The indication of being given by a sheriff will Travis and our pledges will be led by our director of our health department Matt Richardson. We please stand. Morning, Judge, commissioners. Please bow your head. Doing a father think this wonderful day. Thank you, everything you've given us. Thank you for always being there for us and providing force. We always want to know that your number one in our hearts and your name will always be over the door. Please protect all the ones that protect us both domestically and internationally. Thank you for everything once again. Your name we ask it, amen. A 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 the Texas one state and God once indivisible. And it is. Thank you, gentlemen. 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 commissioners court, we ask that you please complete a public comment form. I want to remind everyone to please turn off your cell phones and pages. Item two is the consent agenda. Members, do we have a question on anything on the consent agenda? Do we have a question on anything on the consent agenda? Do we have a motion? I'm with the approval. Motion by Commissioner Eads. Seconded by Commissioner Mitchell. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, aye. The motion does carry. Consent agenda today consists of 2A, which is approval of order making appointments. We have two promotions in the County Clerks Office. We have two promotions in the county clerk's office. We have a promotion in the district attorneys office. We have four new hires in the county jail. One new, one rehire in the county jail. One promotion at all probation and one promotion in public health clinical. 2B is approval of the intro department transfers. 2C is approval of the Intra Department of Transfers to see as approval of Budget Amendment request 101-320 for various line items for public health clinical in the amount of $7,000. 2D is approval of Budget Amendment request 101-330 for other medical and physicians for public health project access in the amount of $6,097 and two E's approval of budget amount request 101, 370 for postage for district clerk in the amount of $6,500 to F is approval of budget amount request 101, 380 for interpreters for criminal district attorney in the amount of $2,500. 3A is approval of a resolution supporting citizen awareness regarding transportation and other infrastructure needs. Let me read the resolution. Whereas the 83rd Texas legislature passed legislation proposing a constitutional amendment on November 4, 2014, state ballot affecting the state's roads, highways, and bridges. Whereas this is a constitutional amendment to provide for the transfer of certain general revenue to the Economic Stabilization Fund, into the state highway fund for the dedication of the revenue transferred to the state highway fund. Whereas this proposal will allow revenue transferred to the state highway fund to be used only for developing public roads other than toll roads. And whereas this would require any State funds transferred to the State Highway Fund to be allocated by the Texas Department of Transportation, consistent with existing formulas to ensure that the entire State benefits from this additional funding. Whereas the proposed amendment does not establish any newer increased taxes or fees? And where is state transportation funding over the past several years has been supplemented by bond programs and those bond programs are now exhausted and have resulted in a significant level of debt for Texas. And where is the current state budget includes approximately $5 million per year in construction funding in will based on current revenue projections, drop the available funds for construction for the next biennium to only $2.5 billion. And whereas the proposed amendment would result in an estimated $1.4 billion per year for the state highway fund. Now therefore, it very resolved that the DEN County Commissioners Court encourages citizens to study and review the transportation and infrastructure needs of the state of Texas and to join the Commissioners Court in voting for Proposition 1 on the November 4, 2014 ballot. Chair will so move. Thank you. Seconded by Commissioner Eads. I'll in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed, Cine. Motion does carry. Other organizations that were involved in DRMC. I believe RTC everybody's starting to pass resolutions in support of Proposition 1 trying to get the word out to the public. So we really need for that to pass. So that's why it's on the agenda today and I thank you. For A is approval of scheduling the public hearing for Tuesday August 26, 2014 at 9 a.m. to discuss and take formal action on the proposed abandonment, abandonment, a gammon row of between South Paloma Creekard, and Ross and Roed located that kind of commissioner pressing to one. Motion by commissioner Collin. Seconded by commissioner Mitchell. In favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, Cindy? Motion does carry. 5A is approval bill report. Payments from CSCD, Community Corrections. TAIP shares, change shares, Profeature, VIT, Interest, DHA, Check FIA, TAI, P-SHAIRs, T-A-I-P, T-A-T, Interest, D-H-E, FIA, D-A, FIA, FIA, FIA, FIA, FUNZAR, presented for recording purposes on the Good Morning chains as well. The Board of Judges and Commissioners, I'd like to privilege the bills as presented with the two editions noted on separate pages. Are there any questions that we have on motion? Yes motion. Motion by Commissioner Marchant, seconded by Commissioner Mitchell. On favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed sitting. Motion carries. 5D is approval of acceptance of service agreement for our three purchase sweep accounts with Wells Fargo. I remember when we started doing this, James. Mm-hmm. The sweep accounts. We have questions that is there a motion? I'll make the motion for approval. Seconded by Commissioner Marchandr, are there any questions? Hearing none, only favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed to the Senate. Motion does carry. 7A is approval. Budget of the May request, one, one, three, five, zero, to increase revenues. Now, I'll get expenditures for contract services, for adult immunization program, DisriP grant, have $461,526 in disease case management program. This is also a DisriP grant, $462,526 for a total of $924,000, 52 dollars. Motion by Commissioner Mitchell. Thank you. Seconded by Commissioner Eads, do we have questions? Hearing none all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Mr. Nguyen. Motion does carry. 7B is approval of Budget Amendment Quest 101-360. To increase revenues, now, I'll take expenditures for salary, assistance, benefits, and various operating line items for public health, foodborne, EPPI grant in the amount of $32,398. Motion by Commissioner Marchant. Seconded by Commissioner Coleman. Other questions? Hearing none, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, sitting. Motion does carry. Seven C is required by law that we officially designate somebody to calculate our rates. So that's why this is on here. Seven C is approval of the designation of the Texas Assessor Collector to calculate and publish the effective and rollback tax rates for date and county for a tax year 2014. Here we go again, Michelle. Chair will some move. Seconded by Commissioner Eads. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, aye. Motion does carry. 10A is approval of the final flat for Jupiter, addition phase E. This is in the Commissioner for. Motion by Commissioner Eads. seconded by Commissioner Mitchell. Are there questions? Very none. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, aye. Motion carries. 13A is approval of appointing Judy Clements, Randy Hunt. She is the Flowers in Jeffrey Scott Gibbs to the Dave and Connie Historical Commission. I'm a approval. Motion by Commissioner Eads. Seconded by Commissioner Mitchell. All in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed to the name. Motion does carry. 14 A is approval of merchant payment card processing agreement between DEMC County Texas and Tyler Technologies incorporated for CARD processing services for the DEMC County clerk in the amount of $7,821 with funding to come from auditor in line item 0.4 I'm sorry 014 to 5 6 2075 and 016661 2075 is recommended by the date and county clerk Yes, your microphone's not on I don't think is it not on yeah, there it is. It just wasn not on. I don't think. Is it not on? Yeah, there it is. This wasn't close enough. So they still ask me for three years? Well, it contract has now been changed before it had a three-year period and why did they basically raise the price any time they wanted. And now it's it says that they can only raise the price with Commissioner's Court approval. Okay, but they still want a three year term. There are 30 days, gate clause in it. There's not. I'm still not good with three year country. Anything you all want to add? Not really. Just no. Good morning, Judge. Good morning commissioners. Thank you. I don't have anything to add to that necessarily, but I would like to say that this would tremendously cut down on the work in our office. Right now our clerks are taking phone payments all day long. It's a lot of work on them. They're struggling to get the cases filed and that sort of thing. So this would really increase the efficiency in our office. So I just wanted to kind of add that, but other than that, I don't have any information on the contract, sorry, but we do have a team here with any of the questions that you have on the actual. I'm not against the contract, I'm just against the contract terms. We talked to them about a 30 dayscape clause in the contract? I don't think I did. I think I just talked to him about the pricing issue. So I mean, I talked to him a bit before. It went on the first time and they rejected all of it. But I bet they would probably do it. You know, they know the court's going to reject it otherwise. They probably would. And I'm sorry I didn't. Didn't. Is this. About that before. I guess my concern is. Is it going to cause problems if we hold this for another week and go back to him and say we need a 30 day stay cause in the contract. Not really. Let's do that. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. 30 days. You say, 30 days. That's standard, I believe. Okay. Brett, what's 30 days now? Yeah. Okay. So there'll be no action on 14A today. We're going to take 14BCD and E together because they're all collection contracts. 14 B is approval of 2014 at a local cooperation agreement for property tax collection between Denton County of Texas and the PowerPoint Independent School District is recommended by the Denton County Tax Discessor Collector. 14 C is approval of the same type of arrangement between Denton County and the City of Corinth as recommended by the tax collector. 14D is a pro-alloo collection contract between Denton County and one Denton County Fresh Water Supply District number 4A2. Denton County Fresh Water Supply District 8C, 3Belmont Fresh Water Supply District number 1. 14E is the same type of agreement between Denton County. And one clear creek watershed authority and two oak point water control and improvement district number two. The chair will so move for approval of all four 14 BC DNE. Seconded by Commissioner Eads, questions. Hearing none, all in favor, please say aye. Aye opposed to any? Motion does carry. 14 F is approval of a construction contract between then kind of Texas and challenge, installation corporation, RFP 1-2-1-3-222-3 for installation of security turnstile. The dent and kind of courts building in the amount of $64,945. The funding for the project to come from 2014 Tax Notes, Courthouse Security Improvement Project, Auditor and Line Item 8275379010. Are there any comments or questions? Do we have a motion? Motion by Commissioner Marchandt. Seconded by Commissioner Coleman hearing no questions. All in favor, please say aye. Opposed, Cine? Motion is carried. Well, we said a lot of time for budget done. Let's go to item 15, which is executive session under Texas Government Code 551.072 Delegation regarding real property. Close meeting to deliberate purchase exchange lease or value of real property or a deliberation in an open meeting would have a detrimental effect on the position of a governmental body and negotiations with a third person regarding the value of real property located in different kind of commissioner, piecing for and with that we learn executive session. There'll be no action on 15a today. 16a is our budget workshop which is a approval of any action related to the fiscal year 2015 that kind of budget. We need a break or are we ready to just go ahead and get started? Okay, I think we're ready to get started. Go ahead, Donna. Good morning, Judge and commissioners. I gave you all packets to go in your binder as well as an agenda. And what we will refer to as the changes sheet for the next three weeks. This is a list of all the appeals that have been submitted. You'll see that the bottom line is just under $1.5 million in appeals for your consideration. We were able to schedule everyone for today, so we'll get through all of the appeals with one exception, and that is the probate court. Judge Robinson is out of town this week, and so she'll be presenting her appeal next week to you in court. You send us a holding packet? Yeah. Information. Yeah. I think there's 90 some odd pages there, so you might get started on that now. Exactly, that was my point. Okay, the first item on the agenda today is from the purchasing department. This is an appeal for a new hire, which is a sourcing manager. That information is on page one of your changes sheet, or if you want to refer to the backup detail, it starts on the under the appeals tab on page A1 and the appeal is also for one pay grade higher than was recommended by the job assessment committee. Good morning. I'm always excited to start off the appeal process. I think I'd rather be last but but I have already mentioned this position to you in executive session when we did a review on the need for it, but I just want to touch on a few things. This is the addition of a position that which also reorganizes our department. It's a sourcing, manger position that would be over all of our buyers. So we have three senior buyers and two buyers, and this position would be over that. As you know, we have been working on lots of extra projects for the last about four or five years. The construction projects and the technology projects have really been a burden on our office. We have worked real hard to find other efficiencies, move projects around, reassign commodities, all those things, but we're at a point that it's not working real well. And so we feel like this position will relieve some of the stress on Scott and I for managing the construction projects and the technology projects, which as you know, take years to complete. I think I've worked with both of our all of you on some project at some point. We do believe we add value to those projects and we probably spend more time on them than other purchasing departments would, but in Denton County, you know, we established that construction management team. And we work very closely with technology and the construction management and expend a lot of time, but we also believe we're adding a lot of value to that process. In purchasing, we're not a revenue generating source other than our surplus and some rebates and things. But we do add value in saving on all of our contracts. If we do our job well, we're protecting the county well and financially and legally. But failure to do our job can result in a lot of contract issues, change orders, and inferior products and services. And so it's our goal to maintain the level of quality that we have. I did ask for a pay grade higher than was indicated by the evaluation committee for ranking the job. My main concern is that it would be an internal equity problem. My senior buyers are professional exempt employees at a grade 12, and it was ranked at a 13. So this position, even if I heard them at 16% above, would be less than two of the employees and the same as another. So it's difficult to say you have full supervisory control over the employees when there's that discrepancy there. I'm also concerned I might have trouble hiring someone at that level for those responsibilities. Because it will be the manger that if Scott and I are not available will be making decisions and contract decisions. And they will have authority to obligate the county contractually. I did in my appeal reduce some of the MNO items that we will try to take care of either if it's proved either at the end of this year or early next year. So I'm, you know, we've not had a new staff member in nine years and we're filling the pain. And I know other people are too and we've tried our best to maintain, but we feel like we really need this. Considered it very carefully and would not have asked if I didn't think we really needed it. I'll be answering any questions that you have. Questions and members of the court. Thank you. Thank you, Beth. Okay, I think like we have done in prior years, I'm going to hear all appeals and then we can start making decisions on things. Next is technology services. There's a list of some reallocation requests, which we'll have a zero impact to the bottom line. They're also looking at requesting two additional new higher positions that we're not recommending to budget, as well as some reclassifications in the records management department. So I know Kevin has a quick slideshow he wants to go over with you with regard to his appeal. And good morning. All right. It is. Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you all this morning. We're going to try a little Skype demo, but the video didn't work very well this morning. Try that another time. Jennifer Pickler is our office administrator. She's going to speak first about the records management reclassifications. I'll turn it over to her. Good morning. We wanted to just go over a few statistics about records management and give you an idea of what we've been working on this year and the reason why we're asking for reclassification. Currently records management has over 28,000 boxes in the warehouse. We have 1.2 million files, 56 million documents, and we process over 2 million documents to microfilm, scan them each year. So we're quite busy with paper, but our goal is to work on moving to a paperless environment as much as we can. We did request a reclassification of two key positions, the record supervisor and the assistant records manager. The reason, well, and I also want to go over some of our, the things that we've accomplished this last year and tell you why we're looking for reclassification of those positions. We've really been focused on trying to increase our visibility as a department, being more available as a training resource with regard to general knowledge of records management, records retention. We've coordinated with the Texas State Library this last year to offer countywide records training. We worked on updating the list of liaisons for each department and have initiated meetings with those liaisons to start improving their knowledge of the records management process. We also updated the records management resolution with a focus on making sure that we're meeting all the expectations that are listed in the records management resolution. We've also identified and implemented an automated archiving solution for social media. We found that that was a need that was missing within the county, so we identified a resource and we are rolling that out. And the purpose of that is to ensure that departments can comply with open records requests and records retention requirements. So that's what we've done so far. What we're wanting to do in the next year is look at the option for an electronic content management solution. The purpose would be to facilitate the creation of a central repository for all county records. That could be integrated with the individual applications used by different departments. That would give us greater control, it would give us the ability to streamline processes, make information quickly and easily accessible, increase transparency, and eliminate unnecessary compliance risks. The reason why we're requesting reclassification of the positions that we requested is they will be vacated this year due to retirement. We see this as an opportunity to bring in some individuals who have more technology skills to help us move forward with managing electronically created documents. So what we, the reason why we're requesting the reclassification is we need to find, we need technology savvy records managers so that they can train and be a resource to county departments, elected officials, department heads. They need to have an understanding of how to integrate all of the individual applications using the various departments with an electronic content management system. They need to be able to have the knowledge and capability to identify, develop, and execute a solution for the management and retention of email. That is something that we're behind on and we definitely need to get a handle on how to manage the amount of email that we work with on a daily basis. the amount of email that we work with on a daily basis. We need the people who fill these positions to be an expert in their field, with the ability to interact, communicate, and provide needed training to elected officials, department heads, and other county employees. And it's going to be very important that we are able to facilitate a culture of digital information awareness. As we move forward, many local governments have already implemented in using electronic content management systems. This is something that we need to work on and catch up on. So we see this year with these reclases as an opportunity to bring some people into the records management department with some technology skills so we can integrate the records knowledge that they have with the technology knowledge that we need to be able to move forward with managing all of the electronically created documents that we have within the county. all of the electronically created documents that we have within the county. Okay, so that's it. I just wanted to give you an overview of what we've been working on, the reason why we have requested the reclass. What we're working toward is being able to tackle all of our electronic content. So I appreciate your consideration of this reclassification. I thank you to Amy for the memo that she sent. And do you have any questions? Any questions or members of the court? Thank you, now. Thank you. I'm Poo. I'm approval to today. The second that? We didn't have a pay greater. Even though your presentation didn't work. approval to today. Second that. We didn't have a pay greater. Even though your presentation didn't work. There's information in your packet on page 8A that we inserted last night from the email that Amy sent to court. I've made some notes on the bottom so you could see what the potential range was assuming that oppositions were to increase at the maximum level that human resources indicated. So the impact could be anywhere from $3,521 to $14,766. However, those positions will officially need to be reviewed and a ranking provided to them before we know the true impact of that. Okay, let's go forward with that first. Okay. Thank you. All right, thank you. The second appeal request we had was for video equipment. This was for a digital camcorder and wireless microphone kit. The digital camcorder would have, give us the ability to record different meetings, informational videos, and public service announcements. As an example, like we've done a video of retirement seminal hers in the past and things like that. The wireless microphone kit can also be used separate from the cam porter as a standalone system where it's necessary. to use separate from the camp quarter as a standalone system, where it's necessary. So we couldn't, this is a, I guess a question for you, Kevin or Donna. Could we not pay for that this year out of some departmental savings? I mean, we need to purchase it. That's something we want to be doing more as a PSA and so forth. But that's something we can't handle this year. We could definitely look at it. I agree. We'll take a look at that. The last request are two new employee requests for the desktop support technical services division. That's for a mobile systems technician and technical services administrator. division, that's for a mobile systems technician and technical services administrator. The purpose of the mobile systems technician is to be responsible for all of the mobile technologies that we support. For example, the textbooks in the law enforcement vehicles, also for NCAR video systems, the wireless equipment, officer body cameras, license plate recognition systems, and all the server software related to the mobile technologies. Also to provide assistance to the local public safety agencies with the CAD and RMS systems that they support through the mobile technologies. And lastly, one of the things that we need the most is a technician who can actually stay on site in our office to provide these services. Currently, our technicians are designed to be out in the field. That's the purpose of them. If they're in our office, we ask them to leave. Go fix someone's computer. The help desk stays on site to answer calls. They're the ones who say in the office. So this technician will be able to stay on site and help with the law enforcement and public safety personnel that stop in Technical service administrator So the screen here is so small They're responsible for basic technical support and administrative duties Currently a lot of those duties are being handled by our health desk manager So we'd like to rather than requesting a technical resource, which is more costly, we're asking for a lower cost technical service administrator to offload some of those less complex issues from the health desk manager. So basically the net result is we'll have, by freeing up the health desk manager, we'll still have that technical resource available through the help desk manager by taking off the administrative duties. Some of the factors in creating the demand for the new staff, just the large growth in the use of technology in county departments, the amount of equipment that we're supporting and installing. the amount of equipment that we're supporting and installing. Just in the last year alone, our inventory size, that's for all the computer equipment, network equipment, software licenses, and everything that we manage our inventories increased by 9.5%. Which is a pretty large number, so you figured that we're involved in a lot of procurement. So that increased about that percentage, the installation, the support, and then the tail end, surplusing the old equipment. That has also increased as well. There's a growth in the number of supported county staff, a number of buildings and courts and other departments. New applications and systems that are implemented by other county departments. Increased number of open record requests. I think in the last year, we spent an exorbitant amount of time processing open record requests now, more so than we ever had before. And then also increase demand for audio video services. So just kind of looking at some of our workload measures, pretty quickly, looking at our application development team, they handle about 30,000 webpages, documents, and images on the website. They develop an on average 15 new custom applications each year. And currently they're maintaining 184 custom applications that have been previously maintained. Similar to the highway system, the more highways you build, the more of your money you devote towards maintaining them rather than building new ones. So we have that same similar situation with application development, or at the point where they spend most of their time maintaining existing applications. Some of our other workload measures, we manage about 158 contracts and maintenance agreements, almost 1200 software licenses. We process about 1,300 user request forms each year, that's for adding and deleting users. At any given time, we have approximately 10 facility design and construction projects, which is very taxing on our department. We're supporting about 100 different departments and public safety agencies. We're supporting almost 1700 employees and most of them are county employees but some of them are temporary or state employees and we receive about 120 new technical service requests each day. We're supporting almost 2,000 computers, 1,025 network devices, over 1,100 printers, and 369 servers. Storage-wise, it's kind of an amazing number. We have 620 million megabytes of storage, so for all of our document imaging and it's growing very quickly every day. We support 3,500 active telephone numbers, 1700 telephones, 1,029 voicemail accounts. We do approximately 176 after hour calls to the health desk every year. And internally technology services We make a receive 54,000 phone calls a year We manage 675 access control readers 936 surveillance cameras, which oh my goodness. That's a lot 115 communication rooms 65 buildings with network connectivity and we're now at 37 miles of Denton County Fiber and growing. So I think it'll grow out in Carrollton in the very near future actually. So the amount of work that we're doing is increasing drastically and it's really difficult to maintain with the current staffing levels. Some of the other factors affecting the demand, the complexity of the IT environment, the bigger the county gets, the more complicated everything gets, and recently we've noticed a more frequent outages in downtime for the users. Insufficient training and skill levels. Our staff doesn't have the time or the money to be able to train on everything they support. When you look at 369 servers, there's about twice that number of applications. You know, five people in the server team. You can't be an expert in hundreds of different things. It's just, it's not possible. Insufficient resource time to properly maintain systems. That's part of what's kind of leaning towards or causing some more of the outages in downtime. Large increase in security risk and vulnerabilities. We get notices of new vulnerabilities almost every day that we're trying to mitigate. So, you know, a lot of times we're just chasing our tail, you know, before we have time to fix the So a lot of times we're just chasing our tail. Before we have time to fix the last one we heard about, another one's already been released. And also increased time on management of staff. I think there's been a decrease in morale the last couple of years, just because of the workload. People are kind of getting burned out. As the economy's gotten better, they've noticed uncompetitive salaries, and you know, when they've noticed other municipalities around here hiring for more and things like that. And obviously, the addition of the records management division, that's taken some of our time, addition of Sheriff's Office technical support. That alone has increased our technical workload by about 20% for telephones and computers. The other thing that's relatively new since we took over Sheriff's Office support is just having walk-in visits from law enforcement personnel to sport their toughbooks. So a lot of times they've just started their shift. They can't get logged in or they're having problems with their laptop. In order to get on the street, they need to get technical help from us. So they'll stop into the office and need help relatively quickly. So that's been relatively difficult for us. Last year we supported about 121 walk-ins. I'm sorry, in 2012 we did about 121. 2013 is 167, so that's about a 38% increase in walk-ins, which leads back to why we really need to have a technician stay in the office all day long. We're providing support for 30 external public safety agencies who access the county's a sunguard and firehouse systems. And the other thing that's been really difficult is the after hour support, the Sheriff's Office and several other agencies, you know, work three shifts a day, they work 24-7 and our office works 8-5, we have one shift. So when the Sheriff's Office does a change, after, you know, two shift changes after our offices are closed, those people need technical assistance also and that's really difficult to provide them the level of service that they need. We've done calculations on ratios to try to better define what the correct number of technicians is and we took information from Gardner Group and some other industry standards and their suggestion based on maturity level of Denton County is about 135 supported users to one technician. And we have details in the back of material that was included in the budget appeal booklet with that calculation information. So with these two requested employees, that would bring us to from about 250 to 1 to 190 to 1. So it's still above industry standards, but it's a lot better than 250 to 1 to 190 to 1. So it's still above industry standards, but it's a lot better than 250 to 1. I will say though, in next year's budget, it looks like there's approximately 46 new computers because of the growth in the courts and jail and juvenile and things like that. So that would actually bring us back up to about a 200 to 1 if these two employees were approved. One of the things that we really take seriously is the effect that we have on departments. We have a fairly large effect on their ability to be productive and to work. As time goes on, because departments are using technology, more and more in their day-to-day job, when the networks down or the servers are down, they can't get very much work done. So we take that very seriously, because of that, we track the approximate cost so that we can put a dollar amount to the downtime that's caused. So a major network outage, we've experienced several fiber cuts in the last year and we've experienced two network outages. We calculate approximately $37,000 an hour in loss productivity whenever the network's down. So for eight hour a day, that's $297,000 in loss productivity. That's based on about a $22 an hour average salary. So that's a huge number for us. And so we realize that every minute, every hour the county's down, employees aren't able to work. One thing that we've developed the last several years are service level agreements that we're implementing with departments. That just helps track our responsibility and tries to set a standard response time. So perhaps a new computer installation, you'd be okay with a week for us to install it. But if there's a major outage, you would expect it to be completed immediately within an hour or so. If it's a smaller problem that affects just your computer, perhaps you, you know, would expect that in a day. So based on that, the number of breach service level agreements that we've had in the last year was 601, which we equated to about $560,000 in loss productivity beyond what they agreed, agreed amount of time would be in the SLA. That's about double, actually 105% up from the year before. So that just means that we're completing service requests more slowly. We're beginning to put together better metrics so that we can determine where our needs are in different areas. And this year, we did request several employees. We're focusing primarily on public safety, law enforcement, for the application support positions, and then for these two on the technical services team. You know, primarily the desktop, laptop support, and you know, the desktop related applications. But there are a lot of needs in other areas that we're not addressing that, you know, at some point in the future, we will need to address. We have needs in the application development area, just to continue to maintain what we have. And I'll say out of all of our departments, they probably, and per FTE, deliver the biggest bang of buck to the county, they probably, and per FTE, deliver the biggest bang of Buck to the county, because they can develop custom applications that need a department specific needs, more so than they can, and you know, buy an office shelf application. So that's very valuable. A desktop team, even with the addition of these two, I fear we're going to still be behind the curve on providing timely response and repairs. Our infrastructure team has a real big deficiency in being able to support the security vulnerabilities. It's just difficult to keep up with it. The server team, they currently have five people. They're pretty significantly understaffed. I'm supporting 369 servers. It's just, it's too much for each person to specialize in and know how to properly support. And then records management, although, if they're current staffing level, they're able to maintain pace with what they're doing. I mean, there's tens of thousands of files that aren't scanned or microfilmmed, which eventually the county needs to catch up on. And there's millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of records in electronic format that aren't being addressed. I probably say in this room we have probably several million email messages amongst us. I might be a million alone, I don't know. But there's a real big demand in that area as well. So that's really all I have. I believe these two requests, although it's difficult to ask in a tight budget year, is really something that's desperately needed so that we can provide the support the county needs and keep everyone operational and productive. Thank you. Thank you. I have a question. So, remember, just a question. I have. Go ahead. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I have had and I'm sure you have with other court members in particular with the support of the CAD system through the law enforcement through the Sheriff's Department. In our discussions we had discussed not necessarily a new hire but an increase, you're proposing an increase through that alliance or understanding with the 30 other agencies that you are provide additional services to them. Is this mobile tech grade, that position one of those support services? Yeah, the mobile system's technician will not directly be part of the public safety support and enhanced service that we've discussed. The intention for them is primarily to support Denton County, law enforcement and public safety personnel. So supporting the arbitrators and watch guard and the tough books and rockets and everything that the sheriff's office and constables and emergency services and the other agencies are using. But there is some impact on public safety agencies because we do have public safety agencies that are running the county's CAD or RMS system or firehouse. And they have a problem on their laptop. And we can't always determine if it's the software problem that we're responsible for, or if it's a problem in their Windows environment or in their hardware itself. So a lot of times we need somebody to get on their laptop to a troubleshoot to figure out if it's our problem or their problem basically. So, what I was trying to understand was the new mobile systems technician associated with that program rollout that you want to roll out. Is there an association with this new technician with that rollout? It's very limited. I'd probably say maybe five percent of their time will be devoted towards non-Denton County public safety agencies. So the local fire and police departments. The two application support technicians, those would be dedicated to public safety application support, so more on the software side. So the Sunguard, CAD, computer-rated dispatch, records management system, and firehouse and Odyssey. So they'll focus on those applications, and there's two of those, and those are the ones that are supported through like an enhanced in enhanced service fee. And go ahead. I know that y'all took over the computer support services for the Sheriff's Department. And when y'all did that, there was a transfer of employees correct? That's right. What's different between the service level provided by the sheriff when they had those technicians and it is not what's going on now? It seems like they were able to do it when they had those people over at the Sheriff's Department but now that it it's with you, we need more employees. Right. Well, I'd like to think that we're providing better service to them. But they were under staff before we took them over. And we are aware of that. Also, we took over their telephone system, which was not maintained by the staff that we took over. So that increased our telephone support by about 20%. That was handled by their technical services team previously. Or, I don't know if that was right or not. I forget the name of that group. Technical services team, okay. My question is, did we leave some employees behind at the Sheriff's Department and when we transferred the responsibilities over? No. No, the only thing that we assumed that didn't have positions associated with it were the telephones. I'm wondering if we transferred all the responsibilities that was being handled by the technical staff, by five people, and then you transfer all the responsibilities over to you, but you only transfer three employees. Right, yeah. You leave some employees behind, they get reassigned, and now you ask for additional employees to do the same work that you did. Yeah, pretty, pretty competent in saying, we didn't leave anyone behind. I know. So it's just, like I said, they were understaffed before we took over their support and just over time the you know their work loads increase our work loads increase so the the demand in our department is increased because of that. Let me show you. Did you have something? No. Okay. And I guess Commissioner Martian answered my other question was the mobile systems technician, that's not for the additional services to the local government on any small town. Yeah, we're not proposing to support their laptops or catholics at this time. That could be something we can discuss in the future though. That's two positions. Those two positions that you're referencing have been included in the recommended budget already. Just to refresh your memory on that. The two positions that will be funded with contracts with cities are included. Thank you. Thank you. Any further questions? I would not thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Any further questions? I would not thank you. Thank you. Our next item on the agenda is, uh, the elections has an appeal for two election technician positions. There's information in your packet on page eight, 28 and on page three of your changes sheet. The impact of this request is $106,168. Pardon me? Thank you very much. Last year I did. Thank you. No problem, Kevin. Good morning. No, it's hard to come up here and ask for additional employees. It really is. What I want to talk about today might be a little different than probably some of the appeals you'll hear. Our problem isn't necessarily not getting the job done because we are getting the job done, but it's how we're getting it done. If you'll remember over the last couple of years, there's been some issues with contract labor or temporary employees that have been utilized in a long term capacity. Last year we took one of my long-term temps and Donna approved that as a regular employee. And at the time I think that a discussion mainly revolved around how long we had utilized the specific temporary employee. So the one that we had the longest term last year became a regular employee in this current budget year. Last November and you have all this in my back up, I want to point out some things to Amy sent out an email to the departments that it looks like utilized the most temporary employees and she made some points there that, you know, we need to look at how we utilize in our temporary employees and their long term viability was only one of the things to look at. And she asked that we look at how we're, how we utilize them and what kind of control we have over them. There were some tests that she attached that were from the IRS and the Texas Workforce Commission and I took those tests and it wasn't pretty. We failed or I say we we fell in just about every category of whether that person should be used as contract labor or if they should be a county employee. Amy and I have had some discussions about this. It was shortly after this email was sent out. We haven't discussed it recently. So my appeal is based on the people I'm using should be full-time employees. Now I'd normally keep about four temporary employees at a time. Now we'll utilize them for a few months, then we'll lay off for two or three months, depending on what elections are coming up and what year we're in, and then we'll pick them back up for several more months. I would like to say one more months. I noticed that Donna had put an attachment of what I requested for contract labor, and I believe it's somewhere around $51,000. That's just part of how I pay for contract labor. A lot of my contract labor is paid for at a checker 19 state funds. So I just want to be clear that 51's not an entire amount that I spend on contract labor every year. It just doesn't come out of the county budget. I did do a, it was kind of an informal survey of some neighboring counties and whether or not all neighboring Williamson's not. I looked at their voter population and how many employees they have and came up with a per capita. As you can see between Dallas Terrent Collin and Williamson we are by far the most per capita. If you extrapolate their per capita into how many employees I would have, it ranges from 12 to 16 and right now I have 10. Before I came this morning I looked at the comp time that my employees have on the books. It totals up to about 170 days right now. The problem is I can't let them take it. I don't, we don't have the time. Before the years over with, at least half of my department will probably lose a lot of vacation because they can't roll over more than 160 hours. I got one now that has 218 or only halfway through the year. And I've got elections coming up in September and November. So are these data entry? Well, what are these positions doing, Frank? Right. Good question. Part of the test is from the IRS and Texas Workforce Commission, is are you using these temporary employees to do your core functions? And that's an absolute yes for us. Everything they do to us is a core function. It's data entry on new voter registration cards, changes. That's why I put the numbers at the bottom. You can see there I put last year's numbers on how many new registrations we got, how many cancellations and changes. Just those are about 52,000. So each one of those requires manual data entry. We utilize them for that. We utilize them for our mail ballots, stuff in mail ballots, stuff in letters, mailing letters. I mean, they truly are part of our core function. If I wish I had stuff other than core functions to perform, but I don't. It's strictly core function. And I don't know if Amy has other thoughts on it or ideas. It's just, I mean, I think it is what it is. I do believe that, like I said, I normally keep four temporary employees, but I believe if I had two regular employees that are there all the time, you know, not, you know, skipping months at a time within that they would be sufficient. Questions from members court. I believe that's it. Thank you. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you. His back up is on 80 28 members. You're asking for two people, right? Correct. I have a question. Are you saying that under the workforce commission that they're required to be employees, I mean, or you're just saying that they're required to have their 941 IRS paid because you can always have contract employees or through a temp agency, you know, I think that test on there is whether they're actually contract employees. In other words, whether they get withholding in all that. I think for a risk of purposes, I think, right? I think maybe that's a question for Amy. I mean, the way I read it, you use these tests to determine how you should be. We have long trading that employee as either contract labor or as an employee. We have been advised that it is a problem to have long-term, long-term temps that are clearly everything in their job is controlled by the county, their schedule, their materials, the duty state perform, that they don't pass the test as intermittent workers or part-time workers. Or part-time isn't the word I meant, but intermittent temps. We don't have them all over the county working for a long period of time. I don't have them all over the county working for a long period of time. I want to point out that the counties that I put up there, they do not utilize long-term temperate employees. The one that you're probably most familiar with that we compare ourselves to a lot of times that does is Fort Bend. They have about 50,000 less registered voters than we do. He's got nine employees, but he also has six temps that he said has been with him for many, many years. So, he's in the, I think his are pretty permanent, but they are in the same boat I am. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, next we may go out and turn a little bit since we're ahead of schedule. The sheriff is here to talk about his appeals. There's information on page A154 of your packet. There's also information starting on page 6 of the changesheet. The appeal today is for two sheriff transport deputy positions, as well as three sheriff patrol positions. Thank you so much, Judge, ministers. Sinciel for hearing us out. As always do when I get up here to the podium, I like to thank each and every one of y'all for what y'all've done for so far. However, the only reason we're up here is just to, our county's growing, we need to meet those demands. And so that's why we're here. I can't thank Donna enough and Donna, I mean as always Thank you guys Outstanding job however. We're gonna talk about the transport deputies first as you can see in your paperwork We've supplied a lot of data for you and we want to follow it up with a few remarks and then we'll move right on to the extra patrol deputy the follow it up with a few remarks and then we'll move right on to the extra patrol deputy. The thank you again, the one deputy that y'all have given us will be a female and will be doing the transport. So we thank you for that. The additional court responsibilities which we need additional transport deputies for is going to be for the 431. It's going to be taken on a criminal docket. The new court, the 442nd, is primarily civil. It will be accommodating a lot of CPS cases. And as you know, there will be a lot of defendants and a lot of guys from our detention facility coming over there, which is going to be required to have armed personnel within those courts. Increased responsibility and jail health. Last year, or at the beginning of the year, January 1st, the 14th, we forecasted 13 hospital visits. We're already at 31 so far this year. So it's a tremendous increase in what we thought we'd have. Our medical transports to the doctors is increase, but it's going to increase quite a bit because of the new tower that's gonna be coming on because we'll be picking up, we'll be right at around 1600 inmates at that time. So it'll be picking up quite a bit. And we need to meet those demands. Right now we pull from existing jail staff. We have seen, by pulling from this, we've seen a huge increase in our comp time and over time, so we're trying to keep that to a minimum, keep that down as well. And last, and then we have, of course, our hospital visits. There's sometimes when we go, I don't know if you all recall the one where we were denting it, shot the individual and we had to stay in the Plano Hospital for, you know, several months just guarding this individual. And we had to do 24-7 around the clock over in Plano just watching this guy. We have an increase in those types of things that we need to have. And last but not least with this it's officer safety. Just having the proper people in the courtroom to provide for our judges, our courts, and everything that's involved with that. So, anyway, we'd like to get to where our transports are not done singly. We had an incident on the highway the other day where one of our guys was coming back from Dallas County and they're using carrying three inmates. One of the inmates got out of his handcuffs and got a tire iron. Our guy got him back under control. So we need to have double guys out there when we go outside our county. That's just real important for officer safety. Thank goodness we had a big enough guy on that transport to take care of the problem. Okay, our next one is gonna be the deputy, the patrol spot. You know, Y'all, Donna's already recommended three. Well, we started off asking for 10. Donna recommended three and we're asking for three more for total of six. We know by decreasing the, if you all look to your charts here, you'll see that what we've done, you have the current patrol districts on the top and you'll have what we would like to go to given a six total patrol districts if we're able to pick up the six additional officers. So that's what we'd like to do if we can reduce the time it takes by reducing these districts, it's gonna reduce the times. And right now we're running about 14, 15 minutes on response calls for priority one calls, and that's calls where something's in, there's a dire need for our service, and we're getting there in 15 minutes. And we really need to do better than that, as accounting, I think, is a response time for priority one call. The, let's see also the impact the more people as you know we're moving into this county and we definitely need to meet that demands. We've got, I don't know if we're the third largest growing county in the U.S. but we're huge right now and we're continuing to grow and we got to stay on that and meet those demands. We don't need these response times getting any longer. We need to get them shorter so that people have trust in us. So anyway, that's pretty much my statement. If you don't have any questions, I'd love to answer answer for you. I have both the chiefs here, chief Georgia, chief Clemens to help me out with any problems. So if you guys, you know, if you'll have any questions, please ask. And members, the backup material here is on A166 senior. And then to tell you what, I'll make you a deal. You give me the three more deputies, I'll buy the three cars warm. Deal? Bob? Or no deal. I'm just kidding. I'm tempting, but okay so there's to you requested 10. Yes sir. And we have four districts now and so Donna you recommended three which would reduce the the patrol size and if we did an additional three So walk us through the the six zones here you are one of your deputies that the how the these zones would work and back up and so forth because I think it's important when we look at the response times And these are priority one calls that we decrease our response times. I think it's important when we look at the response times. And these are priority one calls that we decrease our response times. I think- Right. If you look at the current Sheriff's Deputy District map, which does not have the red on it, this is the one without the red, that's currently what we're operating right now, which is if you look at AB, C&D, those represent the districts that the Sheriff's Office currently operates patrol. By going to a six-district revision map, as you see in red, what that will allow us to do with the six additional deputies, if those are granted, it puts a deputy in each one of those six districts in addition to supervisors that are basically serving as a rover to those particular districts? Now, this is what we're proposing as a revision to that district, to these districts, because with the current constructions that are going on or in many of our roadways, that is impacting a lot of times our response time to certain areas. So I'll use this as an example. If you're looking at the red map, for example, deputies in district one and four will back each other up. Ones in two and three would back up and three in six back up. That's not saying that that would happen each and every single time, but that's the idea that we're looking at and the patrol deputies and supervisors we've looked at and studied. Now when I say there'd be a deputy in each of these districts, that's on each shift. Now you may ask the question, well what happens if someone gets hurt, someone gets sick, how does that affect your, you know, your manpower? Well what would happen is we would adjust our manpower to make sure that we're totally covered during those peak periods. And the peak period for us, if you look at our particular Sunguard system, is going to be the, the evening shift. So our midnight shift would be where we would adjust. Now, I don't give an example. Probably we would adjust districts one in four, or one in two to be able to work as one district in those deep nights, anything after two and three a.m. So that's kind of our backup plan to address that when we have those issues, because it's gonna happen. We have it happen quite often, we're deputies either getting to a tussle of someone, they get hurt, they've got to be on workers' comp or be out for a little bit, those things happen, or deputies involved in an accident. Another plus by going to the six districts and having a deputy in each of those districts, in addition to how we're able to reduce that response time, by having smaller districts, more districts that are smaller, the deputies are able to not have to travel as far. And by doing that, our hope, and of course, your hope would be, and of course, you know, risk management hope would be, is that we will reduce the number of accidents that would occur as a result of that. Unfortunately, we look when I review the regular videos or our deputies making responses to either back up a deputy or trying to get to the scene. You know, these deputies are doing a very good job to getting the scene. It's just that I feel like we are putting a lot of pressure on them to respond to these scenes at speeds and things that nature having to travel long distances. And that happens pretty regularly because of the size of our county. If you were asking how we're doing it right now with the four districts, the four districts, or basically, even though a deputy may be assigned to District A, that really doesn't mean anything because if something happens in District D, they're gonna have to go to that if someone else is tied up. So that's our particular proposal. We feel like that would be the most beneficial to the county. The three deputies that the budget office had suggested to the court just does not put us to be able to do the six districts. If we are given the three, we're probably going to have to stay where we're at with our districts right now and just include those into the mix or into the matrix of the schedule. But the additional six would allow a schedule and a revision of the district maps to give us that opportunity to be able to reduce that response time. You know, increase the preventive things that were a lot of times we're unable to do. You know, the preventive patrols and things of that nature. Hopefully that kind of helps explain kind of what our position would be on the additional districts. Yes sir. You helped me out just a little bit because I've had this question posed to me many, many times and sometimes I can answer, sometimes I can't. I'm in a very highly concentrated area with population and municipalities and not as much county, unincorporated part of the county. In the like Keralton or the colony Frisco Artilittle LAM which are primarily the municipalities within within area number six that you said what would be your capacity as a patrolman in those areas? I know that we tried to put in a satellite there in Carrollton and you didn't utilize it. And so we shut that down. What capacity do you work with municipalities in the unincorporated areas that would dictate having specific officers are assigned to a highly populated or are Corporated part of the county Well, there are going to be certain pockets of the population that would fall in the uncorporated area of the county and of course in those particular areas And I want to say is it the, is it the Frisco Lake I'm thinking about? But I get the area between the colony and Frisco lakes that is all ours out there. And I'm going to say, you have a frisco net, but when you come across the Lake River. Frisco Ranch. Yeah, Frisco Ranch. And then you have all the area right there that is south of the That's not answer my question my question is what do you do in those high those areas that are corporate? That have their own municipality that have their own police force? What what do you do as support to them when you have that okay? Patrol deputy assigned exactly well as you can imagine as large of our county is that we do get calls for service to assist the incorporated the municipality police departments if there's something going on those areas that would flow into the county. I mean, for example, we had a situation yesterday where we had a couple of Carrollton officers that we were meeting on a particular situation. We do that pretty regularly. Last week we had two days of a situation we were dealing with Frisco and the colony. So we are working day in day out with these other agencies. How many calls for service are we conducting that are back up to those? We have what we call in our system, the agency assists. So we conduct those. We just, and we get calls pretty regularly about something that may be flowing over to us or has an impact on us. I'll give you an example of burglars. A lot of times burglars that may burglarize in the county when they're finished with their particular, you know, tasks, they're heading back into their particular municipality where they may be from. So a lot of times that's where, you know, we're working on that. For example, this morning we had a similar situation with a particular someone that was stealing copper or metal and was trying to take it back to another place to get it, you know, sold so it'd be melted down. Those things happen on a regular basis. I can't give you, I'll talk my head right now, but I can get you a number. I'm asking for that. I'm asking for how I respond, you know. Understand. And how do you respond in those areas? And let me ask you this, why would they call you if they could call a DPS trooper? Because a DPS trooper, there's going to be more deputies that would probably have a quicker response time than a DPS trooper in these particular districts. Even though there's highways that are from the troopers there, we still cover. Right. I'm just, you know, we have in those, not only we have your layer, which I believe is the overall layer of the initial law enforcement, the layer of the entire county, then you have the constables as another layer. The constables are another layer, excuse me. And then you have the municipalities are another layer. And so there are three different law enforcement layers that have the possibility of any given time could take care of law enforcement in a majority, not a majority, but a majority of the population centers of our county is that a fair statement? Sure. Travis, you can answer if you want to. Well, just, we, the, you know, DPS, they'll answer calls if we ask them to help us, like on date nights, a lot of times, we'll be right. At the call on them to help us. They come into the only corporate limits off the highways to give us. But we just don't, you know, the, the cost of a job is, you know, they're great. They do their work and everything. We don't, you know, I guess the, I don't, I'm not really sure what their hours are, but they don't have a deep night session and all that section and all this kind of stuff. So, you know, back then it's just, it's, all it's out there is just us. And I guess what Ron is probably trying to ask and I have the same question. Why would you need more offices, control offices in the municipalities that have police departments? And that's, I think that's where you're going with that. Is that like a lot of these areas that I'm seeing like in five and six that are incorporated areas. And why would you need more patrol deputies there when you've got those law enforcement there? I read it. There's one point. There's one point. A few pockets of unincorporated limits within those. Yes, quite a lot. I think part of it is if you were to remove even these, and first of all, I want to thank the sheriff for appealing this, because I think it is something that we need to look at. Part of it is providing backup and assistance for to cover an officer who is in an incident or arrest someone is going in route to the jail. Someone needs to pick up their capacity at patrol and provide that backup. And so I think it's two life safety issues. One is just a response time. If you look at the response time for a priority one call that he provided in the second. And I agree with your comments, what would be the role of the Sheriff Patrol officer in the incorporated area. I get that question, I still understand it, but I think part of it is just providing that additional backup of a troll sharing these regions and providing the new district. Smaller this one. I understand it in all the unimcooperated areas because nine times out of ten, you know, you may provide backup for a Louisville or Carroll to, but you're not going to be the lead officer on that. I don't want to be back in a month. Okay. Okay. And then vice versa with the smaller agencies. You know, we do do a lot of their crimes and we do a lot of their swath, their narcotics. We support them wholeheartedly. Any other questions? I'm still trying to wrap my head around your new deputy districts and I know as the commissioners court we can't tell you how to sign your deputy. One of the things that's my priority is if you have some large population centers in the unincorporated area that were the primary responsible for. And I would echo, I guess, Bobby and Ron's comments, I think they recognize that we're required to provide law enforcement. But I'm concerned that I've been forwarded in several articles that I think y'all, somebody had mentioned that there've been promises made to provide additional law enforcement to the to the Lantana area. And you know, to me, I think Lantana probably needs additional law enforcement, but there's quite a few more special districts in the county other than Lantana. I mean, you know, there's Pulumacriaks, Savannah, Ortizia, and a lot more districts coming up in the north part. They pay for additional deputies, but like I said, Bobby, we're there. One of our problems is we're already supposed to provide them with law enforcement, right? And to have a valid contract, you have to provide something you're not already required to provide. And I want to make sure that the unincorporated area is our priority and that I'm not asking for you know the area that I represent to have a priority over and these are anybody else's but I am asking we need to take care of our unincorporated area first. I can tell you I was at a meeting in the north part of the county, and a police chief asked me to step into his police car. And he showed me the CAD system and he said, look, we spend most of our time responding to calls in the ETJ with our very small police department. He said, look, look where all the patrol deputies are. They're all down in this out part of the county. He said, we can't afford to keep doing this. And so to me, I just want to make sure, because one of the things I said is my budget priority was additional deputies. And I just want to make sure that the districts are equitably assigned throughout, regardless of whether or not they pay for additional law enforcement, because we are required to provide them with the base level. Now, Gallup heard me wax probably way too much about his difference between municipal type law enforcement and rural type law enforcement and how we've allowed, you know, high density municipal type areas to exist in the unincorporated area and we owe those residents a duty and it's higher than a normal, you know, low capacity type service. But it's a reality. We need to take care of it. And I just want to make sure that we are equitably handling those concerns. As a pollot. What is geographic preference? I look at this map that he's submitted and you're right, we can't control their patrol. He just can't do it. But I look at that and it looks pretty evenly divided. And I don't think it's about, this is not a conversation in my opinion about districts or not districts. It's about cover, it's about response time. And I think it's important that we look at the response time. If these are in the unacorporated areas, these responses for the unacorporated area, which we have direct jurisdiction on correct. Correct. Okay, so if this is our direct responsibility for the unacorporated and you're exactly right commissioner, we do not need to be relying on our goodwill and cooperation of our municipalities to bear our burden, as far as being the first responder. So I think this is a good step into increasing the patrol presence, hopefully because of the geography would be reducing for each one of the districts, it would be reducing the response time and allowing the floaters and it sounds like the supervisors would be rovers too, which instead of six districts here, you're looking at seven or eight people, a presence of city. You're looking between seven and eight that would be on a shift. And one thing Commissioner wanted to come in to comment on that. The map, the proposed revised map, it's not necessarily said in stone. I believe that once we start working by getting staff on board, we'd have to tweak it a little bit, all right? And so you're right, we have to concentrate on those population pockets that are directly responsibility of the sheriff's office. And that's really, this was a starting point for a map. So. If I wanted to draw y'all districts out of run for sheriff, so I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to tell y all how to do it. I'm just, you know, like we do is we tell you what our budget priorities are. And to me, I would like additional policing in the unincorporated area. I think that Bobbi and Ron make an excellent point about how we handle stuff in the incorporated area. I always think that we can assist with crime scene services and detectives and stuff like that. But our police presence in my humble opinion that are served in the incorporated areas. One thing that we've also discussed in doing, and it kind of goes what you were talking about Commissioner Marchin is being able to utilize a strategic placement of substations throughout the county. And that's one thing that we are going to do because for one thing we believe we can save money by doing that, by having deputies placed in those particular areas. And hopefully utilizing current fuel stations that are in those particular areas that are county owned so that we're not having to have a deputy from District 1 drive all the way back into the city of Denton to be able to get fuel and things of that nature. So that's one thing, you know, that's one thing we'd like to talk to you about in your particular precincts about those particular road and bridge, fueling areas and things of that nature, obviously it's something we would have to work either with the budget office on or with purchasing on relating to being able to make sure that those charges are being carried out properly. But that's another part of this overall plan. Again, this is kind of a starting point, so it speaks to start working toward that. Thank you. And please remember, if you give us the extra three, I'll buy the floor. And the equipment. And equipment. And equipment. No, I do have. And equipment for the court. I do have a quick question. Would you want us to change your appeal to show those expenses going being added to your sheriff's Forfeiture budget? Is that what you're thinking? Are you gonna write a personal check? No, yeah, she's good. She's good. I warn you. She's good Sure Okay. Okay. Sure. We've had a request for a five-minute recess. We say I'd better get my microphone on. We're reconvened. And what do you want to start with next time? Okay. Next on the agenda is County Criminal Court number three. Jeff Gilmore is here to discuss the training and education reduction that was made in that department. The appeal today is for $7,600, $8.00. Morning. Morning, Judge. I'll be back to you about 10 minutes later. I'll be back. I'll be back. I'll be back. I'll be back. Hey, go ahead. Board Judge, commissioners. I prepared a statement for you. All by half a judge. Garcia and the entire Veterans Court team. Thank you for your commitment to Denton County Veterans Court. Through your support, we're using this vital program to change the lives of those who have served. It is my honor also at this time to present each one of you. The court coin. This coin is presented to each participant who graduates from our court. The coin is the symbol of the graduate success in our program. It also has a token of our appreciation in which we recognize the changes each veteran has to make in their lives as they participate in the court. As of today, we have had two graduates from our program and one recently back in that June. I'm here today to follow up on the email, Judge Garcia sent regarding the notice of the appeal on the recommended 2014-15 budget. The success of our court impart is based on the qualification of skills of the ones who are on the team. And in order to assure the continued success of the participants, the team has been expanded and must be kept up today on the newest information and technologies. Thus the continued education and training of the team is pivotal to the success of our court. They've already had the Veterans Court Conference in DC last December. They also had their second one in May of this year, which we did not get to attend because we didn't have the funds. We have submitted a grant for this next year to receive some more training funds, but that amount will only be about $2,500, which you'll allow for one team member to attend. The expansion of the Vesemist Court team has enabled us to assist the court participants in making needed last-all changes changes as well as address their ongoing needs of their participants. With our community resources as a result, we are no longer able to provide the necessary training to our extended court team rate at 3767 per year. We respectfully request an increase in the allocated funds of 7,6008 to help other members of our team go to training. The current amount that we have is basically set aside for criminal court number three, and there's mandatory staff training they must attend to. And that's per the budget line. There's no additional monies for veterans court and that's what we're requesting. Two defense attorneys, one family study counselor, a clinician and three mentors, volunteer their time to come to our courts, which lasts from noon till 1600, they're longer dependent on the situation of the veteran or the needs of the veterans. And getting these trainings for our team members is vital to help us stay current with the most recent trends that are going on and updates so we can actually help our veterans even more. Any other questions for you? Yes, ma'am. I realize we're getting close to the end of this budget year, obviously, but are there any training sessions going on between now and October 1, that if the funds, we were able to find the funds in this year's budget to send them to some training in that short time period? I don't want to lie to you, ma'am. There may be, and I can research that, but I haven't projected that. I'd like to know that. I know the next Veterans Court conference has been established at this point. Hold on, I'm saying that. No one's going to go to the conversations gone on here. Miss, you're going to go ahead. All right. Turn your microphone on. They're not paid for it out of this year, even if it's in the next calendar year. If they do a PO for it out of this year, they're not. They found the money. So that had to be between now and the end of this fiscal year. You can pay for it out of a separate year, can't you? This question is if they'd go to the training next year but we pay for it out of this year's funds. I don't think they know where it's going to be yet, so I'm not sure. If the course is available, say sometime October, November, December, and then that timeframe, can we dedicate the funds to it out of this year's budget? Well, we have a practice fairly common practice of paying some Registration fees and such at the end of this fiscal year for a conference Early next year that's not uncommon at all if you would research that I think we kind of draw the line It you know paying one in this year for next June or something that kind of doesn't make you know It's kind of that's kind of draw the line, you know, paying one in this year for next June or something, that kind of doesn't make you know, that's kind of, that's kind of, that's kind of, that's pretty far. But I actually just purely out of timing, some lot of registrations might have to go in this year when the conference is actually in the next fiscal year and there's really no way around. Even you get the early, you get a discount for it and it's not uncommon is the question. As long as that. That would be my request is to research that if we can find something, say, between now and the end of the year or even January, that we could pay for it now and it would totally eliminate your request hopefully. Yes, ma'am. And we're looking into that. They just haven't established the next veterans court conference. Sure So that's maybe it may not be the conference, but some some type of trainees. Yes, ma'am Additionally, we're grateful your consideration in this request again. Thank you for your support both financial and In spirit in the veterans court program It is our goal to continue to help our veterans in our county. And I can also be brief, brilliant, and be gone and explain the coin to you if you want to. Go ahead. The coin that you have in front of you, of course, on the front side with the Texas flag didn't count the Veterans Court. If you turn it to the side, it's shown as it's flown and then as it's turned as you see the courthouse basically is why the star is offset and what we like to say in court is that that star is offset because we're not perfect we're imperfect we have to continue to grow in our lives on the backside if you look in the middle that is the city United States of America and the other seals are representing all the branches that we have in the military and who have served us and who we are trying to serve at this time. And on the outside of the coin, it does state. It takes a strength and encourage a warrior to ask for help. And that's what it does from the experience we have dealt with dealing with veterans now. They're tough, they're strong, they don't really want to ask for help, so that's what we're trying to break so we can get them the needs and resources that they're willing and ready to deserve. Pension your questions, ma'am, that's all I have. I think questions from members of court. Thank you very much. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Okay, next on our agenda is the district clerk is here to address appeal for a new assistant chief deputy position on page four of your changes sheet. The impact is $76,797. Well, hi, good morning. Give her waiting. Sorry. Thank you for waiting. Oh, no problem. We're not too far behind schedule here. Let me give you. I have another couple of pieces of paper to give you. Yes, ma'am. Oh, sure. yo, thank you. All right, I am here, like I said, for, or like Donna said, for an assistant chief deputy position that we had requested. Now, we had originally requested two positions. One was the assistant chief deputy. The other one was for a software application manager. And just for, I'm just going to call that a SAM, okay? I said, just viewing that out every time. We did this. Obviously, the county has grown over the years. We added a court in 2011. We're adding another court January 1st. The Supreme Court came down yesterday and mandated electronic filing for all attorneys. The changes that this has brought over the office have just made a second review. Y'all know that I got a new chief deputy last November. Mark's come in from like the outside world, and it's kind of nice, having a new set of eyes and some different inside on it. So he and I really reviewed the office and just the organization before this budget came in. And instead of a deputy clerk three, which we said what two years ago when we talked about getting this court, we decided and determined the best allocation, reallocation of the duties in the office with service best that have an in-assistant chief deputy. This was, it's a similar position to the administration department manager and the county clerks. This is a position that they've had for well over 10 years and I have not had. We would really like to mirror that role in this office and think that it would serve us the best. What you do feel, like I said that this position is extremely warranted, that another thing that it would help with is retention. I mean, I've lost over 17 employees in the past several years, either to other departments, to other jobs, higher grades, higher pays, or to local attorneys. Therefore, while I felt like I was a training ground for local attorneys, people would, you know, you'd have somebody really good up at the front counter and they'd be real impressed and so they'd offer more money and off they'd go. And every time that happens, of course, all the investment that we put in the training, you know, is gone. At the minute, our deputies are absolutely pushed to their limit. One of the things that I gave you prior was a chart just showing the discrepancy of the staff to population ratios in some other counties. We are definitely way up there. Now I didn't list all 254 counties obviously. This is just a random list of the clerks that I did email that responded to me. So we are to me way off the chart, where at the bottom of this and our clerks are really, like I said, just pushed to the limit right now. Plus, we know we saw the survey that the human resources did. Plus, our clerks are only paid at like 80% of the average right now. So it's almost like work work work and then we're not even going to pay you as much as you really should be. I do believe and I talked a lot about this about the staffing. I think some of those counties on that list are overstaffed. I get that, calling county has 69 people. That's a little much to me compared to ours. But I think that we are definitely understaffed, way understaffed in comparison. Anyway, the creation of this Assistant Chief Deputy, like I said, will provide a higher grade level position. This will provide the needed management that we could use in the office, and it will also service an avenue for court advancement. I've got some great employees that I don't want to lose, and so this would give someone an opportunity to step up, and maybe I keep them in the office and not lose them to another department or to a local attorney. department or to a local attorney. I also gave you one of the things that they handed out was like a little history of our employees that we received over the years. And you can see in 2011, we requested one that was approved and that was in conjunction with the 431st District Court coming in. We didn't request any per couple of years. I requested two last year. Neither got recommended or approved when I did the appeal. So this year we came in and asked these two. So of course the SAM got recommended. Now we're asking for this other one. When I talk about the SAM, I want you to understand that it wouldn't matter if we had three courts or 30. I have to have this software application manager with Odyssey's very complex. The E-filing system is extremely complex. I don't know if you've had any opportunity to play with that yet, but it's confusing. We get a lot of phone calls. It's been very time-consuming. Having someone in the office to deal with that and the coding, the configuration, the setup, the training is critical. And a lot of this over the years with Odyssey and even with the E-filing, I stepped in and was part of it. And I can't do that. That's really not, I don't think the role of the elected official of this. That's not really the role of the District Clerk. So I have really kind of backed off of that. And I have an employee who is doing that already pretty much. And obviously doesn't have the grade, doesn't have the pay for it, but I've stuck it on her. And she's having to do this. So in my opinion, this same position, it really doesn't matter about the new course. This is something that's just needed. So we got one position in 2011 for the 431st. If I don't get another one, I mean, what that boils down to is getting one new position, new, one more district court support position, even though we've added two district courts in five years. That's just unbelievable to me if we only had one position with getting two new courts. Let's see. The other thing I gave you, I know one thing that's told to me was about a financial impact that I know money is important. You know, you've got so much money to spend, so much of it's mandated. On my end, it's not so much money, it is time. I have so many mandated duties that have to be done that's just required. So there's just not time to do the things that are not mandated. You have to cut funds somewhere, and that's why we're here repealing it. I have to cut things that take time because I simply don't have time to get everything done. Two things I wanted to give you about the financials. One is copies. We don't think much about copy requests. You know, these are not about pending cases. These are just people coming in and asking. Last year, in FY 2013, we had over 8,700 copy requests. It brought in $166,000, just for selling copies. All right, that's one thing. We are mandated to do that. The other mandated thing we gave you is I'll give you that inmate court cost list. Inmates, when defendants are sent to TDC and they are there, they can have a trust account for various and sundry items that they can use for it. There is a statute that allows the court to sign an order for us to send to TDC and with hold funds, not their whole account, but a certain percentage of it, for their court cost and fines, child support even. So there was a law that allows that. We did that for a while and then there was some issues and some lawsuits filed and so the TDC stopped honoring them and then they started back up in 2010 and so that's what you see on that spreadsheet is whenever we started sending them out again. That is something we've had to stop doing. We simply do not have time to do it and so that's why you see it's gone down. We sent 408 garnishment orders to TDC in 2013, fiscal year 2013. So far in 2014, for this fiscal year, we've sent 56. That number's going down, it's going to continue to go down because I don't have time. But the staff to send them out. So that's one thing that I intend to definitely start back up is not only to do it on the people who are going now, but this is retroactive. There are people sent to prison for very long periods of time and they've got some money in those accounts. So we can actually go back several years in send garnishment orders on those. So I mean that could bring in some money, but like I said until I get some help, it's just not happening. That's something we had to stop this past year. All right. All right, there was not two cents. You have questions? Okay. You have questions for me. I need to get some. That means. Why is assistant chief deputy this year instead of a deputy clerk three? Looking at just the roles and the duties of people are three. Looking at just the roles and the duties that some of the people play and how they've been farmed out to people who this is going to give us the opportunity to have some more administration. I mean right now it's me and the Chief Deputy and there could be some help. There's a lot of reporting. There's a lot of statistics gathering. There's a lot of reporting. There's a lot of statistics gathering. There's a supervisor. One of them, I've got several positions in the office that really don't fall under criminal or civil or jury. They really need to fall more under administration. And those people are reporting right to Mark instead of to having another supervisor over them. So this is what we're looking at. We think it would just be a serve of the office to have an assistant chief deputy in place. Federal practice and the ECF system for the federal government is tremendous. You can look up if you have any person who's a member of the public can get on pay-ser. And if you don't charge more than $20, it's 10 cents a page. You look and look up any lawsuit that's filed in federal court in the United States or any of our commonwealths. I don't know why we can't Get on the website and pull cases off or pleading off for a case that you're not entered into. I don't know why we don't do that. I mean, because it forces you to go down and request copies. In particular, if you get appointed to be an ad-lite them, y'all don't catch that. So you're not an attorney entered into that. And so you have to run down to the courthouse, get y'all to make copies, and then give it to the attorney, which is something that could be very easily handled over the internet. The federal government is crazy about ensuring their local rules are followed when you do filing. I'm on the local rules committee for the Eastern District. The clerks reject stuff all the time, but you don't have to go to Sherman or Plano to go get the items. Everything is available on the web. And I think if you could, I mean, why haven't we implemented those efficiencies? I think that would relieve a tremendous burden on your staff. The Supreme Court has come down with even newer rules, with standardized codes for the e-filing, and they're very strict about sensitive data. I was pretty strict on that anyway. There's a lot of things in the family cases that Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, fake account numbers that I had no intention of putting out on the internet. Just for anybody to go on and get and get copies, I'm not going to do it. And then the Supreme Court has come down and first off they've really limited our rejection reasons, our rejection reasons. We are not to reject. It's been beat into me over the years at the clerk. It's a ministerial duty and that you don't make those judgment calls. And so now they've come in with a sensitive data issue and attorneys aren't always following them. It's amazing to me how creative and imaginative attorneys can be. So we're dealing with the filings that don't fit the criteria. I don't believe it's the clerk's role to reject it, that I don't not have that authority to turn around and just reject it because it doesn't fit some criteria. I think that's a judges' role. It is not the clerks. So I'm going to take it in. They also say in the Supreme Court mandate that if you have documents that do have sensitive data in them, that you are not to put them on the internet. So they're coming down even stronger. So some of those counties that do put stuff out there or having to pull back. I understand, but you're typically the honest to not put out confidential information is on the attorney, not on the clerk. Right. But you've taken on that role. Yes, I have. But you're not required to. No, I'm not. And you get into federal court, you have to certify that you will not to close any confidential information and make contract. They track everyone. I just, to me, I just think that's an efficiency that could be implemented that would save a tremendous amount of manpower. It could. I guess in part of it. Technology. Well, part of it's commissioner is that you are dependent on deputy clerks to catch. Like you said, if they don't catch that you've been appointed as an ad-lite them and added to the case because they are going to miss that stuff, they're also going to miss whenever a court orders one document sealed. They're going to miss things. And so if I am required to not release a document and because it wasn't marked right or checked right or caught by one of these little deputy clerks and it does get released, that's more trouble. It is much safer also to not release data that you should than it is to release data that you shouldn't and I'm going down the safe road. I understand. I mean, what's to stop somebody from just going down and requesting a file that has confidential data? You're required to turn it over to them if it's available and not redacted. You can alter the documents so you can physically go do it. You could. You're just providing an obstacle barrier entry. It's a barrier to get in if you have to come down to get it, yes. Well, it's a difficult situation because I think you're making a lot of work for yourself and then asking for additional employment. I think in my mind it's an ethical question, and that's the route I took. Well, like we both agreed, the really the onus is on the attorney, not the clerk. Yes. Anyway. I know, and we've covered this point. I said, you know what, the next clerk that comes in might have a different view. I share this opinion with many, many, many other clerks out there. And this is just where I've made my stand. And to be fair, I'll tell you, you know, I still acted in the bar. I was at a meeting the other day. I had a lot of people come up to me and say, why is the clerk issuing all these deficiency notices? And then when you do it you can't get old if anybody over there to tell you why it's deficiencies. Why? Well when they issue a deficiency notice and the clerk will say well not a lawyer I can't tell you. Well you've kicked it back as insufficient but then you won't say why. Oh of course not. Are you talking about this call? Yeah I'm talking about the clerk again. The deficiency notice I don't know what you're... When somebody files something and it doesn't meet the requirements though the computer program will kick it back and say it's ours will Yeah, I got one on my email right now. I can fuss and do you was it returned? Some reason I some of those are are Return by us We do our best not to reject stuff. We take things that I would love to reject But again, I've told the clerks don't take it in if it doesn't fit. I'll talk to you about that later if you really want to go to E-biling. It's not me, but it was something I was appointed to be an ad-l item for. So somebody else in the case got something kicked back. It's a work in progress to be sure we were supposed to go to this new standardized codes like three weeks ago and we're still having error issues come up so we haven't put it live yet. So it is a monster. Electronic filing is a monster that we're dealing with right now. So, we're agree with you on that. Yes. And we didn't have a choice. Frame court came down with this last year and we all went what? There were a lot of clerks that didn't even run for election again because of this so because about ugly it is. I agree with you it's a tough deal but it's been done previously. The Fed's been doing it for- We're working on it. 15 years. Okay, are there any other questions from members of court? Thank you. Leave not. Thank you. Leave none. Thank you, Chair. Okay. Our next item is an appeal from the Criminal District Attorney's Office. We have Jeff Fleming here. He's the Chief Intake Attorney in that division. There's information in your packet on page A139, and on page five of your changes sheet. The request is for a new felony intake attorney with the impact being $113,713. Morning. Morning. Thank you for waiting. You're shooting yourself. No problem. I know we're running a high, so I'll be quick. I want to start off just by pointing out that, and I'll reference everything pretty much from 2007 for two regions one. That's when Mr. Johnson came into office. And number two, that's when I was brought into the intake division, so that's kind of the natural point for me to reference. Since that time, at least that time in 2007, there have been no additions to the intake department as far as personnel go. Despite the fact that there have obviously been increases in workload, I mean that's just natural with the counties increasing population wise and you're going to have an increase in crimes that go along with that. And those are reflected somewhat in the numbers, the actual numbers themselves, but the numbers don't tell the whole story and I want to just briefly touch on that because they can be misleading. As far as just give you the numbers up front, again, 2007, the Intake Ranger E Division handled 12,315 combined cases. Last year, 2013, we processed 13,322 cases. That's over 1,000 cases increased without any increase in staffing. But again, that doesn't tell the whole story. Part of it is, those numbers are kind of skewed because of things that we've done intentionally to try to put out a better product, but they don't reflect then in the numbers and briefly some of those to illustrate in 2006, that's the year before I came in there, the decline rate for the Denton County Criminal District Attorney's Office was 35%, which means 35% of the cases that filed by police officers with our office were declined, summarily, without going to grand jury or anything, just gone right up front. In 2013, that number was 13%. That's a huge, huge, huge change. And those things don't just happen on their own. That was obviously efforts that we undertook that take a lot of time. Part of that has been training, and not just the intake division, but a lot of it has been on our division to train police agencies for better quality of equality to help cut down on cases that should have never been filed or cases that were declined before that are now prosecutable because of that training. Some of that training has been formal. Just last before last I spent four out of five days of one week down at Flower Mound every day, training police officers, which takes time. And when I did that, then one of my other staff had to cover a grand jury, which I normally cover every Thursday, which then obviously she couldn't keep up with her case loads. So that's the formal training. We also do a lot more informal, I'd say training or availability. One of the complaints or one of the suggestions when we went around talking to police agencies when Mr. Johnson came in was a lack of communication with the intake department. Officers just couldn't get a hold of people and partly because they were busy. They had a lot of cases and we tried to rectify that as much as possible. We tried to become way more accessible, but of course that takes time. You have to set aside what you're working on to return phone calls or to answer phone calls. Now I think that's, it's been a good result, which is evidenced by the lack or the decrease in decline rate. But it's taken a great deal of our time. Because as the intake department, we're kind of the first step that law enforcement has with our office. So where are the ones that they call for pretty much everything? Which personally is a position that I enjoy because I like talking to the police, but that does take a lot of our time. Another thing that's kind of shown or it doesn't reflect in the numbers that we've done, it's more of a change in philosophy as far as case filings. And I'll just give you one example, one of many that are similar. We have an epidemic going on called car hopping. I don't know if you'll familiar with that term. Car hopping. Car hopping is usually a group. Sometimes it's one person, which usually get two or three of these criminals that will get together and go out and they'll usually hit a neighborhood or multiple neighborhoods and they're checking every car in the neighborhood for variables. And you'd be amazed at what people leave in their car overnight. But this has been a huge epidemic and they'll get 15, 20 cars in a single night. Break into those and steal things out of it. Previously, the philosophy was that you would file 15 or 20 burger-river motor vehicles. Because that is what they're committing. Those are misdemeanor offenses. We've made a change. Now the law allows to aggregate thefts. If you get over a certain level, if it's based on a common scheme or course of conduct, well now instead of filing 20 misdemeanor motor motor vehicles, we're filing one aggregated theft. Now we're still handling all those, but it reflects as a single case, and that's part to show why the numbers don't exactly reflect the increases we've had. And that's just one example, criminal mischiefs and other ones similar. We file a lot more engaging in organized criminal activity now than we used to, which will do the same thing by taking multiple cases and put them into a single one. Another area where the numbers don't reflect the increased burden is in the complexity of cases that we're seeing. Our crimes are becoming more complex and unfortunately our criminals are becoming more complex. In a couple of areas again, just as example, that we're seeing as an identity theft, that is a huge growing area, not just for Ditton County, not just for the state of Texas, but all over the nation. Some of these criminals are very sophisticated, and some of their systems are very complicated. You can actually get a valid credit card number. There are algorithms that you can download off of the internet that you punch that number in that will give you hundreds more valid numbers based on that if you've got a valid one in this algorithm. These criminals can take that then and they have these like card readers you can buy these things that you hook up to computer and you can actually imprint numbers on that magnetic strip on those cards. So we're having officers that are finding these people that will have thousands of numbers, sometimes imprinted on cards, sometimes just on a piece of paper, but you've got to go through then and go through each one of those and try to find if they're valid and if they are, get a hold of a victim and you make contact with them. So these are kind of areas that we're dealing with, the police are dealing with and we're dealing with when we get these cases. The other area that we see the complexity is kind of going through the roof is in technology. Everybody now has a smartphone. Yes, everybody's got, you know, personal computers. These phones are also GPS devices which are great in solving some crimes that we were previously not able to solve, but that's increased the workload because you have to go through a lot of data now to find those little gems in there or a lot of GPS, I mean that's some of the most complicated stuff I've ever had to try to sift through. So the case is just take more time, quite frankly, to work through. And not just when you get them in your hands, but leading up to the filing with our office in helping law enforcement, all of these things when you have like the identity theft or you need bank records or records from credit card companies or on the technology when you need the GPS records or you need text messages or something from Verizon or 18 to your whatever require a piece of paper. And whether that be a grand jury subpoena or a title 18 order or a search warrant quite frankly sometimes you know some of these require a search warrant and will help write. While all those involve either myself or a member of my staff, signing, reviewing, signing, going over these orders, specifically the Title 18 and the Grand Your Speeders, which by law require a signature. So that too takes more time that wasn't there before. And again, it's just to illustrate how maybe the numbers don't tell the whole story of the increased burden. The last thing I just want to hit on quickly, because those are things that we've seen coming. Those are things that have gradually just kind of increased. What we didn't really see coming, and it's kind of been a big hit, and we're still trying to figure out all the implication is this last year, January 1st, the Michael Morton Act went into place. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but the Michael Morton Act is a complete overhaul of the discovery in the state of Texas and how we do criminal discovery. It has added, I burden across the state, where we've always had an open file policy since Mr. Johnson's been in office But these added requirements to actually seek out additional evidence that we might not have had to seek out before which take time And a lot of times it doesn't and I don't want to mislead you and say that all falls on the intake division It doesn't it's impacted You know the entire office, but we're taking our share of it as well And additionally not just complying with the act, we're also as the first point of contact with law enforcement, we're the ones who are getting all the phone calls from police agencies. Going, do we have to turn this over or not? Is this work product or is this not work product? Is that's one of the exceptions? And again, it's things that we don't mind doing, but that's even more time that we're taking away from our cases to deal with this new provision. And again, like I said, it's not, we're not handling that solely. It's not just falling on us, it's falling on everyone else, but that's just shows an added burden along with everything else that we've been dealing with. So with all those things in mind, we are requesting it's a felony intake position a felony to which is the lower pay grade felony position Have any questions Any questions from members of court You're none. Thank you Jeff they split the full time into two part time, right? Correct. That's kind of gone back to one to two to one kind of over the years. Correct. It's a two now. Yes. I think they probably need another one. The office and the population is grown, but anyway. Thank you, Commissioner. Thank you. Thank you. And you noticed he said he liked talking to the police. I'll just remind you all. It's Charlie Flunningaming Sun that you still care of the apartment. Who is good people? Good folks. All right. Okay. Our next appeal is facilities management. On page five and six of the changes sheet you'll see their summary of appeals as well as on page a 146 is the backup data. The request is for two new maintenance positions, one being a maintenance assistant and the other being a maintenance repair specialist one. Also, a reclassification consideration of the landscaping project manager position that was included in the recommended budget is also included on your changes sheet. I believe the committee met yesterday and is recommending the higher pay grade that he is appealing as well. Good morning, Judge commissioners. I believe this is the first time I've appealed anything and I don't know if that's a good thing or me or Y'all've done a really good job of taking care of our needs. I'm going to think it was that one. But one of the things, I want to talk about the landscape Specialist first. The reason this is coming back to court is that we struggled with trying to find a position similar to that in other counties, other cities. And when we initially did it, I did it wrong. I was just the only way to say it. And thanks to Amy and Michelle and Dale's hard work, we were able to come up with another position which it That's more in line with what we were actually looking for what we're looking for is someone to manage those contracts I think that is very important in the direction that the county is going with our landscaping Our landscape our facilities look good the new facilities facilities, they look good, they're very appeasing to people and we want to keep it that way. I think the amount that we're looking at is about $12,000 difference in what was originally budgeted or requested. The other thing that I'd like, the other two jobs that I'd like to talk about, these are contract laborers. And yes, I'm probably abusing the system on that. I'm pretty sure I am. The one that I'm requesting, the two that I'm requesting, one is a tech one. Last year we paid, or this year, we will pay approximately $50,000 to the company to have this employee. What we use that employee for is, he's a maintenance tech one in basically. And what that person does is he helps with all the electrical issues. If we have other projects, we can pull him off and put him doing that. To me it makes sense to for $5,400 to make him an employee with benefits and vacation time. One of the big issues that I have is because he's contract labor, I have to pay him to use mileage. Last year I paid right at $2,500 to him in mileage. Or he has to ride with a tech. That's not reflected in this amount. On the other one, he's a mate, he's just an assistant. He helps with whenever John is out working on the sprinkler systems or the other guys are moving furniture or if the other tax need a helping hand, that's what he's for. That one's a little more expensive That one's a little more expensive to make him full time. One of the other things I'd like to bring to y'all's attention is that we have right now 717,000 square feet that we maintain. We're getting ready in the next week or so to take on the juvenile the new juvenile expansion which is approximately 54,000 square feet So that puts us around 770 thousand square feet that may maintain industry standards I can't say that word but um calls for about 47 to 48,000 square feet per tech. Right now I'm at 12, which I should to be able to maintain the facilities according to industry standards, I need 16. I have 12, but that doesn't include these two employ these two people. Questions and members of the court? I'll silence. Also, with part of the appeal, you'll notice if the position is approved, there's a reduction offered up in contract labor for of 23,000 for the maintenance assistant and 17,000 for the maintenance repair specialist one. Okay. I think that concludes our morning session unless there are a couple of corrections that I'd like to present to you. Basically, item number 15 on your agenda. Constable, precinct five. This is actual reduction that we would bring to you. We made an error in our office when we included wireless service in that budget. The amount should be 4,336 and it was 6,343 dollars in the recommended budget. So it's a $2,07 savings. This has been discussed with the Constable and he's aware that we're bringing this to you today as a change. The other correction would be for constable precinct six. We tried to implement a formula for tires and tubes. As you know, we're getting SUVs, the tires are more expensive to replace. Our office just missed this. We should have increased that line on them by $1,500. So it was in our notes to do that, but it just didn't make it when it got keyed into the system. So we'll be asking the court to consider increasing that line items. I think we should go ahead and take care of that now. You all okay with that? Okay, I'm going to make a motion for approval both of those corrections. Seconded by Commissioner Eads, questions or comments? We're going to end all the favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed to the city? Motion carries. With that, I guess I've moved all the constables up to 130. So far we've heard from all but constable precincts six that they can be here at 130. So we'll have the discussion since three of them are appealing their cell phone reduction for the constable, elected constable themselves. We've tried to schedule that all at the same time, so as to not duplicate discussion. And then there are a few other appeals from Constable precinct, two, three, four, and six. Orra, on these appeals that are coming this afternoon with the Constables, they're going to be using as a part of the argument for us paying for a mobile phone or whatever, the argument of if they use their private phone, that phone becomes subject of public information. If they are an elected official, regardless of what phone they use, whether it's a personal phone that's associated with their job or not associated with their job, if they're using any device in the as part of their duty issue, which is a 24-hour day, that device is subject to open records. Is it is that correct? So it doesn't matter whether they have a county owned device that the county is paying for or if it's personally Owned device that the county is paying for I mean that they're paying for personally both of those are subject to open records request is that correct? Yeah, that's if you. It's like ours. Which means they would carry two phones. The solution is to get a provider that doesn't send you a bill with all the different calls from it. You can get a just pay one price phone that doesn't count the minutes. All I was trying to do is establish, I mean, let me give you a heads up on their argument and if it's a valid argument, it's hard for me to believe. I mean, I have my own personal phone that I pay for, and you have yours, your head, all of us do. It's hard for me to put this down when I'm picking up the phone. I don't know if any, I could be wrong, of course. But I don't know of any county employee management type or elected official that has a personal cell phone that our IT department, technology services, sorry, hasn't incorporated county email and all that into the personal phone. You don't have a email on my phone? Yeah, but it's your backwards. I can do it. I don't have it on my phone. But I still use my phone. Okay, I know one. But if you use county email from your phone, it's still recorded on Outlook. Yeah, but I don't use county mail. I know, but it's just the cell phone numbers. I stand corrected. I only know one person. All I was, I was just giving you a heads up on that discussion. Because, and if there's anything that, that the law can clear up or you're understanding of open records, for instance, records for instance and I hate to bring this up in a public forum but there was a investigation of our new sheriff as well as a new constable prior to them even taking office that their phones were subject, whether they were personal or not, were subject to investigation. Is that correct? Now, that's a different issue. That's a criminal investigation or a civil investigation versus the use of a public official of any phone. And so all I'm saying, it doesn't matter who's paying for the phone. If you're a public official, you are subject to open records whether they show you had no discussion of public business or not. Is that correct? I mean whether it proves out that they had no discussion of public business at all. What you do is you go through your cell phone and you say these calls were for public purpose and these but these calls are not and the ones that are not are not subject to disclosure. They're not subject. The problem is is that you got to go through and pick through them. He said, so, the cherry color, the cherry color, the candifices, he said that there's a cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the cell phone to be, the't want to be a secretary, but someone like me. Yeah. I don't mind. Every elected official should have two phones. That's only for county business. I mean, I get. I don't mind. We don't get them. You can't get a county cell phone. You get the iPad instead. And to me, I mean, I get people who call me at home. My number's in the book. And they call me at home about county business. And I mean, I'm going to get somebody to subpoena my home record, my home. And I'm sorry for bringing that discussion, but I mean, I just want you to be heads up that that discussion will be happening. Okay. Okay. It's 10 to 12. We're back here ready to go 130. All right. We're recessed to 130. Somebody's same. Let's get this show on the road. Donna, cheers. Thank you, Judge. As you all know, several of the constables are here to appeal the recommendation of the telecommunication committee with regard to deleting the individual constables' cell phone. John Felt has written an opinion and I think is prepared to go over that and answer any questions that you have. With regard to that, I figured having this one general discussion versus three different ones would be a lot more productive. So I figured we could start with that discussion. discussion. Good afternoon. I'd be glad to give you the nutshell version and that is that there were changes made to the Public Information Act whereby you know public information remains public regardless of the medium that it's contained on and that applies to electronic devices. So there has not been any type of attorney general opinion yet that I know of or any kind of court decision that's interpreted the changes in the law, but the long and the short of it is if you have, if you have, say, for instance, a cell phone, whether that cell phone is paid for at taxpayer expense or it's your own phone, but you're using it for official business. Patient contained on that device that pertains to public business, transaction public business. that provides that pertains to public business, transactional public business, patience, so as far as conversations that take place, I don't see how there would be a record of that other than maybe telephone numbers that were called, but text messages, pictures, that seems like that would be where you're going. I'm, if you're talking about electronic devices that are used by law enforcement officials, you do have exceptions to the Public Information Act where you can write to the Attorney General's Office as for permission for certain information to be withheld if it's going to interfere with law enforcement investigation detection of crime. Those exceptions would apply to law enforcement officials, but not necessarily other governmental officials, department heads that had information on these electronic devices. So, you can also combine that with the fact that the US Supreme Court has said that search wants are required for searches of cell phones in law enforcement investigations. So I don't know where that all factors in with, you know, because that case came down, you know, since the public was, and, you know, even in the AG's handbook, you know, they do give the disclaimer that there has not been any interpretation of this at this point. I'm not sure where this fits into your deliberation about who should or would get a cell phone at taxpayer expense, but if I can try to clarify anything, we'll be glad to. Okay. Are there any questions at this time? I believe not. Did you have something? Okay. We haven't really had the committee recommendation presented to us. Is it? is yet. We may have speak to this. Sure. It's my understanding that the recommendations of the committee did not come to this body formally but were Kevin and Donna if I'm out of line here. I don't know that it was the plan for us to kind of make a formal recommendation other process. Is that correct? I think I heard myself but I guess it was just here in my own ears. The telecommunications committee did meet about a month ago and recommended that Commissioner's Court revise a wireless phone policy to no longer allow elected officials to receive county paid wireless phone service. But that has not been presented to Commissioner's Court yet for final look, Rubel. But I think the direction that budget went with was based upon the recommendation. Is that right? That's right. This is great. Right. Okay. There are currently two constables that do not have counting issued cell phones and that would be precinct five and six. Now in today's discussion, there's no appeal that's been submitted by Constable Precinct 1. They currently do. He currently does have a county issue cell phone and I haven't had an opportunity to address this with the new clerk. We'll be taking office in January. So I mean, that discussion as well with him. And if you would, Kevin, give a little bit of history or some of the discussion of the committee members and maybe also give a brief discussion of who those committee members were. All right, let's see. From memory. I'll have to look up to see who all the members are because I don't miss somebody. But budget office, purchasing, technology services, public facilities, JP administrative judge, who's, I believe is Judge Holland now. Yeah, emergency management is a new member, Sheriff's Office. I'm Judge Horn. Yeah, Danny Brimley facilities. Oh yeah, yeah, and- You said Sheriff, right? What in essence happened that court charged us with this committee, I've been on the telephone committee ever since the held office, so charged and it's been sort of a ad hoc type of thing because we haven't had to telephone discussions in a long time. So I believe at your charge, Judge Horne, that you wanted the committee to go back and analyze and include wireless devices, which are the phones as well as iPads, or any wireless device included in our discussion. That's why we even renamed the committee from the Telecommunications committee. And then we went back and we looked at every phone, our device that is paid for by the county, or had a line item associated with it, and went through every one of those and looked at those. I mean, there were cell phones that were sitting on people's desk and in their doors not being used for years. I'd say two years, two years years to me. So and they were not even being used or they were being used so infrequently that the need for those didn't seem, it was a need at all. And then on the other side, there were, there were those county phones that were being used that had absorbent minutes on it that were just not way beyond normal, but above normal. And so we looked at all those, that were just not way beyond normal but above normal. And so we looked at all those, and we also looked at all the elected officials and see where they were, and we found that a majority of the elected officials, the committee found that a majority of the elected officials as well as department heads had their own personal phone that they paid for their own pocket doing personal things as well as county business. And so, that's why the committee voted to waive our, to change the exception. I guess the right way. And include all elected officials not having a telephone paid for by the county. And I think also my charge was to take a look and as we all know, technology has changed rapidly and where we doing this the most cost effective way. Yeah, and we did look at that. In fact, we saw where departments were moving from, you know, what also was in our discussion is why we weren't with one carrier. And the answer to that, and the layman's term, is because of coverage. And that 18 team may not cover certain parts of the county that Verizon or Sprint may cover a little bit better. And we found that moving away from data plans like some of the departments have done and have had changed those data plans out for hot spots, which are an essence, a portable Wi-Fi system that's able to pick up and move around have saved dramatically on those data charges. So it gave the committee an opportunity through budgeting and through purchasing to go back and look at the contracts we were currently in and see if we could change any of those contracts. And I think that through doing that the committee and its efforts have saved a lot of money as far as telecommunication is concerned on just data plans along. And so there wasn't a lot of recommendations that came out of that, but one of the recommendations was to not pay for any elected officials, pay for them, and exclude the exception of law enforcement out of that because it had changed so drastically in the approach. And I think that she's only mirroring that in the budget. But you all, your recommendation. And I appreciate the committee going through that. And because we did have a lot of cleanup to do, however, I still think law enforcement still, elected officials should have their cell phones. Whether anyone else have their cell phones or not, I think the low enforcement should. I also had a problem with the wireless charges that we cut out for the iPads, but gladly cut mine out for my employee. But I believe elected constables, sheriff office should have their pay for on pay for by the county. And Kevin, is there any way that you can check the plans and maybe provide a plan that will work for everybody that they can use it so you'll have like on my phone which I pay for, I have only, I can do only 200 checks and I just pay $5 for it. And I have so many minutes that I pay and if I go over, you know, I have to pay for it. So surely we can find a plan that everybody can use and maybe two plans so they can all use that same plan. So the minutes that they use, they have a certain amount of minutes and they go over those minutes and they have to pray for it. We do purchase all of the plans that are state contract. So we get the absolute best price possible on the wireless service. The purchasing department is responsible for managing the plans and I believe they do go through and they run reports to figure out where plans need to be adjusted and things like that and try to bring them into the lowest cost plan to meet their needs. And if they don't want to go with the lowest cost plan, then they have to pay for the sense. You have the plan that the county offers. Where is this? Do we have a copy of this list where the edits yet? What does committee use that they cut out? Different one? Do we have that yet? Don't have that yet? No, they have that yet. What was cut out of the budgets were submitted to those departments when the recommended budget came out. So, for example, the committee recommended cutting one for veteran service. They received a form that showed that that that service, what kind of service? Army. What? We eliminated that phone. It was only used when they were traveling and that sort of I didn't have a list of what phones were, which I'd like to have at least. And I can provide you with a report for that. And we can provide you with minutes, minutes of it. It just, commissioners, and the reason why I, and I may have gotten this wrong, but the reason why that I believe there was direction from the commissioners court to look at the time we were looking looking at it that we included in the budget that the recommendations would be so I don't I think that that we we have direction of the commissioners court by including it. And those that had issues with it, we had another meeting of the telecommunications committee where they were able to discuss with either Donna or with purchasing exactly why and then we made amendments because of necessity that was relays to that. But you say law enforcement, the top law enforcement agent if you would, are elected official in this county, which is a sheriff has his own personal phone and does not have a county phone. And then the issue of the whatever device you're on, if you're elected official, it didn't matter whether it was a county pay for a person with a device that any of that is subject for open records. Regardless if you say that it's a personal phone, I don't talk about it. It doesn't mean that it's not subject to it. Yeah, so the argument that it violates or whatever, kind of goes way unless you go to who do you make get the exception before? That's right. The Texas Attorney General's office record division Okay, so I'm just telling you the the direction that the committee went Miss Donna or James maybe you could help without our Kevin From what I understand we used to pay for cell phones for elected officials correct What precipitated us changing that policy? I can tell you. There was abuse by an elected official that the decision was made the following year to not pay for the cell phones of all members of the commissioners court. Like the PIO of the sheriff's department one time. I don't remember that part, but I can't remember, but I was just trying to figure out because it seems like we're concerned that on one hand you're using your private cell phone and if you do that, it'll subject open records. Well, then the simple solution is give all the elected officials a county paid for cell phone in that way you can divide out personal calls versus non-personal calls. I think Mr. Felt detailed it out very succinctly that law enforcement calls the attorney general is ruled. I have seen it many a time that if it's involving law enforcement, it's not subject to disclosure. So that kind of makes that argument a non-secretor. So I think we just need to make a policy decision, whether it's based on the committee, we accept the committee's recommendation or not, that we either give all elected officials a county cell phone, tell them to take county calls on that, don't use their private phone, or we let all elected officials use their private phone and then if we get a request you just if you have a list of calls you go with the high lottery and say I think these are all county calls and I think that you know I mean we just kind of have to go I don't know why we're having such you know well the recommendation of the committee was the latter. What's the name? I just, you know, I don't have a problem. I don't. I don't want a county phone. I pay for my cell phone and I'm okay with paying for my cell phone and doing county business on my cell phone. I don't have a problem with that. But I believe as law enforcement officers, we should pay for their cell phone. Other business, they're business, the hours. I think we're paying for law enforcement officers cell phones. It's whether the elected officials get. So are they not law enforcement officers? Yeah, but they're a different aunt. I mean, they do, they do that. move out, they do the same things, they do their deputies, so I mean, there's not any difference, they bail off court, everything that their deputies do, they do. They don't disagree with you, Commissioner Mitchell, but keep in mind we just spend enough a lot of money to improve radio communications for everybody, and I think that's the way we do it. They do. I don't disagree with you, Commissioner Mitchell, but keep in mind we just spend enough a lot of money to improve radio communications for everybody too. So the radio doesn't, they can't communicate with the regular citizen or the person that they're serving a paper with the radio. I understand it. Can we do this? Would it be prudent to have the committee make the report and then put the recommendation of the committee before the commission's court on that specific recommendation? That's what you're asking for, isn't it? Pretty much. And let us vote up or down that policy and then that's. And proceed. I mean, is that... Time out of full report of all the cell phones. Well, for sure at least the recommendation of the committee and the justification of the committee and a justification of the committee, specific to the change of policy of no elected officials with no exception should have a county pay for I mean, and if we vote, my mind is not going to change. I can care you right now. Well, I'm not trying to change your mind. I'm just saying do we need to form an action that way to move it along? We have an existing policy. We can provide the policies. Yeah, I mean, I'm just asking the commissioners court if that's the, if that you think a logical way to do it or are we just going to just not listen to the recommendation or act on the rich or the recommendation or are we acting on the recommendation by our vote on each individual, one of these selected officials that have appealed it. I think it would be, not by the individual, or by the classifications of the... It seems to be the only one that there's a hang-up on his law enforcement. So I think the vote is yes or no as to whether or not we pay for any elected officials, cell phone or if we're going to make an exception for law enforcement. But there is already an exception on the books that the policy is already there that it's in there right? The policy is already there there is an exception for law enforcement. Okay. Then it's in that right. The policy is already there. There is an exception for long portion. Okay. Then it's just the money thing. The recommended policy is to not have that exception. Okay. We went through the same process back in 2002. That's when Commissioner's Court originally amended the policy to no longer allow elected officials to get county provided wireless phones. And then that was in July of 2002. And then in August, we're in the same spot we are right now during appeals. And we added the law enforcement exception in there. So. Right. Yeah, it's been in 12 years that. We got the same thing right right back where I was saying. I would say for the Telecommunications Committee, the consubles were not represented directly in the committee. So if we were to make a formal recommendation, we'd probably need a here and appeal, just like you're scheduled to hear today from the consubles to really find out their specific needs. It's difficult to say, elected officials over here is the same as elected officials who's law enforcement and even within the constables, you know, they might do their job a little bit differently. So for me, I'd like I'd love to hear their appeal or their justification so we can make a better recommendation. I think Presently have a county paid for cell phone how many do and how many do not on? All right four of the six have counting paid so Thank you others and the sheriff have chosen not to accept a phone. Not to engage in softism, but I think every elected official could make an argument that they need to be available 24 set up. There could be a flash flood in Sanger and as a result I need to be available through my county cell phone. It's happening recently. Yeah, there could be a public health emergency where we need to immediately decide whether to spray from mosquitoes. The county judge would need a county cell phone. To me, I just think we need to, we trust our employees to put a policy together. We try to empower our employees because they spend a lot of time working on it. And as a result, I really think it's a good idea. Not that I don't always agree with the committees, but I think it's a good idea to give the committees recommendations great weight because they worked on it. And they dug deep and they've considered the facts in the various arguments. I did give it weight. I took Donna's Woller's service away from her team, but I'm not willing to take the cost of cell phones away. And you know, I'm pretty hoid on most things. But this one, I'm firm on those cost of those having their cell phones. Well, that cell phone come with a new employee. Well, that cell phone come with a new employee. What? teasing you, my wife said, would the cell phone come with a new employee? I know. Oh, geez. Okay, let's move on. Let's move on, folks. Thank you, Kevin. Appreciate that. Okay. Constable, true. You are first one on the list. Yes, on page a 172 of your package, is the information provided to us by constable through it. It's also on page 9 172. Sorry, a 172. So the training and education request, as well as the wireless service for the constable and the third item on the agenda on an offer as a correction. Last year, the constable asked for remote access charges for the reserve deputy or the extra laptop. That wasn't implemented until just recently, therefore our office had cut that, assuming that it was not needed and that was a mistake on our part. So the card was actually approved last year and we deleted it in here. Which one was it? It's the third one for $456. It's the card for the tough book. Okay. Thank you all for coming a little bit early. Appreciate it. It's our pleasure. Since we've already covered cell phones and it's like we're going to be, I will borrow the the call with this. I guess we're going to go to the committee and make our appeal to them. So. Oh, one. I think we should go to the committee. Thank you. Need to do it here. Okay, I'll go ahead and do it here then. We've only covered the public information aspect of it. Thanks to Senate Bill 1368, which expands the definition of public information. In talking to Theresa Rogers earlier today, just out of curiosity, I was asking her what the retention schedule would be. If we had to have our information on our cell phones, if it was routine, we could be deleted at any time. If it's general information, we have to keep it two years on our cell phones. If it was routine, we could be deleted at any time. If it's general information, we have to keep it two years on our cell phone. And if it's administrative, we have to keep it four years. I don't know about y'all, but I go through cell phones about one every two years or so. So my cell phones don't last that long. So I don't know how we could comply with that on my personal cell phone. So, and I'm sure another thing is that, most cell phones, I don't have enough memory on mine to keep four-year-old texts on my cell phone. So, the other reason we ask for it is because of safety issues. Cell phones allow us to access our personnel at a moment's notice. We access other departments. We have a certain, I give my card out to anybody and everybody. There are deputies from the Sheriff's Office that call me all times to the day and night, asking questions about civil process. There are police departments that call me all the time asking about what we should do because we've got two people out here fighting over a kid. about what we should do because we've got two people out here fighting over a kid. Those type of calls, I don't have a problem with giving my cell phone number out, my county cell phone number out. I do have a problem with giving my personal cell phone number out to those. We deal with evictions, we deal with seizures of property, we deal with attachments of children where we're talking to the people constantly. If we gave our personal cell phone numbers out to those people, it would be very easy for them to go through the internet and find us and look up and see where we live at. Where the county cell phone number comes back to a county address. That is one of the reasons that that myself and the rest of the constables are all concerned about having you know using our personal cell phones for county business. In just doing some research some research, county owned cell phones. We contacted the counties in the state of Texas that had populations of over 450,000. And we found that seven of the nine counties paid for cell phones not only for their law enforcement, but for all county elected officials. And there was only three, sorry, there was seven out of ten. There was only three that did not. And that was Dallas, El Paso, and Fort Benton counties. All the rest of them found it very interesting when we told them what we were doing research on to think that the county wouldn't pay for it. So we're making a request that the cell phones for county elected officials are in particular law enforcement officials be re added to the budget. In my case, it would be $533 cost per year. I don't know what the other gentlemen's are, but that's the cost they would cost for year. I don't know what the other gentlemen's are but that's the cost that it cost for mine. All right. Thank you. Did you want to hear the other two? Yes, please go ahead. The tough book, air card she's already covered. The other thing that we asked for this year is money to go to a court security specialist certification school. This is a specialized school intended for bailiffs to get their certification and courtroom security. As you all know, courtroom are very unique areas. They provide very interesting things that we have to deal with when it comes to security issues. And this is a course that is specially designed for that purpose. It's a 40 hour course. When we initially made our request, we asked for $36, $3,630 in order to go to Ellis County. However this morning I talked to the instructor who is Constable Harris and he has agreed to come to Denton County and which will save us a bunch of money that way, but he does require at least 10 people to be in the class. He does 10 people, minimum, 30 people maximum. And I figure between our offices, many people maximum. And I figured between all the hospitals offices, the sheriff's office, and the other agencies around here because what he provides is not only good for us, but also for municipal courts. We can get the additional people. However, so in this case, I would like to amend my, amend mine to a total of $1,650 in additional training funds. This will cover him coming to us. We don't have to cover any of his travel expenses or anything that's all covered in the fee that he charges. There's many law enforcement is not just consuls but in this palace and I don't know if existing bailiffs need to go for some kind of recurrent training. They're probably required to get seat use. I can see where he'd have more than one class. Absolutely. And we talked about that quite extensively. I know him from being from working with him as president of the association this last year. But he actually is the one that worked with T. Col and developed this course with T. Col and developed the guidelines forward and everything. He's been in law enforcement for a long time in the San Angelo area and he's very good instructor. Good. Go ahead. Let me ask, and you may even know this, but James are Donna. We currently have a separate line item in the processing of tickets for court security fund. And this is training allowable use I know that I know that the constables had I mean the the JP's had used the security fund court security fund to pay for metal detectors and But I didn't know if it covered training Actually the JP court security fund Statute has been recently amended to specifically allow training for a possible personnel. I believe that's only for one county, sir. I don't. It's one county. I think it was just for one county. I could have done one county. Oh, God, it could be wrong. Excuse me, I'll be corrected then, I'm sorry. I think I could do that for one county. Yeah, they did it for a specific county down in South Texas. Oh, look. The only thing is I mean, if you if if there's an opportunity for you to utilize those, I mean, there's going to be excellent funds to you. Use, uh, but that's what they're for. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'll will use whatever we can get. Yeah. But I mean, if you're saying it's bracketed to one county, wow, that was a pretty powerful legislator. It was attached to some bills that the Justice of the Peace and Constable's Association fought because they were trying, basically what it amounted to is that county wanted to make all of the security, all of that fund available to hospitals and JPs and most of the JPs and what you said is news to me. So if it is news, that's news to me. But whenever I look up a cell phone number on a reverse phone look up or whatever, it never, ever. I've never had a case where it gave me a street address. It gave me the tower or the, for instance, if it were Metro PCS or whatever. It gave me a location, usually with 817 numbers over in Arlington. I mean, it. Ever is ever. Ever. That's the way it used to be. There are a lot of sites that you can go on out there. A lot of them still do that. However, there are some sites that actually give the information. And if you go to something like publicvegda.com or whatever and look up, it gives you everything. I'm sorry, that's. If you pay for yeah yeah if you pay for yeah I mean for fifteen dollars if you're lucky to get revenge for fifteen dollars it's you know I would like for you if you don't mind to give that bill number but if in fact this does affect only one county and get that information to Pat Fallon who covers your area It's representative Pat Fallon and see if we can get that change statewide because I mean that's logical But it should apply to that training and education money for constables, too Right, and a lot of a lot of JP's Don't have a problem with spending the funds just to to do it for constables to you know put constables through training, but there were a lot of JPs that fight it with their constables constantly. And so they're not going to spend the dime out of there out of the JP security fund or the JP tech fund to assist the constables at all. And that's where a lot of that came from. So there's some sharp counties around it. So you know, when they take the money in with the proceeds, so each elected official has say over there. We tried to do that. We worked for months. I made a couple of trips down to South Texas to talk to them. And it was an interesting conversation. I feel you're paying. Then they're done then. Okay, well, the research set. But if we could go that direction, they'd be a good handling. What do we find in them? I'm fine in limitation but it's really less likely to me to apply to us. Actually the allowed uses of the Justice Court Security Fund are a little more vague than the Courthouse Security Fund. Probably it probably needs to be interpreted. I think the safest thing would be, because it says you can do security, provide security services, security personnel, and items for justice court located in the building that is not the county courthouse. So, whether or not that means constable training, bailiff training, it's probably not for me to say at this moment. I will look up what was presented to the state legislature and get that to the court. I'll go back and research by records and get it. Not a courthouse security fund. It's different than the one that the district court administrator administers. It's totally different. It's specifically allowed for, in that fund for Deputy Constable's, but the security service where I provide pretty much uses all that money up. Yeah, I know. So not money for training there one way or the other, although it wouldn't be allowed for, it specifically is allowed for Deputy Constables, but there's not, there's just not even excess funds in that one, so. Thank you very much. Thank you appreciate your time. Okay, Constable precinct three is next. The appeal is for the wireless service for the constable as well as the administrative manager in that department. Good afternoon. Hi. Along with everything that Constable Truett said, none of our offices are exactly the same. We can't be the same. We have different geographical location. Different, everything is different in every precinct. You look closer, thank you. OK. Is that all right look closer, thank you. Okay. Is that all right? Yes, thank you. And from my perspective, not only is it a safety issue, but we deal with a lot of sensitive information. We deal with a lot of children, a lot of families. It's nice to have a photograph transmitted when we need it. Some to someone in the field to make sure we're dealing with the right individual. My chief deputy does a lot of executions. She can contact attorney's health, transmit photographs or whatever she needs from her car, from her phone. If she has one that has that capability and I think the flip phones do. But aside from keeping, I keep my county phone and my personal cell phone separate and I require them to do the same. And I don't have a laptop. I could have one, but to me it's a waste of money. I don't generate reports from the field. I don't do research in the field. They do. I'd rather have a phone that's capable of contacting them when they need me or when I need to talk to them rather than a laptop. And do you want me to address Ashley's? Yes, everything, please. Okay. Ashley As you know is my chief administrator She's also the subject matter expert the liaison between Odyssey and all the constables offices and As much as I'd like to we can't do this Monday through Friday 8th 5 She has to occasionally do some things after hours and on her day off. And again a phone is is been very valuable to her since we got it. I think an iPad might be better. I don't know what the difference in the cost or the FK or anything would be. But in her position, she has to be in contact with the county technology services, the Odyssey people, and different constables, I'll choose to resolve issues that come up with technology. And that's why I want her to have either the phone that she has or an iPad. It simply gives us more flexibility to take care of what we need to take care of. And to me it's about efficiency and doing the best we can with as little as possible. And I think me having a $7,000 laptop makes no sense when I can do what I need to do with the cell phone. All right, thank you. Thank you. The questions? You're none, thank you. Okay, the next appeal is Constable Prisnaked for. Constable Birch is here appealing the wireless service for the costable, as well as in-car video cameras for six vehicles. Morning, afternoon. Good afternoon, and this particular year, I'm not fishing. So I'm actually here representing myself. And you'll probably would have had me shut up if it wouldn't have been for cell phones But I think that I think the audio video is gonna be taken care of ultimately right Donna Let me clarify They have asked for all new video cameras for their vehicles I have been in conversation with Kevin Carr and we discussed even the relation of some video cameras in the Sheriff's Department. There's a minimal number in the Sheriff's Department but he felt like even what's being recommended is a band aid for a problem for video cameras that are outdated. So in our discussions we felt like it may be important for that to be studied a little more closely, and that in next year's budget or capital replacement contingency funds be made available to look at all departments, including the sheriff's outdated systems. So my explanation to him was the reason it was cut is we felt like we needed to do something all together as one lump sum purchase. That way everybody has the same type of camera system. They're all purchased at the same time and they typically last six, seven years or longer depending on the circumstances. But that was the discussion that we would present something at a future meeting either this year or next year about that. It's gonna take a little time to study who all has the cameras, so it may be something that is handled outside the budget process. But that's been our discussion that this really needs to occur that a lot of our equipment's old and outdated and that we might consider doing this all at one time. It would maybe cost $300,000 or so for the county to consider. But again, they're starting to fail. They're starting to have issues. Kevin and them are having to deal with their problems. As I mentioned earlier on a daily basis. So it would be a logical capital improvement project. I think that we can present to court. You have videos now, Councilwoman, go ahead. We have the five years that you all approved last budget season, which allows us to, you know, when we're out of the car, we record as well. But it's only going to give you the audio portion when you're out of your vehicle. So we do currently have that and I've asked over the years for the audio video because we're out quite a bit in precinct for and like Councilor Ravens says everybody's different. We're out and you know there's good possibility as much as we are in the field that more opportunities for things to exist and you just one CNN incident away from, you know, a lawsuit. So, and it's an officer safety issue that's been a, you know, it's been one of my issues. I've addressed many years, but like I said, I'm also, you know, glad the show did purchase the five use force last year. So, I'm going to defer to if you're going to address something at a later date for everyone. It is definitely an officer safety issue. It addresses the, you know, when we've got racial profiling reports and the things like that that we have to deal with. It's also a big help. It minimizes complaints against your officers. But like I said, that's the biggest part of my appeal process, you know, from the recommended budget. There's a number of things that, you know, Don and I has recommended cutting from my budget, and I'm fine with that. But, you know, as far as the cell phone goes, commission of March on to understand where you're coming from as the sheriff does not require one. But I don't really think that's apples to apples because he has a number of layers of supervision that he can go to. I think years ago when we was decided by the court that we eliminate the sergeant position, one of the deciding factors was that you already have two first line supervisors, one being the constable, one being the start, one being the chief deputy. So we are first line supervisors out there. And I'm out in the field. If you catch me in my office, it's a rare occasion because I'm out in the field with my guys. And we conduct, basically I conduct office in my office from my phone. But like I said to say that, to take it away, you've, it's to take it away. You've got to, you know, how many elected officials are you going to have one on one portion of a house, one on another portion of a house sitting up on a warrant where you text back and forth between your deputies. You can't use your radio as far as a safety issue. There's a number of times when you're out on a warrant you're doing that very thing and that texting mode does help you as far as a safety issue. There's a number of times when you're out on one, you're doing that very thing. And that texting mode does help you as far as that. It's a very important issue to us out there. So when you say, go across the board, I'm never gonna agree. I wish that could be the fact. You know, I wish you could do that. But like I said, I think when we weren't even represented on that particular committee to give our opinion and the things that we do have out here to make it separate. You know that we should at least have a voice or for anybody made that type of a recommendation. And that's all I've got and will let you. I'm going to let you all. Have you got any questions of me? I do. Go ahead. One of the things that the committee did look at with the difference of each cell plan in each office. How some office would be a cell plan at $415 and then another office would be at $850 like yours. What is the difference of that cell plan versus your cell plan and why is yours twice as much as theirs? Is there something more that you're doing uniquely in your office than in that other office? Well, I'm not going to speak to the other one's commission, or something, because I don't have it in front of me, you know, as far as their minutes and what they require. I know in my plan I'm going to have two of the phones that are going to be of the unlimited, which is basically about $20 and more a month or what have you. I think the difference that you're taking out if you were to take the plans and put them together. And everything was discussed as far as maybe coming up with a budget for every particular council's office and let them play from that. Okay, that's a good idea. And then we can work with that. But where you went off in left field with, taking the phones away from the elected officials, I didn't agree with. But that's not the same. That's not the same. But when you're looking at the plan, the characterizing the efforts of a committee of the people that's left field. Okay, all right. Well, when you go back to the plans, if you were to look at it, two of my phones are unlimited on that plan. We did, when everybody's making the recommendation to go to a carrier, which is, you know, status files the needs of everyone, we went to Verizon, we went to the plan that, you know, basically everybody is using. It helps us because we have a lot of rural area that we cover. We have found that Verizon does, you know, satisfy those needs. A lot of times when your actual communications on your radio goes out, Verizon has been very good about that. So, since we changed over to them and are using hot spots now, it has eliminated a lot of it. But as far as the difference in, I don't know what everybody else, you know, what they are using as far as minutes. But this is some of the recommendation that the Verizon representative made to us. So you don't have data plans on your? Yes, sir. We have the data plan. Yes, sir. And that's like I was saying when we use the data plans, what we can converse in the field, when it's especially critical, that's why we have the data plans on our phones. But you mentioned hotspots. Are you using hotspots as well? No, okay, I'll take that back. We changed from the data plans to the hotspots, I'm sorry. Okay, and there's still a $850. Is that? $850 is for the cell phone itself. I believe that all the other constables in precinct four all are under one plan and they share minutes and I think constable precinct four is in a separate plan because of the usage of minutes. So I think his is higher right and it's for higher. Do you have a hotspot on your? Yes sir. So, so he doesn't have a data plan in this $850? This is just the cell phone. The data plan is included in the budget for all their laptops. Donna, do we have a list of like how many minutes on average each constable use per month or anything like that? Yep. We do have, we can look at the bills and give you a report on that. Was it done by like the amount of territory? I mean, is the person with the biggest amount of territory have the highest bill or? I think it's been, I think the reason this plan is higher is just based on usage. I think the number of it was cheaper to have an unwanted plan, which is what I believe he has, rather than have a lower amount and then exceed the minutes and be charged per minute if I'm correct. And if you break that down and the reason I went there, if you were to break it down, which I could gladly furnish you with statistics as far as what I do in the field. And you break that down as far as those minutes, that's why my phone is used so much. And it's not, you know, like it was stated earlier, you can't compare offices as far as the amount of minutes because I'm not gonna say one hospital doesn't do more than the other one, but I'm just telling you if you were to look at, which I conferred issue with, the report. We are having. No, I'm talking about what I do in the field. Then you would know why I use my cell phone so much. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I don't put a lot of minutes on the cell phone. Because you know, it's there right there in front of you. But it's because I'm out there in the field, and I'm working most of the time 16 hours today. So, anything else? Leave now, thank you. Thank you. Okay, the next item is Constable Precinct 6 is here to discuss the operating equipment, which would be four weapons storage vaults for their SUVs at $884 each as well as a scanner for one of their administrative positions and then a minor increase to add radar repairs a line on them to their budget. As she had mentioned there, yeah, I got a few little things I wanted to address that I feel that should be within the budget. Line 42.56, the computer under a computer equipment. I think we requested $955 on this. This is a scanner. I've always been big in scanning and minimizing our storage needs and everything like that. We've been pretty successful with that. We've got two scanners right now, one's in my office and one is in the administrative manager's office. We got administrative assistance out front that does a lot of processing of the returns as we do these papers and get them in. And once we are one of the actions she takes, after she completes everything else and gets the grades to send out, she scans it. That way we got to scan copies and stuff like that. Now what's been happening is we've had to, she's had to leave there and go somewhere else to scan either my office or the administrative managers office and stuff like that. So I think, you know, that's one of the main reasons I'm asking that this be approved the scanner that would be placed on her desk and be utilized on daily basis. It makes us more efficient and be able to find certain documents when we need to find them. And we don't have to storm and file candidates. Because I'm trying to get away from file candidates as much as we can. That's that. Anybody have any questions on that? Item. Yeah, actually I do. Do you think there's going to be any money left in this year's budget that can be moved to do that, Donna? We can process a budget amendment from contingency funds for this, if you'd like. I don't think there's going to be any money left in his budget at the end of the year to. He's got a pretty lean budget, but we can certainly look at it with him and see if there's a way we could come up with that. Oh, yeah, thanks. We had a work for you now. Hi. Well, do you have a, remember though, there's those cheaper scanners. I've been involved in scanners for the last 20 years, but there's cheaper scanners. I've been by the scanners for less 20 years, but there's cheaper ones. But we need one that processes papers fast that goes through their real fast and scans it, reads it, it's more cost effective. Yeah, to have a scanner that goes one by one, by one, you know, you follow sleep before it gets there's Dr. Scans, you know. So, you know, you follow sleep before it gets there's doctor to scan. You know, so you know this one is mid-range, 955. I mean it really is, it's about mid-range. But it would make us more efficient. on 62.45. That's radar repairs. I talked to Donald in this. I've originally put it in another line item and we adjusted some things around but we came up with this 62.45 which is radar repairs. I wouldn't have some money which is $200. We have $200. We have $200. We have $200. We have $200. We have $200. We have $200. We have $200. We have $200. We have $200. We have $200. We have $200. We have $200. We have $200. I have a question for you there. The court did take action just so you know on the correction I talked to you about on the Tarzan tubes. Tarzan tubes right. Court did take action just to want to restore that to the level that we intended. Right. It was just a matter of adjustment there. In the way. God I did it. No, no. Okay. in the way. God I did it no no. Okay I did I have requested again this year this Weapons storage vault line 4892 for $3,536 I know there's everybody got their opinion on this stuff but this is a safety issue for these weapons to be stored in these SUVs not only the weapons itself but the the ammunition and any other items whose items that we have or that the officers carry with them. We have, or that the officers carry with them. It, I don't know or understand why we haven't had these in the past, but, but, I think, you know, they're necessary thing because it really takes one time for these vehicles to be broken into and these vehicles are broken into. And Dallas police officer got down there and in Charlton, his vehicle got broken into and weapons were taken out. But he didn't have the, not his rifle, but the ammunition stuff was taken out. So I think for this amount of money and for these four vehicle issue vehicles, I think for this amount of money and for these four vehicles, I think it's well worth it. And I know, again, I know everybody's got their opinion on this stuff. But for, it's about $800, I think, per vehicle. I know over here at the election office, we spent $800 per chair on these training men. So we're here for about 100 or 150 chairs. I'm only asking for four vaults, you know, $800. And so that's all I'm looking for that I try to balance and work with you all and work with the budget office and work with our officers in my department. And I think if we work together, we find solutions and can move forward in a good way. I didn't mean to be laughing at you, Constable, that we appreciate the comic relief. We're taking your request seriously. I want to show you that. Oh yeah, yeah. Good job. Good job. Good job. That's true. So are you the Constable? Thanks for being here. Any other Constables have these? I'm sorry. The other Constables have these. The other Constables. Yeah, I think they do. I know precinct to if I'm not mistaken has balls. Tracing. Be a ball. Yeah, they have them. I know the Sherke department has them. And nice things about these balls. Now, they're almost the one time purchased deal because these can't be transferred. They don't wear out. And these are not the best balls, but they're halfway diesel balls. They got rollers on them. So they have good mechanisms. And so they should last, you know, get 10, 15 years out of them. And- Keep them in the trunk. They go, yeah, in the out of them. And keep them in the trunk. They go in the trunk of SUV. Break into the trunk and steal the vault. Now it's all bolted down. It's easier to carry it away. It's all bolted down. And the main thing to do in the vault is to keep the weapons and ammunition out of sight and locked up because the ball does lock. Thank you. I don't believe there's any further questions. Thank you. Thank you. I think that pretty much sums up the appeals with the exception of the one I mentioned to you earlier next week. We'll have Judge Robinson here for the probate court appeal. I'm going to go to the next meeting. Is there any additional information that the court would like our office to provide for future meetings? Yeah. I would like we did last year. Will you be giving us information as we go along? How if we address the appeal and if we approve the appeal, what it's gonna do to change our tax rate. Absolutely. Next week, we will have the presentation on the agenda of the effective and rollback tax rate. So going into next week, we'll be in a much better position to tell you whether our estimates were within the ballpark, which we're hoping for. Provided we got the railroad rolling stock. Right. And that number did come in yesterday. Oh, good. That's a good Michelle. So she's in the process of looking at that information now. And as soon as the appraisal district certifies the role this week, she will be calculating our rates. So we should be going into next week's workshop with a good number and an accurate number versus an estimate. So we should be able to give you a start of our meeting where we stand on our tax rate. Anything else you wanna address today, Donald? She's busy. Is there anything else that you want to address today? I can't think of anything else to talk considered. Yeah, sure is. You know, just my initial reaction to all the appeals that we've heard today is I think everybody's done a really good job of justifying their appeals this morning and this afternoon having that in the chair that y'all have sat in symbolically because I was appealing to commissioners card. I understand your frustrations, believe me. But I think everybody did really a good job. We're all struggling with the same issues of a fast growing county and the demands of your office increasing with that demand and I'll be very interested to see the numbers from the come in. Well we're anxiously awaiting that as well. There are a couple of reallocation requests on the agenda today. I don't know if you want to talk about that today or next week. But on page two of ten, there's a request from technology services to transfer some money within the recommended budget by reducing pager expense and computer software and transferring that to their dozens of subscriptions. It says zero impact request, but that's something that you may or may not want to consider today. I make a motion to that change. I'll second the motion. Any discussion or questions? On favor please say aye. Aye. Opposient aye. Motion is carried. The other reallocation is on page 5 of 10, the very top justice information system. This is a request to reduce software maintenance and increase the training and education on item at that same amount. I'll make a motion to approve. Seconded by Commissioner Mitchell, other questions? Your none on favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, any motion carries? What if that's all of the reallocations? It's all the easy stuff. All right, well thank you very much everybody. I appreciate your time. Are there any other questions or any more information requests? Okay, well we look forward to seeing Certified values next week They're required to Maybe in the Presidus District are required to get the certified values to the The President's district are required to get the certified values to the task collector July 25th, that state specific in the law, which tells me that Michelle and some staff members are going to be spending time at the task service this weekend calculating rates for about 70 jurisdictions. So we should have our actual numbers Tuesday and that's going to answer an awful lot of questions for us, I believe. Thank you very much everybody for all your hard work that you put into this and I'm saying that to all the people that did their appeals today and Bonnie put together a documentary for us, put your no-show on a go, but thank you very much everybody. documentary force. Good job. I'm going to go over. Thank you very much everybody. Have a great day. We are adjourned.