coast, the San Francisco area, and the valley there around San Jose as being very high tech with computer jobs concentrated there and also over on the Northeast coast where we have New York, Philadelphia, Boston and well even the Raleigh Durham area but if you I came across on the internet that last year, Denton was named number six in computer jobs. And you can see there are a lot of other college towns that are having that same thing happen there. It's getting spread across the country. And with the focus on Denton, that makes recruitment in our technology services area much more competitive as well and harder to recruit for, harder to recruit and harder to more difficult to retain employees. Here's our workforce and you know you could hardly be in the workforce today in the last five years without hearing something about how many generations we have in the workforce today in the last five years without hearing something about how many generations we have in the workplace. And some analysts today will say, well, we have four generations, some will say five, I'm going to go with four, it's not really that important whether we have four or five, but just to recap real quickly, that first individual that I have standing there is what we call a silent or a traditionalist. Those are people. We all know them who have been in the workforce a long time. They have their generation has always been conservative, patriotic, very hardworking. They believe that the way to get ahead is to put your nose to the grindstone and work hard, work your tail off and you'll get ahead. Baby boomers and these are stereotypes but they've pretty much been applied. Certainly there are anomalies but baby boomers are also hard working. As a matter of fact, there's a lot of them still working that we thought we're gonna retire within the next five or 10 years when we started piloting the flight about 10 years ago. And so the baby boomers have a very strong work ethic that they probably learned from the traditionalists. And they're enjoying working, but we know from the number of retirements that we've seen this year that that silver tsunami that we were looking forward to is actually hitting now. So we're seeing a lot of baby boomers exiting the workforce. You can see the next generation, the exers, these people are also hard working. They don't have the same necessarily dedication to the company as the boomers and the traditionalists do. And that's thought to be a reflection of the fact that they live through. Their parents being laid off that company stayed work for a long time or sometimes losing retirements that they had banked on. So they're hardworking and they're dedicated to the work in front of them but they might put their career ahead of the company and go somewhere else for a better opportunity. They're more likely to. And the last group that you see there are the millennials. And we hear a whole lot about the millennials and they're pretty new in the workforce. We heard a lot about the other three groups when they were new in the workforce too. What we do know about them is they're not afraid of hard work but they feel like the work needs to be meaningful and make a difference. It's not, they're not willing to do work just for work's sake. It's not a means to get ahead like it was to the traditionalists. It's something that they want to do to contribute. And the millennials are, you know, they're the ones that were raised on technology. And they're very mobile, not just physically mobile, like the exers, but they're pretty much addicted to their mobile devices. They see things a little bit differently. And because of the mobile devices and the way they've grown up, they expect immediate feedback. And they're sometimes seen as a little more demanding than some of the other generations. And generation gaps aren't anything new. But all businesses today are talking about them and concerned about them and trying to train their employees to work with the different generations because it has an impact on retention of employees in the workplace. If I were to and I clicked on this too soon, I was going to ask you if anybody wanted to guess what proportion of our workforce was made up of traditionalists today. And I already clicked on it, it's less than 2%, about 1.5%. And I think that's interesting because nationwide, the statistics say that traditionalists make up about 4.5% of the workforce. And so our workforce is generationally a little bit different than the national norm. And in a different way than we would think being a government entity. Anybody want to guess the percentage of baby boomers today? Still working in Denton County? About 40 or 50? I heard both of those. If I can keep doing it on the glass, I'm sorry. Get it here. It's about 30%. I thought that might surprise some of you. It surprised me. It's about 30%. And nationally, that's actually the largest group in the workforce. I would really invite you to poke your head in at new employee orientation sometimes, because it is a very different group than what we have seen in the past in a lot of ways. And generations is just one way. It's actually in Denton County largest group right now is Generation X. And I said they were hard working and that they're mobile and they're also tired of waiting for some baby boomers as they think, get out of their way so they can run something. They say these, these boomers have been running things a long time and so they're always looking for opportunity. It doesn't mean they're not loyal. It's a reflection of their life experience being different from the experience of the traditionalists and the boomers. The millennials make up almost as many, almost as bigger percent, and now I'm really listening. Almost as large a percent as the boomers, probably in a couple of months, that'll even out. So you can see a lot of transition there and very different from what we think of as a local government entity just in age group. I don't know if our, you know, I haven't been around for decades and decades and decades just a couple of them. So I don't know if our workforce ever looked like this before, but I would be surprised if it was because we all know how large the baby boomer group is. So these are the people, if you look the largest, you know, over 60%, nearly 70% of our workforce are in the younger generations, the exurs and the millennials. And these are the people that were charged with recruiting and retaining so that we can be successful and productive in the future. A lot different than a lot of the people in this room right now. So we talked about being generationally diverse and I also alluded a little bit to the fact that our workforce is much more ethnically diverse than it used to be even five years ago. I don't know if you noticed that in your workplaces, but we absolutely see that in the HR department. I almost took a picture of the other day. I wanted John's classes that's required for new hires so that I could put in in my presentation that I didn't know how I'd explained to him what I was doing with it. So I didn't know how I'd explained to them what I was doing with it. So I didn't take the picture, but if you poke your head in sometime, you can't help but notice the change in Denton County in our workforce. And we've always had the same occupations. We've always been very diverse there. I think that's what makes my job really interesting is we have people with all different missions and different educational levels and different incomes and we are ready to serve them wherever they are. Technologically oriented, we know we talk a lot about leveraging technology at the county and how that makes our work easier. It certainly makes us be able to get our hands on information a lot faster, and it makes us compute faster. And none of us want to go back to the days that we didn't really have all that technology, and we did everything with paper and pen. At the same time, it just placed demands on us that we didn't use to have. I can remember, you know, in our capacity here just at this table, when we would be asked a question in Commissioner's Court and say, you know Commissioner, I don't know, but I'll look into that and I'll try to get you an answer before next Tuesday. I don't think anybody said that in a long time. Sometimes we have our own employees back at the office using their technology to find the answer and send it to us. And you can see that our workforce, and you see this every day, is looking more and more like this last picture where people are relying very heavily on their mobile devices. Because this is very different than what we've seen before and it's really happened pretty quickly in Denton County. We don't really know what it takes to recruit and retain this population. We're not really sure. This is just a graphic to show you where our average ages average age is about 42 years old. I think our average age used to be a lot closer to 50. And our average longevity I've already said is right around 7.9. So it's a younger group and they may not stay as long as the boomers and the traditionalists have stayed. Still, we want to do what we can to not have people coming and going and coming and going because that can be inefficient and counterproductive and very expensive. So we have a lot of challenges. We probably need to look at some of our systems and processes because they may have been designed for our former workforce and not our present or current workforce. And I think that includes our pay systems, our benefit packages. We probably need to look at all of those things and see if they're going to be appropriate to the workforce going forward and help us with recruitment because we are dealing with increased competition. We have increasing retirements and that makes us need to recruit more positions or more people as well. So if we have people who are not inclined to stay 20 or 30 years like a lot of us have and if we have people who have been here a long time and they're retiring, that kind of means we're having an increase need for recruitment from both ends. And one way to settle that down a little bit is probably to work on retention. I'm not saying that our retention is terrible. I'm just saying that looking ahead, I'm not sure we can expect to have the same kind of retention as we've had in the past in Denton County. As a result of the recruitment competition and the improved economy, we do not get as many really great applications for key positions anymore. And we need to look at that. We're looking at recruiting in different places, but we also need to look at, as I said, our systems and processes and our benefits and our compensation and see how all that plays into that. We have a lot of needs. I'm not sure we can, I'm not here to tell you, these are exactly what our needs are, and this is exactly what we need to do. I'm here to raise awareness and start a conversation about these things. And we always, we know that one thing that hasn't changed is that we have limited resources. And we will always have limited resources. Sometimes, a few more resources than others, but we always have to keep in mind that those resources come from the taxpayers and they are limited. And we try to keep them as limited as we can, actually. Ultimately, we are really challenged. We will be really challenged from now and to the future to recruit, retain and engage our employees. And engage is a word I haven't used in this presentation, but it's the difference between an employee who comes to work every day, faithfully, and does what they need to do to keep their job, and an employee who comes to work enthusiastically and really invest themselves in their job and tries to learn everything they can about their job and how it fits into the organization and the Artman and the larger organization and to To is motivated to do whatever they can to help and to be more productive So that's something that a lot of employers today, studies are showing that a lot of our employees are not engaged, not just in public sector, but in private sector as well. And there are a lot of efforts to get employees more engaged so that we can be more efficient and productive with the employees that we have and that we keep. And of course, all of this has to be done with limited resources. I have a list of options that's not meant to be all inclusive, but this is just one option on this screen. This is an engagement survey. A lot of employers have been doing engagement surveys to measure their engagement and to see what is important to their employees, what their employees value most. What is it that keeps employees employed with a particular employer and also what motivates them to do more than they have to do to stay employed? That's one option. I know a lot of employers are doing that. It could be very expensive. It could be much less expensive depending on what we want out of it. I know that some organizations are paying tens of thousands of dollars to do engagement surveys and find out what's really important to their employees. Is it feeling valued? Is it doing meaningful work? Is it recognition, pay, benefits? Is it that they need their supervisor to communicate better with them? There's a lot of different things measured in these surveys. They're doing that because they want to be able to engage their employees and to keep their employees happy and productive and working hard but enjoying the work and not just coming to put in eight hours to get a paycheck. There are less expensive options for that and I'm familiar with one the differences it probably would come with a lot of measurement and Indicators it probably would not come with recommendations the recommendations would be left for the county to look at the study Results and come up with our own recommendations and that that may be an approach that's preferred. It's certainly less expensive. I can talk a lot more about that in another presentation. Another option that we might want to think about and we have to be careful, but we know that for years we have budgeted very large increases for our healthcare. Five years ago, I don't think we had any reserve at all. Today we have a very healthy reserve in our health insurance plan. And so we may be able in the future to budget smaller increases for our health insurance plan and possibly redirect that to other areas other than benefits. Maybe pay, maybe somewhere else. We may want to see if our pay structure is really appropriate or whether we want to look at alternative pay structures. Our pay philosophy, as I said earlier, although it's never been written down anywhere that I'm aware of, has always seemed to be that compensation could be a little lower than market, or sometimes a lot lower, because our benefits were a lot higher. We know that in a few years, our benefits will look very similar to everybody else's, and we're going to lose that competitive edge. And so we have to think about how we're going to make up for that. You know, if we were to do a study and it were to show that our employees didn't feel like they were getting enough communication or they weren't fairly valued, now that might be something that we could improve with advanced supervisory training. Certainly we're looking at different modes of recruitment and if recognition turns out to be key to our employees, we might wanna do that. As I said, I didn't come here with solutions or a plan to tell you this is what I think we need to do. I think it's too early for that, but I did want to make sure that Commissioner Coleman and Commissioner Eads comments about a larger conversation didn't get lost over time and that we didn't wait until January to discuss it when it might be too late if we needed to put something into our budget process. So I'm looking for your input, and I'm wondering if there are any options there that you'd like to hear or learn more about, or they may not be listed there, something that you want to learn or know more about. I find it interesting, your comments concerning qualified applicants and recruitment. concerns, concerning qualified applicants and recruitment. My husband serves on the committee, a citizen committee that basically they help the Army recruit. And they have in a terrible time. And it's not because people don't want to be in the Army, it's because they can't meet the qualifications. They're out of shape and they can't pass a basic test. It's really pretty stunning. Sometimes when we get applicants, the quality might not be what we had hoped for. So yeah, those things, I guess people have been talking about that for a long time that it was coming, and we're starting to see some of that. I did see some information the other day from the International Public Management Association for HR saying that there is some data to suggest. They didn't, I don't remember that they cited a particular study. They said, actually, I think they said there are some studies that demonstrate that there is a direct correlation between, it may not be cause and effect, but a direct correlation between, it may not be causing effect, but a direct correlation between paying benefit levels with quality of employees and applicants. And we've, you know, I think had a lot of really good applicants and employees in the past and we've had a certain benefit compensation balance but through things that are out of all of our control we know we have to change that balance at least in one area. So we probably want to look at the other areas and see if there are things that we put more money in our employees' pockets since we're having to take more money out of our employees' pockets. Go ahead. I just got a couple of questions that I would love to see. Well, you're microphone over in front of you. Sorry. Not that short-court. Would you agree or disagree with the increase of technology also comes the decrease of the need for some of the employees? I think that there's no question that we have kept our number of employees relatively low partly because of the investment that we've made in technology. But I think it also has increased people's expectations. And so we can do a lot more work faster, but people expect us to do that more work faster. So if the expectations had remained the same, then probably we wouldn't need more employees. But if you're asking when, as we leverage technology, should we be cutting that, the number of employees, I would say no, because the work just continues to grow. Does that make sense? It kind of just makes sense. I mean, are you saying that because of the expectation is greater that it is done faster is that on a customer service level or is that on a? I mean we do everything for a constituents and the citizens so I guess I'm answering my own question. It's on a customer service level. It is, and I think it's societal. I don't think it's just in county. I think the expectations on a worker today are that they can get their hands on a lot more information, a lot faster and get answers a lot faster in any work environment. And it's kind of a kin, I guess. I can use that word to what we've seen in law enforcement where everybody watches CSI and NCIS and they expect your local law enforcement agency to come back with those kinds of results real quickly. And it's a little bit unrealistic. But I think that, bless you, that while that might be an exaggerated expectation that people don't want to wape for response anymore, and where we used to spend half a day filling out a paper time sheet, now technology allows us to do it all online a lot faster and it takes all our part of our day. But it lets us do things faster but our expectations grow. Secondly, other than technology, because I mean, this would be the end of my eighth year, oh God. Anyway, and I know there's everything becomes cyclical. And I can remember us heavy duty addressing the area of technology at the beginning of my eight years and having to address the competition within the area for those jobs and having to do something as far as pay to address that. And then we saw a slump, it dropped almost totally off of everybody's radar that we either had accommodated that competition or there was no need for it any longer. Other than that technology element, which we know can go. What other areas are we having high vacancies in that we're having trouble filling those vacancies because of the benefit package or because of the salaries. And that goes to targeting, that goes to part of what you said of either targeting retention of those areas or targeting the recruitment of those areas. A lot of areas today we post a job for two or three months and don't get a real lot of quality applicants. Which ones? We've had that experience in Rodin Bridge. We've had that experience in purchasing. We've had that experience in, you know, obviously technology. We've had that experience in engineering, sometimes telecommunications, nursing. But even jail health. Yeah, although when we remove the, when we remove the jail or certifications from jail health, we really improved recruiting there. What we're seeing in some other areas, such as the tax office and some in County Clerk and District Clerk is a real retention issue. County clerk and district clerk is a real retention issue. They are hiring and rehiring and losing and hiring and losing and hiring and losing those clerks. That's very distressing. Because a training period is not being... They don't know everything in three months. The training period takes longer than that. That area, I was really good to talk about that area at a different presentation sometime or a different discussion because at the very lowest pay grades in our organization, the great three and four deputy clerks and administrative support specialists. They showed to be, we have some of our biggest retention problem there and they showed to be some of our lowest paid positions in our last couple of salary surveys. And I have been working on a proposal to bring maybe in the next budget year. It concerns me because I know to turn over that they're having especially in tax, but also because that group of employees, you know, when you think that, the presentations that we've had from elected officials and department heads, about groups of employees that needed to be addressed. A lot of times they have been groups of employees that are all in one or two large departments. And oftentimes they've been employees in uniform or of one type or another. And they've been a lot of times in jobs that are male dominated, tend to be more male dominated. But we have this large group of lower level employees that are really the backbone of all of our offices that are spread out. And they're not as visible and they're pretty quiet, but their pay shows to be as lower or lower than the rest of the organization. And that's something that has gotten my attention that I felt like I was gonna bring to you in the next budget year. I would have brought it last year except that when I noticed it and I started working on it, it is problematic because you have grade three, grade four, grade five, and they're all back to that. And once you get up to a higher level of administrative employee, they don't show to be below market. So I have to find that spot in there where I can recommend raising those lower level employees and not raising those higher level and those sort of market. So that's a big thing and those people, most of them report to elected officials but they might be in tax, county clerk, district clerk, the DA's office, but most offices have one or two of them at least. And so they're really spread across the county and we're talking about a lot of employees. So there's a lot of different concerns out there, retention, recruiting that have to be addressed. And all of our employees will be in the same boat when it comes to the changes to their health insurance. Amy, I think what we should do, what I suggested to you is to analyze our workforce in two different timeframes. I think we have a new paradigm right now regarding employees. In the past, there was a tremendous amount of political patronage in Denton County. I mean, we had one elected official fire half the staff when he got elected. We had some sheriff, you know, extensively clean house. I know that that one situation, you know, the DA can always fire whoever he wants when anyone takes place, but the sheriff and the constables are now civil service. And so I think, you know, we really book in what we look at people, pre-civil service and post-civil service because I think we'll find we have a lot more longevity now that we have civil service and there won't be these wholesale you know patronage type removals and that will be able to hold on to people with more experience so I think that's if you're gonna take a look at that I think you need to look at it based on pre and post civil service particularly for those offices where we've lost a tremendous amount of experience. The other thing is, I know it's tough to gauge what salaries need to be paid. And I tremendously agree with you regarding, you know, we have a lot of lower paid and administrative employees who are the backbone of Denton County. And that's kind of one of the things and I'm glad you recognize that, that when we do benefits, benefits really matter. And when we increase benefits, the percentage increase as to income is quite a bit larger for our lower level employees as opposed to our higher level employees. And that can be a financial hardship on them, whether it's perceived or not, I think that may discourage them. And you're right, the lower level employees, they do the best young ones work before the county. the county. You know my administrative assistant just left to go take a job for the PowerPoint EDC if she's going to make I guess two and a half times more than what she was making at the county and she did a great job. She did tremendous stuff for us. She's probably way over qualified but we can keep people like that and retain them. Kind of get them in the county system, show them they're the way to advance. Develop kind of a fine team. But I think a lot of the things we saw in the past, we won't see again because of civil service, particularly in our law enforcement areas. You know, as long as we're a government officials and government jobs we're going to see our salaries lower than the other ones and the only way that you do that is the elected officials, the Commission Court, City Councils and all these people step up to the plate and say you're going to put your job on the line and raise those salaries and so I think when you're ready to do that, we can do it. I recommend everybody who comes to road bridge to be hired in at the maximum. That's allowable under HR because I want to retain those sellers. And we've had a hard hard time. We've had a hard time retaining people Well, I've asked them, the people they want to do. And we need, you know, it takes all kinds, but democratically we've got a lot of employees who've been around a long time. And we need to be able to diversify our workforce, particularly in road and bridge. For us, we've got positions that hang around forever. And we removed the requirements that they had a class A driver's license. We now will hire anybody with a class C and we still can't get applicants. But that's not the count as full that the persons are not qualified. Well the applicants that you understand but we don't even get people applying. That's because right now jobs are more plentiful than they were, say, 20 years ago. So people can work where they want to work. We have a vested interest that regardless of whether society value having a road and bridge employee who's been around a lot of money and training that knows that knows how to dig a ditch. That's just what I was talking about. Like you said, but who have those intangible skills that we can retain them and keep them. I always tell that fellows when they come workforce, you may not make much, but we pay. You work for those other guys in their ranks, you may not get paid. You know money is a short time motivating. I've learned that over the years so there has to be some kind of incentive that we can look at also would pay. As you mentioned how we go about the benefits maybe we look at paying then can't be paying more about the benefits. Maybe we look at paying, then can't be paying more to the benefits. There are other things that you can look at as you can't get a higher salary at the time. But I don't think it's always about money. I know it wasn't for me. It hasn't been for me for years. The amount of money it's about, you know, a lot of the incentives that you get. You work on a lot of jobs and there are not any benefits. You don't get any benefits at all. And I've not heard in a long time, I employees complain about benefits because we do get pretty good benefits right now. And there was a time that they were not just good. So I think we have to look at the whole picture. the benefits as well as the salary, some kind of incentive to do what we can do. Hands may be tied with the healthcare for America, specifically stating what we can do. I just think we should, in regards to retention and other stuff, I think we should look at things pre-expanded civil service and post-expanded civil service. And I think that would give us a better picture on retention. To clarify for anybody that's listening, we do have civil service in the Sheriff's Department for almost all of the employees. We have civil service in the Constable's offices with regards to administrative staff on it. But the majority of the employees in the Constable's offices are not covered by civil service. And we've only had civil service in the Sheriff's office for about two years. We have had civil service in the rest of the county for, I don't know, 25 or 30 years. It's my tenure. So I'm not sure how we would measure the difference. I think when we hit our population bracket, we've reimposed. Expanded it greatly. And I think that there's quite a bit of difference between the civil service now under expanded civil service and then the way it used to be. But we can just say. It's a little bit. There's a little bit. I'm really counting the commission. Let's count the man. Absolutely. On any of our employees, when they do leave us, you just have to remind me because I have one employee and she hasn't left for 17 years. So I haven't had to do that. Then they tried to run around. So do we do exit interviews? We do. Okay. And in those exit interviews of people, and let me use an example of a court clerk, which some ten, those types of jobs tend to be at the lower pay grade. In those, are they given us reasons for leaving financial? Are they given reasons for leaving personal? Are they giving reasons to I mean because just like Bobby said the monetary it quickly goes away. That motivation goes way very, very quick. Especially when you find out they left you for a job paying 25 cents more an hour. So I would be very interested in knowing what those ex-interviews are showing you. I mean, to me, that's why you do an ex and interview is to try to red flag those areas that are the concern for you to address. So I'd be interested in knowing what not specifically what they're saying, but why in the world they are? Are they, is it the hassle factor? You know, just like you said, they're splattered all over the county. There's offices that have one other person employee and a supervisor, there are other offices that may have five employees. Three of them are supervisors over the two employees. And so I'd be very interested in knowing Three of them are supervisors over the two employees. And so I'd be very interested in knowing why they're leaving and going. And if it's if it's an environmental, not environmental like. I know what you know, again, in the J.P. office, we had high turnover. Some of that had to do with personality, more than it had to do with money. Well, and not all of the turnover is valid here either. I think sometimes when we've had to hire employees that weren't always as high quality as we had hoped, then sometimes they didn't work out too. So some of that is mandatory, but I will absolutely look at the exit interview they done and provide you more information there. Amy, I'm glad you brought up about the clerks and senior clerks not above. Rayleigh felt like we needed to make an adjustment there for some time. I can tell you from personal experience years ago, trying to hire clerks at a tax office, well our salaries have improved since, but just getting, we might get 15 applications, but they've never, ever done anything except babysit. You know, they had no job history. There was nothing there for me to say, look, at least we gave them a typing test, you know, so I'd know if they could type. But a lot of those, I was just going on, gee, do I think this person is going to fit in and do I think they've got enough between years I can train them, you know, and some worked out and some didn't. But you're not going to attract the qualified people if you don't have, you know, a reasonable salary to offer them. And I think our closest senior court positions and I really think that's a lot of the turnover in the district clerk county clerk and tax office positions, which that's an awful lot of people. And like I said earlier, I feel certain that the district clerk and county clerk have the same issues as the tax office and that there's a lot of training for a long time that goes into getting this person ready to put them on the front counter and turn them loose with the public by themselves. Not taking up the time of somebody sitting beside them or over their shoulder, you know, guiding them along and to work with somebody like that for six months to a year and they're gone and then you start over with the next one that goes on that's repeated time and again we really do need to stop that. You know another thing is like for instance in the J.D.s office you got you know you have the regular clerk then you have a senior clerk and a deputy. and deputy, chief deputy clerk. Well, no one else has anywhere else to go. And so, you know, they, and those, usually the senior clerk, you see Barbara had 27 years there, and the other senior clerk, Barbara was the chief deputy. The other senior clerk, Kim that left, maybe a year and a half, two years ago, she had 27 years there. So those people never leave. So the people that come in, they have nowhere to go. So quite naturally, they're gonna get to train in and go somewhere else. So I mean, the key is maybe to create another position in some of those offices, so you'll have somewhere else to promote. You know they you know. Exactly. I mean I was get raised say that I would tell you that one of the biggest detriment in those smaller offices has is the lack of advancement. Not only can county government add stability, offer stability within job positions, which sometimes come with longevity, that means that those that are hired, opportunity for advancement. Now, you did say that our longevity is going down. So maybe that is. But I, some of the frustrations that I went through, and that I knew employees as a judge went through was they can't advance anywhere else. They can't go anywhere else, They can't go anywhere else so they might as well go. Now, so with that being said, I think that we should encourage, encourage advancement in other departments within the county that's not necessarily associated with the job. So what have they been doing? So the whole idea of hiring within and having the opportunity for those employees that have been with the county that another position opens up in another department, another area where they can have the first shot. You still want to hire the best person. Right. But they have the same, they have an opportunity to move, not laterally, move up over and up. Okay. Anything else? Yes, thank you. It's been interesting. Okay. Anything else? Thank you. It's been interesting. Is there any interest from the court in doing an engagement survey or anything like that? What's the engagement survey? Engagement, engagement survey. Then cost us any money. Nothing's free. Nothing's free. None of the things we're talking about are free. What kind of money are you talking about? What? On a higher rate consultant? I didn't say I want to. That is an option. Or another option would be to have IPMA do it for us. IPMA is the International Public Management Association for HR. They did a study and engagement survey about a year ago with cities and counties and state. It's a little heavy on state and county and they have kind of a baseline and they are offering to do it for other entities that belong which we do for $2,000. They would not come with recommendations. And that's, you know, when I said earlier, you have options if you wanna do that. I know that, for example, Tarrant County went out for proposals and they're gonna be spending a whole lot more than that on an engagement survey. And it was very important to them to not just get the data, but also to get recommendations. IPMA doesn't do recommendations. Their suggestion was if you went with them, it would be a lot less expensive. expensive, but then the county would need some kind of committee or group to analyze the data and make recommendations as a result. And I don't think they need to do recommendations. First of all, I would want them to give me the recommendation. I want them to give me the information and let me make the decision as in the county, IE, the Human Resource Department to recommend to us instead of having somebody else recommend it. I don't know about the recipe, I'll be able to. Well, I mean, as far as the data, I'd be interested in data, but more than the data to spend $2,000 on understanding their process so that we could duplicate or replicate that same process within the human resource department itself. I don't mean that somebody just strictly do that, but it's part of policy or even if you ask a different question on an exit interview or an interview when you're interviewing somebody. So I mean $2,000 to do that data to me sounds very, very, very, very, very, very, very reasonable. I think it's very, I was very surprised that they could do it for that much. I can tell you that they used the process,, I mean, they use the consultant to do it. You know, IPMA has very small staff. They didn't do it themselves, but they use the consultant to do it. And I believe that a consultant would be gathering our data and analyzing our data, giving us the results of the data without giving us recommendations. Good way to go. All right, thank you Amy, is there anything else? Just that I'd like to get some information together as a result of what you said today and maybe continue this conversation in December. Yes. Okay. Okay, send Jim Horn an email, continue this conversation in December. Yes. Hey, you all send him a horn and email wishing me happy birthday. It's his birthday to me. Jim, I prefer to Jim. Oh, all right. We are during everybody. All right. We are during everybody.