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I'm going to do a the next one. I'm going to go to the next one. I'm going to go to the next one. I'm going to go to the next one. I'm going to go to the next one. I'm going to go to the next one. I'm going to go to the next one. I'm going to go to the next one. I'm going to go to the next one. I'm going to go to the next one. All right, good afternoon everyone. Today is September 10th, 2024. We are going to begin the meeting. We're going to start with a moment of silence. Thank you very much. I'll rise if you're able for the pledge of allegiance. of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God and the visible with the routine justice for all. All right thank you so very much we are moving on to agenda item number three which is public comment time. What I'm going to do is I will call speakers up five at a time and just a reminder you have three minutes to speak. Please state your name and where you dinner and reside. Right now I have one person sign up and that is Miss Rachel Ellis. All right. Good afternoon. Rachel Ellis, Dean's Field District. The last couple of months, I've been working with residents throughout the county on the strategic planning committee, and one thing has been clear to me. Even residents on the eastern side of the county see us as one Prince William. There are some issues that directly impact one district, more than others, and there are some issues that are prevalent across the county as a whole. I challenge this board to look at Prince William County as one county. I am asking each member of this board to rebuild the trust and transparency that residents have noted as the number one weakness in the county, which is further explained as zero, not feeling heard, disconnected from other districts, politicized improper influences divisiveness. Start rebuilding the trust and transparency by visiting other districts within the county. Ask what challenges their residents are facing and how you can help that supervisor. Work together as one board serving one Prince William. On Monday, there's a multi-district town hall on the proposed affordable dwelling unit ordinance. I am inviting each of you to come out and listen to concerns of residents outside of your district. It was obvious watching last week's board meeting that some of you do not understand the impact of all the infrastructure to include transmission lines and substations needed to power all the data centers that this county has approved. If you are voting on it, then please take the time to understand the unintended consequences. Just because your district will not be visually impacted, you should understand that your district's residents will help to subsidize it. Another unintended consequence of the data center craze has been the increased dump truck traffic. At least eight miles away from the nearest data center being built. Yet I am now feeling the impacts. My home sits fairly close to Shelter Lane with one house between me and the road. Daily, even on Saturdays, dump trucks are flying up and down a hilly residential rural road to dump dirt. Yesterday, Flagman had the road stop for a paving project. Eight dump trucks were lined up during the short interval of traffic taking turns. While I turn on to this road or cross this road in my car, I often cross this road while walking or running. This is dangerous to all residents that live in this area. I should be able to cross a road without having to run fast because a dump truck has emptied its load and is speeding back to get another load. Let's also talk about the quality of dirt that is being dumped in an area that relies solely on wells as a water resource. Has the county even considered that? The destructive tentacles of the data center industry are reaching well beyond the power source they are building on. They are turning residential roads into industrial roads with drum truck traffic. And knowing what this county has already approved, this will continue for decades to come. Maybe once the tentacles of Parsons or Mid-County reach the eastern end of the county, maybe this board will work together to come up with solutions to a problem that they have created. Residents want and deserve more from this board. Work together as one board serving one Prince William. Thank you. Thank you so very much. Do we have any other speakers? Ms. Madden. All right so then I will turn it over to Supervisor Voting for virtual. Thank you Chair Jefferson. Ms. Van, Ms. Madden, how many folks do we have online this afternoon too? All right let's begin. Your first speaker is Elena Schlossberg. Good afternoon, everyone. Rachel did a fabulous job. So obviously I already sent my comments, and but I really like them, so I'm going to read a little bit from what I sent you. This is really about what is the strategic plan? The strategic plan is the foundation of equality community for everybody in the county. What's frustrating is that it's supposed to align our goals with actual policy that is supported by everyone, government and citizens alike. We all want our county and therefore our communities to succeed. This is not, sometimes I feel like there is still this adversarial between the board and citizens, but we are really all one community. We are all one county, which I think Rachel expressed very eloquently. My concern is that this county has adopted a comprehensive plan that in practice does not align with smart growth goals, which plays a key role in our collective future, both in our quality of life and our tax burden. When the Gainesville community met for this strategic goal meeting, the first thing I said was, you know, we feel like this is an exercise in futility, which is why it is so important to take into consideration the concerns of the community. Right now, one of my biggest concerns is that you all would like to see protection of open space. You have adopted a PDR program. We have an arts, ag, and overlay district that has no ordinance. And right now what we are seeing is our open spaces, which by the way, number one, in every single district, and you have the information I sent you, in every single district, protecting our green spaces and open space was either number one or tied in all seven districts. How are you guys gonna do that? How are you gonna do that if your smart growth strategies do not align with your strategic plan? And what are your smart growth strategies? Well, they are strengthening direct development towards existing communities. Provide a variety of transportation choices, make development decisions predictable. But when you allow communities to go into an assemblage, either for data center development or housing, where it doesn't belong, that makes the future for why we built here in Prince William County and why we love it at risk. I'm gonna urge everyone, Kim isn't here anymore, but she left some amazing programs, and I know Ashley is doing a fabulous job as the new executive director, but I really invite you all to revisit those programs. I think they're very informative and they'll help teach you what it looks like to preserve open space and perpetuity because right now we are not doing that. So thanks everyone. Thank you, Miss Las Vegas always next speaker please. Your next speaker is Jessica Grove. Miss Grove. Good afternoon, supervisors. I have to be quick today, so I had to cut my talking points drastically. But I wanted to again, again, bring it to your attention that you don't seem to be quick today so I had to cut my talking points drastically. But I wanted to again, again, bring it to your attention that you don't seem to be listening. You don't seem to be listening to the residents of county who keep coming to speak to you or write to you or those that participate in county focus groups to give you feedback. In phase two of the strategic plan development process, the number one issue was that reported a weakness of the county was trust and transparency. 42 people brought it up. 25 people mentioned overdevelopment. So the two biggest issues that were brought up in mass were ignored by the board in their work session. After that meeting, it was not mentioned once that the citizens are looking for trust and transparency. I hope that you hear from enough people to make some better decisions moving forward. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Crouve. Was that the last speaker, Ms. Van? Yes, there are no more speakers. Thank you, as always, for your assistance. Back to you, Madam Chair. All right, thank you so very much. I thank you, our people, who took a time today to speak with us. We're going to move on to County Executive time. So Mr. Shorter, the floor is now yours. Good afternoon and thank you very much Madam Chair, members of the board. A few updates before I call up Lisa majoring to provide an update on the CRC consistent with supervisor Bailey's request last week. We are working as a team to really assess all of the current directives, even directives that were, that are a few years old, with that what I plan to do moving forward where possible it's come to the board meeting to reflect out directives from the prior board meeting and where they have been assigned. And so I hope in the next few days also to send a memo to the board, lifting up all of those directives that are currently outstanding and making sure that the board is aware of directives that have been closed over the last few years. With that in mind, last week, there were four directives that we discussed. One, the cancellation of Route 15, the pedestrian bridge. We have assigned that to transportation. Appreciate the boards, interest in having us come back and have a further discussion about that directive. We will likely have a transportation come back in the coming months. This fall, likely in November or December, with a full complete presentation and an opportunity for us to have a discussion. There was also a directive issued about restoring property for a historical preservation that has been assigned to Parks and Recreation, and we will follow up soon. We were also asked to arrange a presentation for Prince William Water. They will likely be coming in December. Certainly recall that that presentation, among other things, will include PFAS, serenityinity and water capacity generally, as requested by Supervisor Weir. And then finally, the directive regarding the establishment of two additional board, not additional, but two board committees, budget and finance and the inter-intergestictional committee. I'll be working with communications, our county attorney, and Finance to draft language around those board committees and come back to the board in the coming weeks. So certainly more to come on that. I plan to make this, take a few minutes, and make this a regular piece of what I report out on moving forward. In addition to the directives, you all may recall the conversation we had about towns. Madam Chair. I do quickly. I'll let you go through that because I know Supervisor Rear had a comment. It was about the directives. Okay. I'm just sure I just want to be clear that you're making a differentiation because I believe there's a legal distinction between actions that were done by directive and actions that were done by resolution will evoke and that they're being handled as two separate categories. They are being handled as two separate categories. What I'll do my best to report out on really are directives. Resolutions are formal action by the board and will be handled as they always have been. Really the intent here is just to lift up directives which in my mind have gone sometimes months without us addressing it to the collective board where we might be having conversations with a single board member. So yes, they will be treated separately. We did talk about better collaboration and just more communication with towns. And so I have reached out to the town managers consistent with our conversation. We are tentatively scheduled right now for first meeting on October 18th. So that is tentative. We have gotten acceptance from most of our towns, but not all. So we'll certainly update the board as we go forward. I'm hoping that those meetings will be quarterly and we'll be really looking to the town managers to help with the agenda setting process so that it's just not the county providing information but it is a information exchange. I wanted to remind the board but also the public of the September 11th remembrance ceremony tomorrow morning at 9.30 a.m. As you all know, our county lost 22 lives 23 years ago. And so we are, as we do every year, remembering, honoring those lives, the families, and the residents of Prince William County. So all are invited to attend tomorrow morning. That's ceremony. Also just wanted to acknowledge Superintendent Pete Meletus. He is retiring next month after 42 years of service to Prince William County. 16 of those years as superintendent for ADC. He has served the county well, and I just wanted to lift up his name here today as he is winding down his time in the county. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. And then to Supervisor Bailey's request last week when we were together, I have asked Lisa Maidrin to please come forward. She's going to give a brief summary on where we stand with the CRC and answer some questions that came up by way of discussion last week and then certainly take any questions that you all might have. Lisa, turn it over to you. Thank you. Good afternoon. I apologize real quick. Supervisor Bailey. Thank you, manager. I just had a quick question for the county exec. Thank you so much for making an attempt to have those meetings with the town managers. I think that will help us tremendously just in keeping good healthy relationships and making sure our level of service is where it needs to be. Just as feedback, will you be coming back to us in terms of what the needs are? And I asked that not to micro-manage anything. But I asked that because a lot of times I know my office with the two towns. I get phone calls from the citizens, you know what I mean? And so if we could look like it's a collaborative effort in terms of communication. Absolutely. We'll be creative about how we lift up the topic areas that come up at these meetings. I'm hoping that things like emergency management, coordination, certainly special events like the one we're about to host this week. These are the kinds of things that we're talking about, but certainly where other things come up, I want to make sure that the board is aware, so we will absolutely, probably not at more meetings, but certainly by way of communication to the board, we'll be reporting out on important agenda items. Thank you. Thank you. Please. Thank you. Good afternoon. Chair Jefferson, members of the Board. I'm Lisa Maidrin currently serving as your chief transformation officer. As indicated in the emails that were sent to you by Mr. Shorter, the Department of Medical Assistance had contacted us in July over the crisis receiving center, asking that we complete a form that they use when considering residential facilities for an Institute of Mental Disease or an IMD to determine Medicaid payment. After completing the form, DMS did inform us that they determined the CRC at Worth Avenue to be an IMD facility. And an IMD facility was from a policy in 1965, created around the time of deinstitutionalization to shift payment from the federal government to the states and to decrease deinstitutionalization from returning. And it basically says if you have, if you're an institution of more than 16 beds and you treat someone with a diagnosis, DSM diagnosis, diagnostic statistical manual, mental health or substance abuse diagnosis, you can be considered an IMD and therefore not eligible for Medicaid reimbursement. Although we challenge this designation, given the fact that this is a crisis facility, not a long-term care facility which the policy speaks to, and the exception that is in the policy known as Psych under 21 for providing youth services or not including youth beds in this consideration. Demast persisted in saying that the youth beds would count since the facility was not an inpatient hospital. At the time of the policy, there wasn't a CRC or any type of crisis facility. So the exception for youth was made for inpatient hospitals. At this point, it seems that the only way in Virginia for us to build for Medicaid would be if the state approves a waiver. DMS has indicated the intent to apply for an 1115 waiver and has engaged a vendor to assist them with the completion of the application. I don't know exactly when that application will be submitted, but they are indicating a target date in November of 2024. Demas would make the application and I'm told that CMS, the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, would have between six months to two years to approve the application and then allow IMDs to apply for the waiver. Presently we're working with connections, DMS, DBHDS, and hopefully you for possible options. Our options include opening the CRC as planned if funding can be identified to support in the interim of the waiver or opening in a more phased approach, such as when we initially started this we talked about the adult CRC 16 beds 23 hours and possibly some of the youth observational chairs the 23 hours. We also learned from DBHDS that the $2.1 million in funding that they awarded us in December of 2022 to start part of the UTHCRC with our plan to start the adult was not ongoing but one time funding. DPHDS is aware that we would need the ongoing funding that they've taken as well as the bridge for the Medicaid revenue for us to be able to open as planned. They've communicated as well as demas that they want this to work and they're willing to work with us to try to figure out how to make this plan. Any questions? Supervisor Franklin? Sure, yet thank you for all of this and I'm just going to be a little bit candid. If you can just break that down and just remember we have the public watching. So if you can say that in layman's terms and terms of what the actual issue is, I think that will be helpful and then I think I have some follow-up questions. So in the 60s, when deinstitutionalization was happening, a policy got put on the books through the Social Security Administration that basically said we don't want large facilities anymore. So we're going to put in incentive and have states be responsible rather than the federal government for any institutions that have 16 or more beds. And we're going to exclude Medicaid payment from that. However, there are some exceptions to this policy. One exception would be for youth. So the policy is really for 22 to 65-year-olds. If you have 16 or more beds, then that's considered an IMD. Youth should not count. However, in the exclusion, there was no such thing as a crisis facility. Everything was long-term care. And even in one of their exceptions that they have for Medicaid-managed care to bill, you can bill them if somebody's not staying longer than 15 days. There's also a lump-son that the state can make. But what we're being told at this point is because RIMD, our CRC, is considered an IMD because we're planning to have 16 adult beds and 16 youth beds. And because of the Chantilly Regional Center that was opened last year, you may recall, a vendor ended the contract and connections took over. Primarily to be well positioned to get their license, to be able to take over RCRC and the licensing process more smoothly, we're now being told that that facility that is in another county because it is operated by connections might count toward our 16 beds. So we don't know. We don't know where we stand with opening any beds. We're trying to get answers. We've asked Demas, who's known all along what we've been planning to do and has supported what we've been planning to do. Has brought this up now, telling us that the youth, we can't bill for youth even though there's an exclusion because the policy says the youth must be in an inpatient hospital. What we're trying to avoid in the first place by this community center, because crisis centers weren't part of the known entity at the time this policy was there. There's also the piece about Medicaid-managed cares, being able to pay for these services and in IMDs, as long as you don't stay longer than 15 days. I'm told by DMS that that would require a general assembly change and funding. It's not clear why it requires a change since it's in the policy. It's also in the policy that the lump sum, the lump sum payment can be made to states for services in an IMD and DMS will not comment on that at this time. So really we're not sure what we can open yet. And we're trying to figure out what we can and what General Assembly Action legislative action is needed. We definitely know the waiver is needed to at least be able to have that to go to. However in other states, and it is the state determination that makes the determination of whether something is considered an IMD or not, and in other states that do not have the waiver like Arizona, they do not have the state making the strict determination that Virginia has made. And I believe Virginia is making the strict termination demasses because they recently had a situation of a facility where they did not consider it and IMD CMS did and so DMS had to pay CMS back. And I think that's why we're experiencing what we are. And to my follow up questions, I guess you kind of explained the process, but if you can just speak a little bit more to kind of what we're doing to kind of fix and mitigate. And then I think, and part of this maybe your answer, have we spoken to the congressional delegation, have we spoken to our state delegation with regards to particularly on the congressional side reaching out to CMS about these designations and seeing if there are any other type of exclusions or waivers we can get. And then speaking with the state, obviously, because they have oversight of DMAs to kind of figure out what our options are there or to get them to look at the definitions a little bit differently. We are trying to figure a lot of that out. Connections has had too lobbyists that have been working with, that also helped change some of the things that we needed changing. They're working to see the best approach. They're also working with DMS on this. They have definitely told us that they think, you know, us having that connection and speaking to our delegation about it. It's somewhat problematic at this point in terms of not knowing what we're asking for because we know the waiver. And if they can expedite the consideration of this waiver, that is definitely one thing. But in terms of the policy, again, when DMA said that it would take a general assembly change to allow us to bill the Medicaid MCOs for our services. It's not clear what that changes because it's in the policy. So we're trying to work with the state and with DMS and connections to align and see what we can do as soon as possible as well as what options we have in facing in the services. Sure, and I hear you say that you're working with the state in Demos, but have we actually spoken to members of our state and congressional delegation about this issue? I think we've been waiting for that. Yeah, so a few items I'd like to kind of touch on one, just to be clear, the construction associated with the crisis receiving center is on schedule. And there are no projected delays in the construction schedule. So the facility will be opened as we have updated. And FFM is certainly here to answer any questions associated with the CRC construction in terms of funding. Now we have been Glenn and Nikki meeting with each of you to talk through the legislative agenda. And so to be clear, this is absolutely a part of our legislative agenda and we will be making sure once we publish it and that we get concurrence from all of you that the where there is a need for general assembly input or support that we ask for that support as part of our legislative agenda. For now, we are having conversations with the state delegation separate and apart from the legislative agenda about support. And so if that's where you were going, Supervisor, yes, we are having those conversations. I think what Lisa is making a point to include and highlight is the fact that we have a partner in connections and that they have their own resources in terms of lobbying and that they are doing their part as well. Yep. Yep. And I would just say from experience on both of those ends, a, connections needs to be in line with our lobbyists and making sure that they're moving step in step together. And then I would also say I know we have the legislative agenda and we'll add this to it and you guys are having discussions aside from that. But this is a priority and it's urgent and I would make sure that those discussions are happening right now so that the state and congressional delegation understands that we need to be moving on this daily until we can reconcile and seek some type of solution. Even if that means sending a letter to CMS if our congressional delegation can maybe have a meeting with CMS about this issue and then our delegation, our state delegation, doing the same with Demos and making Demos answer to them as to how they came to these designations. I mean, this isn't just a discussion. We need to make sure that we're actually pushing our representatives to actually move on this. So I would just encourage you all to just make sure that connections is moving in step with Glenn and Nikki. And then also that we are making official ask of our congressional and state delegation to reach out to CMS, reach out to Demos, send those letters, have meetings, and we want some type of solution. And I would even give a time frame for that. Absolutely. All right. Thank you so very much. Supervisor Bailey. Thank you, Madam Chair. even give a time frame for that. Absolutely. All right, thank you so very much. Supervisor Bailey. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Supervisor Franklin. I'm great mind to think alike. And I've been thinking about this all weekend. I appreciate your input on this. And I have been having those discussions. But I didn't want to be outside of my colleagues nor the process that the county is setting up nor our county exec. And so, you know, just going in front of y'all, didn't want to do that. I think it is a collaborative effort. I appreciate you coming and saying that to expect this before it really did happen because it's been in the work. So I've been talking to the state and to congressional partners since then. And so I appreciate the county exact bringing this because this is a county, a colleague effort and we collectively need to understand with a pristine project like this. Is it not going to stop? Thank you for saying that. Appreciate that. But the inside is the essence of why we're building it. And so we do need to have a plan. People are aware of it, but we need to collectively understand what's going on. This is being discussed also in VACO. We talked about that in our summit. The expectation of it coming, I didn't know it was going to come this soon. So just to give you a flavor of what partners you have out there. And I'm very thankful that plans haven't stopped to have it built. But as Supervisor Franklin is saying, the state controls DMAs. And so that's a cool for us, that's good. And so I think I would ask the county exact to have individual meetings with us. If you have time, I know your time is valuable also, but I would like to share what that looks like so that we can also share it with the colleagues and share it with the public, what we're doing collectively, because the state and congressional are very much aware of this. And then lastly, Glyn and Nikki, there's verbiage in our legislative agenda that needs to be changed and enhanced and I don't know if you've done that already. Okay, then that's great. That's great. But I appreciate you responding to this so quickly because it's very important and just keeping the project going is very important. And I think you're very student making sure in that documentation of Dimas knowing that this is not an institution, that's not the purpose of this building that we're building. And so we have to be very strong and collaborative. And the other thing I would ask my colleagues to consider if we need to provide a letter in terms of the support of this project in terms of our county staff and the county exact we will be willing to do that. Thank you. All right next the Supervisor we're thank you Madam Chair I'm not going to belabor this too much, but I've always had a bit of a concern about, I guess, haste in some aspects of this project. What I would like to know is, if the facility construction is ongoing, and we've got these problems with respect to operational funding at some point in the future. It occurs to me that the solution doesn't lie within our hands, and I think you would agree that lies either with the state of the federal level, depending on how you want to interpret it. What I haven't heard is the projected range of unbudgeted costs if any, both short-term and ongoing, if there is no solution to the issue as raised, how much are we looking at? We estimated the revenue to be approximately 8 million for both the adult and the youth that we were anticipating to be able to collect. If we are able to go ahead with the adult and collect the revenue, then it would be around 4 million that we're looking at for the youth. The 2.1 million that was ongoing that the state took back, I believe they are trying to work with us because they did provide us documentation that it was supposed to be ongoing. And if I understand correctly, this may be further jeopardized by our partner and their previous relationship with another facility where we might just get lumped in with them and so that's more connected to the I.D. and the designation not the state actually that partnering with the Chantilly with the state was what might facilitate and expedite the license for the Worth Avenue facility. All right Supervisor Gordy. Thank you, Madam Chair. Just to piggyback on Supervisor Franklin, I think we should be engaged. I don't think we should wait from a legislative standpoint to engage the congressional delegation. This is more of a constituent matter. Not a necessary legislative one, because I think when we take a look at this from the beginning, if we go ahead and start working with the congressional delegation and getting them working with CMS, then we can identify specifically with, have them see it from their own individual personal perspective of what the challenges are and then help us find that solution. We don't have to do this alone. We should have them in partnership with us looking at this. Having, you know, work for a member of Congress as an office, this is not outside normal operations. This is what we do with every day. So I would go ahead and engage the congressional delegation. Their local office, not necessarily their Washington office, say, hey, we need your help. And then, in just for point of clarity, so we're talking about just Medicaid funding, but if somebody comes with their own insurance, we're still going to be able to, we will be taking other insurance. So this, we're not anticipating 100% of the participants are all on Medicaid, that there are others come in with, potentially with their own insurance that can pay for services. That is correct. Not all of the commercial insurances necessarily cover all of the aspects of crisis. And that is something that's already being dealt with legislatively, but absolutely. And that's what the estimate of the 8 million is for revenue is really an estimate. This has never been done before and it's a combination of commercial insurance and Medicaid. Thank you. All right, Supervisor Ingrid. I'll be real quick because they because actually both of you nailed it. So we got a building being built, timing is good, but we have really sounds like a situation with Medicaid and really some legalities between the state and where we're going with this. So I would simply say that both of these have to happen at the same time. Otherwise we're going to be sitting here with a facility that's open that probably a bulk of its intake, folks that need to be there on Medicaid or somewhere forming that where there's the issue, there's a lot of the issue. So I would just like to say for this board and for you, Chris, that both of those really need to be, we need to be pushing, as a supervisor Franklin said, getting everything we need with the legislation in place because it's great to see that the facility is coming up on schedule, we always like to get things built to have the schedule or even on schedule. So that's great, but if we get it all there, or when we get it all there, just to have these issues would be like, ah, we missed an opportunity. Now, let me ask this one question. I remember a couple years back, we were discussing Prince William County being its own medical health department. I don't, would that have any influence over this discussion with this, you know? I'm not sure if it would, but you know, I know as we were saying, it's those, there's still things that we were looking at. So just, not for this discussion, just curious about it but but thanks. All right. You said not for this discussion? Are you sure? All right. Thanks. All right. Supervisor Bowdie. Thank you Madam Chair. I'll just save very quickly. Picking back off what everyone else is saying is we need everyone in and we need to be talking about this right now. I appreciate both you as Franklin and Gordy. This isn't something we need to wait until a lot of clarity has had. We know what the issues are. We know the outcome we want to have, so we should at least be talking from that discussion point and help everyone get on the same page of music. The last partner I think we should really engage us all to the governor's office directly. We know that he over the last few years is prioritized mental health and frankly has been a supporter of facilities like ours. I mean he was here for the our sort of our ground will not groundbreaking the ceremony we had last year So I know that he's a big supporter of this. So I would just say that as much as he can play a role in this We should be you know talking to his all his office as well because frankly We can't have too many folks rowing in the same direction on this, especially when we know that right now, it sounds like we're almost being penalized providing the services that we need to do, knowing that we're so far behind anyway, especially when it comes to children. We're shooting ourselves in the foot by them saying, essentially, because you're providing more of these services, we're not going to, as your angry point, allow for one of the biggest most at risk folks that need it, your Medicaid recipients to avail themselves of this. So I think there's a lot of folks that we need to bring in and have a big huddle on this. And again, I think that one of the outcomes we should say is folks should, especially our community, should not be penalized for providing services that are long overdue and needed. Thank you Madam Chair. All right, supervisor Bailey. Thank you Madam Chair. I just wanted to, for Bob, in terms of not anything but just to address what you said about the HACE. The HACE came out of the fact of the need for the kids. Yeah, and so we can't let this stop us. It is two separate things, mental health, and then this, it's not separate, but still collective, mental health and physical health. So we still need the physical health, the health building, we still, but we need the mental health building as well. So I just want to, to what a supervisor, Angri just mentioned, I think his point is very valid in terms of, keep that on the radar as well. But the other thing is just to make you aware that the Secretary of Health is very much engaged in this. You know that just to let my colleagues know, he's very much engaged in the Secretary of the Tell, very much engaged in this. So that's top cover that we have in terms of partnership variant. And so if he knows the governor knows, so I just wanted to say that for a sense of security with this project. So thank you for coming back immediately with the information for my colleagues. All right. Thank you. Now I have a question. And I feel like I want my security blanket because this makes me nervous. The state dropped the ball on us. What really makes me nervous is the most vulnerable population, the most vulnerable people. What will happen to them if we don't have this resolved? This is the same thing that has been. They've been waiting in languishing in hospitals. And that's why this is the most convoluted antithesis of what the policy stood for in the 60s. Don't build institutions. We're going to make sure you don't. And now they're coming back. And when we have a crisis model that shows that we are not building institutions that we are helping in a way that's never been thought of before, they're telling us that you can't do it. It's because the laws haven't kept up with the real life needs. So I appreciate you. Thank you for coming and discussing this. I mean, this is a weighty issue. This is a tough issue. And hopefully we will continue to work together to resolve this. And again, anything that the board collectively needs to do, whether it is a letter, whether it is, you know, really pushing whatever relationships we have, you know, at the congressional and state level. This is a priority. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. And Lisa, thank you very much. I know she has been working over time on this issue along with so many others so I just want to appreciate you. Madam Chair, I'd now like to invite up Director Tanya Washington to provide an update on the data center overlay boundary study. Good afternoon members of the board, Tanya Washington, planning director. This is an update on directive 24-23. Review of boundaries related to current data center opportunity overlay district from May of this year. County staff was directed to expedite a review of the boundaries of the current data center overlay, data center opportunity overlay district, and to recommend any suggested adjustments to the overlay district's boundaries. The planning office provided a memo to the board in June, outlining a proposed process to complete this effort, including initial staff analysis starting this summer, and bringing on board a consultant later this year after the planning office completes our on-call consultant procurement process with recommendations to the board for changes to the overlay district by November of 2025. Following you at Directive, Chair Jefferson also requested the planning office look first at the recommendations for the 2023 STAN Tech Consultant Report for sites to remove from the overlay district and to bring recommendations on those sites forward as soon as possible. The analysis by the consultant STAN Tech was conducted as part of an earlier directive that included in that scope identifying areas to expand the overlay district as well expand the state's plan to expand the state's plan to expand the state's plan to expand the state's plan to expand the state's plan to expand the state's plan to expand the state's plan to expand the state's plan to expand the state's plan to expand the state's plan to expand the state's plan to expand the state's plan to expand the state's plan to expand the report recommendations and will be bringing staff recommendations for removals to the board later this fall for further direction. We also would like to continue our broader analysis of the overlay district boundaries as a phase two. Once we have a consultant on board later this year to identify any additional areas for possible removal from the overlay district. That concludes my update. Happy to answer any questions. Wow, this is really going. Supervisor Franklin. Just a quick question and I guess we'll get into this once we do the official presentation, but it was my understanding that in terms of the amount of parcels left that had not been I guess developed or even purchased in the overlay was very minimal. And so I'm very curious as to what's being recommended to be taken out, seeing as how I don't think there is a lot left in the overlay in the first place, unless I could be. We will be able to provide further details on that question as well as focusing on the analysis that we've completed so far. But this first phase is focusing just on those nine sites that have not already been developed for data centers. And so that's the starting point for now. And then once we conclude that we get direction for newborn in terms of how you would like to proceed with any recommended removals, there's still the opportunity to do a broader look at the overly district boundaries, because as you know, there are sites that have come forward through rezoning applications, et cetera, that have the issues of proximity to residents, to schools, et cetera, that have been issues that have been issues of proximity to residents, to schools, et cetera, that have been issues that have been coming up and that's sort of part of the criteria that we're going to be looking at as well. Yeah, and for the non-sites, are they is it land that has not been purchased? I think we'll better be able to answer that question when we come back later. We can give you a specifics on those sites. Because obviously that would be a concern if the land has already been purchased, but I'm just going to assume that these are parcels that have not been purchased. That is something we will be verifying because we're looking at each site, site by site to look at what the current conditions are. So again, we can answer that question better when we come back. All right, Supervisor Weir. I think we're going to have a lot of time to do that. I think we're going to have a lot of time to do that. I think we're going to have a lot of time to do that. I think we're going to have a lot of time to do that. I think we're going to have a lot of time to do that. I think we're going to have a lot of time to do that. I think we're going to have a I can't wait more than a year to do this. I am curious though, which stand-tech report are we using? Are we using the one that was initially supplied? Or the one that was supplied shortly thereafter in support of the comp plan so that certain parcels could be added back in? Or are we not addressing the additional parcels? Before Mr. McGatty can come up to answer that question, I did want to clarify that I noted that this initial analysis that we're looking at, we will be bringing for recommendations to the Board for possible removals before the end of this year. I dig the McGatty again from the Planning Office. We will focus on the removals, so not the additional additions that stand-tech recommended in their final report will be based on the recommendations in the February 2023 report. So the original stand-tech report with the original table and the original boundaries? Because there were two. The latest one and it was the changes I think were on additions not in removals so we will be focusing on removals. Okay. So we're essentially going to start from ground zero and with the exception of the STAN Tech report that you're going to use as the basis for some removals. Spend even more money on studies and consultants than we've already spent in the last couple of years. At this point, because we are looking at sites that were initially examined by Santa C, what we would like to do is once we bring forward those recommendations to the board, we get some clear direction from the board and understand how you would like to proceed at that point. We did want to note that, excuse me, with regards to the original directive to do a boundary study that that would require some consultant assistance in order for us to really do a broader scan. So we definitely hear a concern supervisor we are at this point again because we are taking some work that has already been completed on behalf of the county but was not moved forward previously we'd like to focus on that and then just you know find out for an abort how you would like to proceed at that point. I'm not blaming you because you weren't the planning director at the time but it seems like this all got pigeon-hold Two and a half years ago when it was ready to be handled and for a variety of reasons didn't I would just note that with respect to the current overlay The your predecessor quite famously Is either that or economic development, I'm not sure, entirely sure which one it was at this point in time, it really doesn't matter. Quite famously came in here and told the board and the public that no parcels could be developed in the, or very few parcels could be developed within the overlay because everybody wanted 100 acres and there were no 100 acre parcels left. As we've seen in recent months, recent years, the validity of that statement is questionable as a kind word. We've had many applications come in for far less than a hundred acres, 40 acres and such. We've also seen quite a number of applications come in where they are aggregations of smaller parcels. So this narrative that there is no available space within the overlay above and beyond whether there's any power for it at this point in time. It's quite frankly a false one and I would hope that we would stop pushing that narrative on the public because every time somebody comes in with a conglomeration of parcels, I mean, I just end up repeating myself, where's your 100 acres and how is this possible in an area? So I think we just need to keep that in mind when we're looking at the overlay and determining what the boundaries can be and not go with this narrative that every data center needs 100 acres. Thank you. All right, Supervisor Gordy. Thank you Madam Chair. Thank you Miss Washington for this update. A couple of points as we're looking at this and you know I've I've encouraged people to look at the overlay as in a transparent format. Too many times when we look at the overlay we look in in a solid color which does not reveal all the activity that currently exists within the overlay the current economic activity and when you take a look at the land that is left within the overlay, most of the land that is already, which is not developed, is being developed, it's already been purchased. What's left is current acting, active economic activity. So to whatever extent we leave the overlay over these parcels, I think it would also benefit us as a board to understand what are we, if a data center goes in here, what are we giving up? How many jobs, how many businesses? Because we are already seeing, and there's already one area in the Hornbaker industrial that is being sold out and its numerous businesses will be removed. And unfortunately, as we've discussed, and as we talk about a strategic plan, there's no place for them to go in this county for those types of businesses. So the challenge then, so as we look at the overlay, this is no longer just what do we gain, this is about what we lose. And then the second piece of this is also, and I'll speak a little bit to this during supervised time, but I was in Richmond this morning to meet with Dominion. And it's clear, there is the infrastructure, power infrastructure for additional data just as not there. Whatever power comes of these sites will have to come from outside the overlay. So that's what we're, and that's a very clear message. So as we look at that and as we understand, we're not just looking at sites for data centers. We're also having to look at how do you get power to those sites? Where is it coming from? What are the transmission routes that will be required to supply power within these corridors? It is a significant impact. And what we're seeing right now is a lot of the routes that are being proposed are eliminating buffers between the residential and the data centers which are in the overlay, but the residents are not, but the power routes, transmission routes are eliminating the buffers that we're intend to protect those communities. So as we're looking at that, I just asked that we would also take a look at these other aspects, not just looking at it from a land use perspective, but there has to be a broader understanding and a more holistic view about the impacts of this activity within what's left, because it will be significant. Thank you. Thank you. Sir Viser Bowdoin. Thank you, Madam Chair. To dovetail off of that, you know, we also know that a lot of the folks that are selling their land right now to this industry, it's a financial game, right? They stand to make a lot more money off of the data industry buying up that land than whoever else might be there. So I think that it would be who of us, you know, as recommendations are brought forth and that board acts upon them, us look at the economic development side of that and come up with a plan to provide incentives for folks to provide that other kind of economic activity because, frankly, as other folks have said on this day, we're putting too many eggs in this one basket and we're losing other types of robust, diverse economic activity as an outlay. So instead of having it, or we take all this land out of the overlay and run into two situations where that land in sits vacant for years, or, frankly, then people just bring in, where he's only application either at it back in the overlay like we've seen, or just frankly go through the SUP process, which still defeats the purpose taking out of the overlay, which is the decent device data going there. We need to provide something else because just taking it out and just saying no, we're making it harder. Frankly, it's only one part of that equation. So we need to come up with another way to incentivize other tough economic activity and other development in that area to offset the fact that we're taking it out of being centralized for data. Thank you, Madam Chair. Sir, Vice, or Bailey? Thank you, Madam Chair. Director Washington, really appreciate you bringing this back and bringing it to the fore because it's timely. There's been so much controversy around this one piece as it relates to data centers. And so this is very, very timely. And just making sure that we understand where we are with old stuff and going forward with new stuff, if we go forward with new stuff. And so I would ask that in your timeliness that you make it yesterday, but I know you can't. But we need to have it sincerely as soon as we possibly can so that we can address some of the concerns that the public has and help them to put things to rest in their minds as to the direction that we're going in with this. So it's very timely. We do need it yesterday. I know that you've got other things to do in conjunction with this. But to my colleagues recommendation, Mr. Bodhi, it's a great time because we can include other aspects to this and not just land. And so I know you're in your expertise. You are aware of that, but I just wanted to say that that is one of my concerns as well that we've done it with blinders on and not really focused on being inclusive with every aspect that we can be inclusive of. So thank you for your time, Loonness, but if we can, we appreciate it. Thank you, Manager. Thank you, Senator Rear. Thank you, Madam Chair, to dovetail on supervisory and supervisor Gordy, supervisor's Bordy. We're losing businesses on an ongoing basis, losing revenues, and we're losing employees and employment taxes and spending as a function of what is largely at this point in time, spec development that may or may not ever be realized from a revenue stream standpoint. To that point, I would argue, and I can say this, because I was here, as one of the original authors of the overlay, it's outlived its usefulness, and I think we need to look in an alternative. The basis of it in 2014 that brought it forward has changed and changed dramatically. Nobody predicted the exponential growth of the data center industry in Prince William County, at least not to this degree. The overlay was created to mitigate impacts to some degree. Keep development within power, existing power, corridors principally. That's no longer an option. We don't have transmission corridors now. Dominion doesn't have any planned. They're sort of doing it on an ad hoc one-by-one, one-off basis. So the whole premise behind creating it is now gone as the power lines are tapped. Similarly, a lot of other issues with respect to the data registry weren't known in 2014. Nobody considered things like noise, or what the other immediate impacts on neighboring parcels were. And a lot of that had to do with this. The overlay was, you know, by a large, it compromised product. And with every compromise, you know, it's not perfect. But the fact of the matter is, the overlay district was significantly better than the status quo with the time, which was data center anywhere, anytime, as a by-right use. The overlay eliminated that, at least some degree. So it was better than what the existing zoning provided for. I do have one ask though, and that is, when the overlay was initially created 2015-16, I don't even remember the date, as part of the planning office met with fairly frequently both community groups and the industry and dominion to craft the initial overlay. When it was met in 2017, planning staff threw that paradigm out the window and just did it on their own. And if we're going to go back and revise this, or get rid of it, or whatever we're going to ultimately end up doing with it, I do believe that both the community and the industry and most importantly, Dominion needs to be involved in the process so that we're all on the same page and operating under the same understandings, particularly with respect to transmission and generation capacity in the future. And by that I don't mean five years, I mean 30, because we've got a 25 to 30 year backlog of generation projects that will require new generation and new transmission. Thank you Madam Chair. Mr. Revisor Gordy. One other aspect I wanted to bring to your attention is the Innovation District, George Mason's side-tock campus. really trying to leverage this development of the innovation district to support what's happening on the site at campus. We're right there at the precipice of just reaching that tipping point of this thing turning into fantastic economic growth. But when I looked at the map that is of the innovation district, over half of it is data source. So we're literally squeezing out this other economic engine called the CITEC campus and the potential for nanofabrication forensics and all the other activities that are there on that campus. And so as you're looking at that, and I've actually asked an economic development director, Christina Wynn, to work with the innovation district leadership to present the entire board a presentation on this so that we all have an understanding of what's going on there. But I think that also needs to be looked at as part of how do we protect that area around George Mason in order to ensure that they have the land available to support the innovation activities of the site tech campus. Thank you. All right. I wanted to thank you, Director Washington, because you know I requested this in May and I did request it at VX, but I did. And your team has been working diligently on this. So I want to say thank you. This is a very important issue for particularly for the communities that are impacted by it. There's a cliche that a camel is a horse designed by committee. And that's how I feel about the overlay. When it was created, it had a specific purpose. And data centers were quite different than they are now. We have to do what we can to protect communities. And that is the reason I want to start with, what is it that we can take out? And again, I know that's not going to be just an easy vote. And we're going to have discussions about this. But I do want to know, what can we take out? What is not a good fit in 2024 that we didn't know about in 2012 or whenever this was created? And I want to tag on to something a couple of my colleagues said, incentivizing other commercial activities and innovation park. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Data centers have helped us bring more revenue into the county, but there have been unintended consequences. They have been going in areas, in some cases, where they really don't belong. We do have concerns about power, but yes, we have to think about what other industries are we crowding out? What else could be there? And that requires imagination. That requires patience. We can't have everything at once. And the problem with this issue with data centers, it doesn't fall evenly onto everyone in the county. I mean, we have to be clear about that. There are certain communities that are more impacted than others. And it's easy to take a vote for something that we are not held responsible for by our constituents. And so I want people on the board to really consider this. We take votes for everyone across the county, but not everyone is necessarily going to be voting for the individual supervisors. So when we take votes, let's consider the impact on the communities that are, you know, that literally I guess most directly impact, you know, that, you know, could be harmed. So this directive was given because I just at least want to, let's start the conversation. Are there areas that can be removed? We can get to other questions like, you know, you know, have they been sold or is there anything planned? I mean, let's look at, is there anything that can be removed? It doesn't have a current application on it. We can discuss what other incentives are other things that we can do. But we need to have the conversation. We have to acknowledge that things have changed. And again, that the laws or the boundaries, you know, an overlay district that we created, doesn't necessarily apply today. So again, I appreciate you and your team for expediting this, for working on this so diligently. And I look forward to continuing these conversations with my colleagues. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Director Washington. Finally, for me, Madam Chair, I just wanna take knowledge. We are in a, Madam Chair, I just want to take knowledge. We are in a week, well, I should say in a few days, at the end of this week, going to be welcoming over 150,000 spectators and folks who are watching around the world, Prince William County. I just really wanted to lift up and thank all of the staff that played a role in preparing to host the Solhanka. As you know, we will be at the end of this week really starting today hosting the world's best female golfers. And so I really wanted to just acknowledge our police department, fire and rescue, planning, and certainly economic development and tourism for many, many others, for all of the work that they've done to get us to this point and just wishing our county the best as we make sure that we have a very safe event over this next few days. All right. Thank you so very much. sure that we have a very safe event over this next few days. All right, thank you so very much. We are now going to move on to county attorney time. Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the board. We have no items for close session this afternoon. Thank you so very much. We are now going to go into agenda item number six to work session. So I'm going to go back to Mr. Shorter to queue them up. Very good. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, members of the Board. As you know, a few months back, we really started, thanks to you all allowing, after the restructuring of our government, by strategic quadrant, allowing for these work sessions to really evolve into updates by Quadrant. This is really an opportunity for our agency leaders, our directors, to have an opportunity to really come before you and before the public to give an update on where they stand. This kicked off with Deputy County Executive Dan Alexander in the Safe and Secure Community Quadrant and really want to just give a big thank you to Deputy CXO Quinn Haynes and really the entire team of directors that are about to present to you this afternoon for all the work they are. As you can see in the slides, I have done just a phenomenal job with preparing for today. So with that, I will turn it over to Quinn. Thank you, Chris. Good afternoon, Chair Jefferson members of the board. I'm Quentin Hanks, Deputy County Executive for government operations, performance, and innovation. And I'm excited to start our discussion here today to talk about our quadrant, specifically giving an introduction to the work that we do. I'm going to talk a little bit about the progress that we have done in an effort to continue to move forward with the county executive's goal of modernizing our business operations, or quote unquote what we call our internal operations of county government. To our quadrant, internally known as gub-ops, and I always say this, yes, government can have a cool name. And so we're called Gub Ops, is made up of six agencies. Facilities and fleet management, human resources, human rights, information technology, management and budget, and procurement and servicemen services. We are also the liaison or the government liaison to the Office of Elections, Prince William County School District, as well as internal cities and towns to Prince William County. So the approximately 400 dedicated, passionate and innovative employees who make up our government operations quadrant work tirelessly each and every single day to ensure that our buildings are safe, operational, and welcoming to the public. We remain as an employer of choice by recruiting top talent and ensuring our employees have a journey or career trajectory within the county. Our county is free from discriminatory practices and is aware of those laws. We leverage technology both internally and externally to ensure that our interactions are simplified and seamless to the public and they're in a convenient, transparent and accessible manner. And we're keeping the future of our county and mind through our budget, our investments, and our strategic planning activities. And last but not least that we are obtaining quality goods and services from reliable vendors that support our agencies and the employees so that they can do the great work that they are doing each and every day. Now, these all align with our unified mission of delivering innovative administrative solutions that optimize agency service delivery. Speaking of service delivery, we have five areas of service within our quadramp. Those are acquisition, asset management, people, planning, and technology. Now I'm going to get out of the way and let our phenomenal directors talk about each of their service areas and talk about the great work that their employees are doing to ensure that we remain maintained a high performing organization here in Prince William County Prince and Madam Chair, we'll t whether you want us to pa to take questions, wait t us to do it will be flexi that what I'm going to be and if people have speak kind of signal. Absolutely. want to bring up our office Miss sanitary who is our Director as well as our Chief Procurement Officer, Schena the floor is yours. Thank you, Quentin, Madam Chair, members of the board. Very excited to present the Office of Procurement Services objectives, our strategic goals as well as our initiatives. We are just shy of one year of being a new office. So last year in September, as part of the organizational structure realignment, Procurement Services Division of Finance became the Office of Procurement Services and the Office of Executive Management. With this new reporting structure, the Office of Procurement Services was established. We have rebranded ourselves our office with the focus on providing strategic, responsible public procurement to deliver the best value for our customers. The Office of Procurement Services support agencies in obtaining mission critical high quality goods and services in a timely manner at a reasonable cost and from reliable vendors. We provide guidance and training to our county agencies to ensure compliance with laws, regulations, while promoting transparency in the acquisition process. And throughout that process, we want to make sure that all of our procurements are conducted in a fair and impartial way, that we are avoiding the appearance of impropriety, and that all qualified vendors have access to contracting opportunities. We want to make sure that our offers are not arbitrarily or capriciously excluded and that when we are tailoring our specifications that we are tailoring them to the needs of the county and that we are not tailoring them to a specific vendor. And as always we want to maximize compensation to the greatest degree possible. over the past year we've established a new office and team structure and four core service areas to support strategic procurement to support our Calney agencies and vendors. We have a team of 20 highly experienced procurement professionals who work collaboratively to develop innovative solutions to meet the needs of agencies and the public. So within these teams we have our operational procurement, our operational procurement focuses on procuring goods and services to support all of our county agencies and this excludes our capital procurement, switching includes construction and architectural engineering services. Our capital procurement team, they focus on procuring construction, architectural engineering services, and work closely with our project managers to support our capital improvement program delivery. So this includes all of your major infrastructure projects, facilities, buildings, internal construction and renovation. So all of those projects that you see throughout the county procurement had a hand in working with those project managers and departments to develop their requirements and make sure that we procure those construction services, architectural professional services as well as make sure that the contractors are held accountable for performing in accordance with that contract. Our procurement card team they manage the county's procurement card program and that includes our standard procurement cards as well as our virtual procurement cards. Our vendor relations team this is a new team and service that we have added to the Office of Procurement Services so we have a vendor relations coordinator that works with our agencies as well as our vendors specifically providing tools and resources to help our vendors navigate the procurement process. He conducts outreach to our vendor community to make sure that they are aware of our upcoming procurement opportunities, attending outreach events to let vendors know that we are looking forward to having them register as a vendor with us and do business with the county. Here you'll see our organizational chart. And our current structure provides for staff development, growth, succession planning. And this structure here helps us maximize our resources and build capacity of staff and leadership. So when I came on board as the director of the Office of Precurement Services that was one of my key tasks in developing a office structure that would be collaborative in supporting the different county agencies. So we have here, I like to say, instead of a single point of failure, we have several opportunities for success here because we have several levels of leadership here in the deputy director there, as well as our senior procurement officers that work directly with these teams. And then we have our procurement manager there. So looking at our strategic objectives, so our main objective is to ensure that agencies obtain high quality goods and services in a timely manner at a reasonable cost and from reliable vendors. So our objectives here, the first one there is modernizing the acquisition process and improving the overall buyer and vendor experience. The goal here is to focus on reducing the administrative burden for our agencies and our vendors. Utilizing technology, automating processes that increase efficiency, implementing procurement and contract systems that allow for end-to-end monitoring throughout the entire lifespan of a contract. We're also focused on developing a robust marketplace that connects our partner agencies to vendors that meet their business needs. We're also looking to increase competition and cost savings by looking at our overall spend by conducting a spend analysis, looking at our contracts to see where we can consolidate requirements and eliminate contracts that are being underutilized. Expanding procurement solutions through strategic and sustainable sourcing and use of EVA, GSA, and other strategic sourcing marketplaces. Again, we want to leverage our network of cooperatives and other procurement entities that have already procured certain goods and services that allow us to join those particular systems to take advantage of savings to the county. And looking at improving contract administration through training and policy development and vendor performance assessments. Again, we are looking at making sure that we are not making rules for the sake of making rules that we are making sure that there are safe guys in place but again removing any bureaucracy or red tape out of the process that will allow our agencies to timely get the goods and services that they need. And again we're looking to increase county agency supplier network through vendor outreach to local and Swam enterprises. We want to increase our supplier pool, our supplier network. This allows us to increase competition and it allows us to achieve savings. Again, we want to humanize the procurement process establishing personalized outreach. That is the goal of our vendor relations coordinator. We're not just someone behind the screen, we have someone that they can come in and talk to, I'm interested in registering. I'm not sure of your particular processes. Again, we want to humanize that particular process. We are finalizing our first annual procurement report that will provide information on our procurement activities such as our contract spend and we look to have that out within the next few months. The team has made tremendous progress on initiatives that support all of our strategic objectives and I'll go over those on the next couple of slides. So in March of 2024 we held a virtual workshop how to do business with the county which was highly successful. So as a newly established office it was important for us to conduct outreach events to our vendor community virtual and in person to introduce our newly rebranded office to the vendor community. On April, we developed a vendor resources web page. So this web page is a place where all of our vendors can go to to find information on how to register with the county. Once they've registered, they can learn about upcoming opportunities. We have recordings on the website of presentations on how to do business with the county So we look to continue to build on that website just to have a one-stop shop for our vendors with resources and tools that they need We again, we hired a vendor relations coordinator to provide dedicated staff to conduct vendor outreach and training on how to navigate our procurement process. Our vendor relations coordinator again attends Chamber of Commerce events to make sure that vendors know how to register with us and they know of any upcoming opportunities that we have. And this is all aimed at increasing our supplier network. Very, very exciting. We held our first annual procurement expo. We had hundreds of vendors across the region to attend our first annual procurement expo. This was a major collaborative effort between the Office of Procurement Services and many of our county agencies who were there and able to connect with our vendors. Vinders were able to learn about the goods and services that the county typically procured to support their mission. It was just a great event. Our theme was making connections and building partnerships. I like to give a shout out to the procurement team who worked diligently in a short amount of time to execute this program. We had weekly planning meetings and every week the team was energized as we moved closer and closer to launching this event. Being in the middle of it, it was very hard to kind of see what a grant event it was, but I was glad I was able to go back and look at the Buzz video and I hope you all were able to look at that too to capture some of those highlights there but these vendors they provide goods and services and there are partners in delivering quality goods and services to the county. So long gone other days of keeping our vendors at arm length we need to engage early and often with our vendor community to be aware of latest trends in technologies, what the market will bear, so that when we put out our requirements, we can leverage that and make sure that we are clearly communicating to the vendor community what our needs are and setting them up with the best possible chance to respond and to deliver. Let's see. So next, in May, we rolled out our contract administration toolkit. Our toolkit includes a comprehensive guide and resources for our agency so effectively managed contracts. This training is required for staff that are assigned as a contract administrator, as well as have the duties of reviewing and approving invoices. We had over 300 employees enrolled in this class and we've been continually holding these training sessions, which has been very beneficial for our county agencies. We developed a new vendor performance evaluation process. This process includes a continuous and transparent evaluation process that provides the vendor an opportunity to provide feedback on the evaluation as to how they plan to approve, improve. And this area of focus is very important because in order for us to be able to provide quality goods and services to our community, the relationships that we have with our vendors and how they perform has a direct impact on county operations as well as service delivery to our communities. So next we launched our training and process advisory group interest forms. So the goal here is within the county, we want to have two different groups, advisory groups, where we'll work with each of these groups, a training advisory group to work with our county agencies to identify what training needs that do they have around procurement so that we can develop training for them and the correct delivery method that works for them to be able to help them to navigate our procurement processes as well as our process advisory group to look at all of our procurement processes internally. The processes that our agencies have to follow to get their feedback on those policies. What do they find burden some what steps can we remove just to make sure that again, we're not making rules for the sake of making rules, but we're protecting the county's interests and making sure that the agencies can get what they need in a timely manner. It's also important through this process for us to understand and procurement as we're developing these processes and procedures that we understand the impact to the agencies as we're developing the procedures. And we are also, we're now utilizing Eva, the state's E-procurement portal. So through the Eva system, county contracts, county agencies now have access to state contracts which allows us to leverage our buying power. It allows for additional savings and discounts on those contracts as well as we are now cross-posting our solicitations in EVA to allow for greater increased competition. So we have access to a larger pool of vendors as well as registered swan vendors that we can notify of our opportunities as well. And we had we were successful in advancing procurement legislative changes for our job order contracting program. So these changes allowed increase in the limit for our contracts for our job order contract as well as it terms. So the big benefit here is that we are able to execute some of our smaller construction projects without going through the formal bidding process. So that is a huge win helping us to deliver on our capital projects. We amended our procurement regulations which allow for increases in efficiency and the procurement process, increasing transparency and removing barriers to competition. And we had a huge impact on the organization in terms of saving through our procurement and virtual car program. We achieved 2.7 million administrative cost savings from a 38 million program expenditure. And these administrative cost savings represent organizational efficiencies for the county. Mary places manual paper, paper base procurement orders and check payments. It expedites the procurement process and reduces the cost of processing purchase orders and check payments, it expedites the procurement process and reduces the cost of processing purchase orders and voices and check payments. And these are all of the highlights of the Office of Recurement Services. I'm happy to take any questions before I turn it over to my next colleague. All right, I appreciate that. Thank you. I actually just have a couple questions. I just want to understand like when you guys are determining the best vendor for a particular good or service, you know, what aspects of their application is given the most weight? Is it price, past performance, reviews, technical write-up? How do you, what does that process look like? So we always consider a contractor's experience. So when we're procuring an invitation for bid, price is the overall riding factor. So the goods or services are very descriptive. So there's not a need to include additional criteria in terms of capabilities and things like that. So price is the overriding factor. So lowest, responsive, responsible bidder is awarded. So responsive meaning that they submitted all the required documents, responsible meaning they have the financial capacity, they have the staff, they have the experience, they've completed similar projects of that nature and they have the equipment and materials to perform the job. All right, my other question. And also, on the other side of that, where we evaluate experience and technical but capability as the override and requirement, that would be our request for a proposal process where innovation, experience, capability, all of those types of things are the overriding factor. Cost has a lower value point, but cost is still considered and negotiated throughout that process. Gotcha. Couple other things. I believe Eva, the procurement portal, that's the state portal, correct? Yes. You know, I had mentioned this once, you know, I know that we have a very tight percurement process, but when we Have things like whether it's an unsolicited a bid. We're looking at or thinking about accepting I would really like to see us make sure we're not just obviously posting on our website Which you've shared with us also goes out to vendors But let's you know make sure that we post things widely like our putting things in Eva so that we get more responses That's really important Making sure things are shared widely. But my other concern is, you know, making sure that we're reaching like swam vendors. Yes. Can you talk a little bit more about what you're doing to making sure that we have cast a wider net? Yes, so within the latest update of our procurement regulations, we did include a provision that requires agencies that they're delegated procurement authority, which is under $30,000 to solicit at least one SWAM vendor. When we issue our solicitations, they are publicly posted and we are cross posting in We're cross-posting in EBA, which has a list of certified swam vendors as well as we have certified swam vendors within our vendor list as well. We're doing outreach events, again Asian Chamber of Commerce, Black Chamber of Commerce, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, all these different entities that have a wide variety of diverse vendors where we can let them know of our procurement opportunities and invite them to register so that they can be a part of our procurement process. All right, thank you very much. That's all I have, a supervisor Gordy. To what extent are veteran companies included with your SWAM program? We do consider veterans as well. We have some other initiatives that will be rolling out soon, that will dig a little deeper into that considering veteran disabled vendors further. So we do have something coming up that will address that, but it's still in the works right now, hopefully to be released soon. Yeah, I was talking to Mr. Gilkerson. He heads up the Veterans Commission. And he and I talked about this as something potentially, the Veterans Commission could look into to help, try to help work through that process. But yeah, I'd really appreciate you taking looking into the Veterans community, this disabled Veterans community to add them into that. Where, what do we do? About 45,000 veterans in Prince William County. And so it's a significant portion of our community that I think we should be tapping into as well. In terms of audits, how often are you audited and to what extent does that help you drive better policy going forward? Yeah, so I do want to circle back to the common on outreach to veterans. So if you know of any events that they're having, we're happy to come out of Interrelations coordinator to speak with them, let them know how they can register and what opportunities that we have coming in. In terms of audits, we are audit on whatever cycle the internal audit program decides that we need to be audited on. We are maximizing our resources in procurement. We don't have audit branch. So contract administrator, the agencies have contract administrators within the department who are conducting that role. What we're going to be trying to do is to do some spot checks within those agencies. So preview view, all of their documents, their processes, to let them know, hey, you might want to consider, you know, working more in this area or that area. So we need more resources, but we're trying to work with what we have. So we're going to try to do some of those spot checks to get ahead of, you know, whenever we do have formal audits to come up. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Supervisor Bailey. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Supervisor Bailey. Thank you, Madam Chair. Working with what we have, that's a good practice. Thank you so much. But I wanted to say also, the $2.7 million savings to some that may be small, but that's big. Yes. That's big. And so my question is, where specifically could you just project where those savings came from? So what was the highest that maybe we may have overlooked in the past? I don't have specific numbers on that. And as I said, we're going to have our annual procurement report coming out that will give you specific numbers to that but most of the numbers for where those savings came from so we have our e-pables program where it's basically like a virtual car program instead of the vendor being paid with a check they're paid with a digital like procurement card. So that's where a majority of those costs I would say came from. So if you have like a major capital construction project where you have tens of thousands of dollars on an invoice, you're able to capture that on a P card and then leverage the savings from that as well as bringing rebates to the county. And additionally it seems like you're taking your show on the road so to speak in the community. And I think that's great. And to what my colleague was saying about the veterans in the community, we do have not to taking things from Supervisor Franklin. She has a wonderful pop-up veterans establishment in her district, and it's a lot of small businesses there as we engage more. But I appreciate your conversation about the disabled veterans too, because that builds community as well. And let's the community know that we're here for them. So thank you for the savings. That's big. You're welcome. As I said, we're happy to come out to any events where there would be a vendor community population that we can conduct that outreach to. And chair one last thing. The other thing too, you mentioned succession and succession planning being an OHR person. That's important as you talk about the growth in our community here and motivating and making sure people feel good about what they're doing and keeping that good been strength of expertise. So I appreciate that as well the succession planning. Thank you. Supervisor Rear. Thank you Madam Chair. While I'm encouraged by a lot of what I'm hearing, Commissioner Gord, Supervisor Gordy's question with respect to the audit and your response troubles me a little bit, I would hope that we are putting some sort of audit function into this to correct weaknesses that have been discovered in the past. And I know it's not at your level, it's at the contract officer's level, but a little more oversight over the contract administrator and what's going on so that we don't have circumstances as we've had in the past of missing documentation. The application not being complete, no liability insurance. All these little issues that go on, I would have hoped that we would have come up and perhaps you've got it in the works, but I have an expectation of a little bit more of a robust or more robust review on audit function so that we don't find ourselves with reports of contractor regularities missing materials if something ever happens. So if that's something that you can sort of add into the process or focus on in the future that would make me feel much, much better. Yes, well on my whiteboard, if I could have my dream, it says compliance branch. I would have a compliance branch within the Office of Precurement Services to do exactly that. So, number one, we rolled out processes and procedures. Number two, we provided training to make sure that these contract administrators understand their role. And number three, we're going to do spot checks within those agencies to assist them and help guide them through that contract administration process as we have and we've beefed up our requirements on contract administration. But ideally, I would love to have a compliance branch. I might actually fund it. Actually, that's what I was gonna ask you. I didn't say that. It's on tape. And also we do have the RSM annual audit as well as a check and balance for contract compliance. All right. We have supervisor. We're on the hook next year for more money. In about the season supervisor voting. Thank you Madam Chair and thank you for the presentation. I just have one quick question. You sort of talked about the expo both the one that was done and the one that you are all planning in the future. And one of the slides mentions outreach and cross regional Chamber of commerce outreach events Can you peel back a little bit more about how you're reaching out to the business community because you know We know that that we have our our spec chamber our Asian chamber You mentioned them a little bit the the black chamber what have you can you talk about your collaboration with them and also Collaboration possibly more with the school system because I know that they may have different vendors for certain things that they prefer and that there's an opportunity there for some synergy around certain public facilities. So could you talk about that a little bit more? Yes. So back in 2019 there was a combined reverse trade show where we had Prince William County schools. We had Stafford County and we had Prince William County schools, we have Stafford County, and we have Prince William County. This year we wanted to focus more on Prince William County. So there is opportunity to do some combined outreach as well in terms of outreach to the chambers. Those chambers generally reach out to us, saying hey, we have this event, we would like you to come, set up a table and do some outreach and that's how we get invited to those chamber events so we're open to work with any of the chambers. You welcome. All right thank you so very much for your presentation. Thank you now I'll turn it over to my colleague Matt Filareo. Chair Jefferson, members of the board. Matt Dillarell, you're very proud and excited. Director of Facilities and Fleet Management. I really appreciate the opportunity to come brag about my department. Facilities and fleet management, we have a purpose and our purpose is that we sustain the foundation of local democracy. FFM exists to ensure that the county departments are provided the facilities and services they need to fulfill the will of the Board of County supervisors. Every FFM employee takes pride in their work and is causing its impacts on how well others can serve the community. Thus we see ourselves as a partner to all county departments. FFM has six divisions with multiple lines of business. We have buildings and grounds, is the biggest division with 81.47 full-time equivalents and five separate lines of business. The facilities maintenance group currently maintains 69 facilities and 1.2 million square feet, which will be increasing to 71 facilities and 1.7 million square feet with the addition of the CRC and the NIAPSCO Potomac Parking Garage this fiscal year. Another line of business is B&G's mail and courier services. Each of your offices interacts with this group when your office receives inter-office mail or needs the mail to mail out something. So I'm sure you've met our couriers on a daily basis. The next division that I'd like to highlight is the Business Services Division. This division has eight employees and oversees many of the internal business functions that an organization needs to have them to be effective. This past fiscal year, this group oversaw the six divisions complete 10,000 plus financial transactions and the hiring of 41 employees. Also, something I'm very proud of with this group is that business services overseas are department's apprentice slash intern program. Furthermore, some of your offices have interacted with the record center. This past year, they processed over 3,984 record requests and picked up 3,377 boxes of records, ensuring the records are properly managed following the Library of Virginia's retention schedules. The next division is the Facilities Construction Management Division, which has 11 employees. They oversee the design and construction of capital facility projects. This fiscal year they have six active projects. Three of these projects are slated to go to construction. That would be the Fire and Rescue Station 27, the Homeless Navigation Center East, and the Public Safety Training Center Expansion Project. Next Division is Fleet Management which has 44 employees. The county currently has just over 3,100 units ranging from weed eaters to police cars to landfill compactors. The automotive shop has multiple members that are certified as emergency vehicle technicians that work on fire and rescue equipment. Since 2020, fleet management has placed four times in the top 100 fleets of North America and of the Green fleets program. Next division I'd like to talk about is the Property Management Division, which has 26 employees. They work with departments to arrange their office space or find new space to meet their current needs, which would also include furniture replacement. Each of your offices has worked with the property management team. They've facilitated getting your space set up to meet your needs. Also property management completes construction management and oversees projects like the CRC project, the judicial center renovations, the building and facilities program, and the fire and rescue system station replacement and renovation program. Furthermore, this division oversees utility usage for the most county facilities and the completion of energy management projects. The last division that I would like to talk about is the security management division, which is the newest division with seven employees. Within the past six months, this group has issued over 7,000 employee ID badges to volunteers, employees, and contractors. This is addressed one of the major findings of the RSM Security Audit. Also, they have an instituted controls over the access to video cameras and access control logs. Furthermore, they've begun working with departments to complete security assessments at various facilities. So within the government operations performance innovation quadrant, FFM's area of service is asset management. FFM places a lot of emphasis on having sound asset management practices. In our own department strategic plan, it's our first goal. This on this slide are the strategic objectives FFM is responsible for achieving. I'll let you guys read those. I don't want to read them outside. So FFM has made some great progress in achieving this strategic initiative related to asset management. First what I want to talk about is the office space standards. This summer the Department of Facilities and Fleet Management, Property Management Division, finalized and implemented office space standards which have been approved by the county executive. These standards are intended to improve an agency's operational efficiency and overall productivity. Maximize space flexibility for future uses and control the county's renovations expenses by improving space utilization across all agencies. These standards which are applicable to all county agencies are related to the construction of new buildings, renovation of existing buildings, and office reconfiguration projects. The office space standards represent the baseline requirements for space planning purposes. Next item on here is the program Masterworks. This past January, FFM working with do-it, parks and recreation, public works and transportation began the process of implementing Masterworks by Aurego. This is a program for each of the departments to track all aspects of their capital projects. This system addresses concerns that have been raised in previous audits by of FFM's facilities construction management division. Also, this program will work for the county's financial system Mobius. All aspects related to the management of a project will be tracked within this program. This will allow for more transparency and be a resource for future maintenance of the completed projects. Masterworks is currently scheduled to go online in the spring of 2025. Next thing I'd like to highlight is County Fleet. Fleet Management Division has been working to reduce its carbon footprint of the fleet. Currently we have 1,541 vehicles which includes 41 hybrids and seven electric vehicles. The number of hybrids in the fleet will continue to grow because the police department has determined that hybrid vehicles will meet their needs for patrol vehicles. That's a good thing. Next thing that we're working on that's related to asset management is new facility construction standards. FFM's facility construction management division and the property management division are working with a consultant to develop facility design standards. Our goal is to improve the efficiency of the facility design process by defining our preferences. The defined standards will be related to a facility's mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems. They will cover IT infrastructure, septet which is crime prevention through environmental design, security systems, and fit and finishes. Furthermore, the standards will define acceptable, sustainable options for future county facilities. Some of those examples of that would be LED light fixtures, solar rays, and electrical vehicle charging stations. Ultimately, the standards will systemize what is in place at our new facilities, making the facilities easier to maintain, all of which will improve the end-user experience in the building. Next thing I'd like to talk about is our new security vision. FFM has been managing facility security systems for 20 plus years, and this is originally done in the buildings and grounds division. The creation of this new division has made it possible for the group to be singularly focused on the physical security of county facilities. The security division's initial priority has been the employee badges and new controls on county surveillance and access control systems. The division is now taking the active role in the facility's CIP design process. They'll be tasked with the CEPTED reviews of new facilities and major renovations. Also in the future, they'll be working with developing security policies and training for county government. Next thing I'd like to highlight is our countywide space project. Currently we have begun the countywide space project. This project will be a completion of a master plan study of the existing government center complex as well as the recently acquired adjacent 48 acres. So I say government center complex I'm talking development service ability and McCourt whole area around that also the parks area where the stadium is. The focus of the master plan will be to provide future needs of the county departments located in the current complex. Also the study will look to reduce the amount of space leased by the county by trying to consolidate the groups that are in warehouse and flex space. The study will look at agencies that are in locations that could be better use for other functions. So for example, in the Manassas down by the judicial center you have the buildings and grounds office, you have office of elections and you also have a fire marshal's office. That's all high needed space that we could utilize for something else. The last thing I like to talk about are LED upgrades. As you can see in this picture, that's a picture of the lights that were changed out at Chin Library. That was probably about two years ago. The property management division has been working for many years on completing energy efficiency improvements to county facilities. In FY24, LED upgrades were completed at the Woodbridge Senior Center, the scenario-based training center shooting range, McCourt and the development service building. These projects will save the county approximately $15,000 a year in utility costs. In FY23, we had our best year for LED projects with an estimated savings of $53,000 from those projects. As part of the Judicial Center Innovation Project, many LED upgrades will be completed. We anticipate that as a result of these projects, which will be other things including the HVAC system and the controls for the HVAC,C will realize a $20,000 a year in new energy savings. So currently, 89% of the county owned facilities maintained by FFM have LED lighting. 28% of our lease facilities have LED lighting. So we see that an opportunity is to be working on our lease facilities and try to switch those out to LED to find more savings. So facilities and fleet management are futures a sustainable future. Our vision as a department is that we are the recognized service leader of innovative and sustainable infrastructure solutions. In FFM, we're working towards innovative and sustainable solutions in these four areas. Employees. FFM is working to develop a sustainable workforce. If any of you are aware of the great silver tsunami that's coming aboard, especially in the trades, and we're seeing lots of people retire out. And we are a desperate need of trying to develop a bench strength for this. So we are marketing ourselves to the local high schools, building our brand with the students with the goal that they will see FFM as a viable option for their future career. We have a workforce and professional development coordinator in our business services division. While he's only been with us for two years he's been working with the high schools and Nova Community College. When he visits the high schools he's been to most of the high schools at this point and at the schools he teaches classes about job entry skills like how to interview and how to create a resume. Also he has participated in multiple career fairs with the schools. Furthermore, he's coordinated an event with the Woodbridge High School called the Vikings Trade Expo. The FFM divisions, the buildings and grounds of fleet management were on site with equipment and employees to talk about what they do in their jobs, maintaining facilities and fleet. It was well received and it was so well received that Unity Read High School has asked us to come this fall to do a similar event for them. This summer, we held our second FFM Career X. This is a 50-hour immersive career exploration in turn slash externship. That provides participants the opportunity to learn about the careers and operations of FFM and key county agencies so they can make informed decisions about their career pathways and public service. The goal is to provide participants with an educational experience like no other. We set them to learn about the many careers and roles within FFM and key county agencies. This has achieved through an immersive experience so they can make informed decisions about their career pathways and public service. What we did was we paired them up with our divisions, they got to go out and be with a division for pretty much a day and they really enjoyed getting to see how we actually do things. We are growing our future workforce by planning seeds now and inspiring them to want to work for FFM in the county in the future. I want to thank Chair Jefferson and County Executive Shorter for their participation in the program this year and also Deputy County Executive Haynes as well. On a positive note, I'm happy to report that this year and also Deputy County Executive Haines as well. On a positive note I'm happy to report that this year we had one one college student in the program. We have since provided her an internship at our property management division until she goes back to school at Caltech in late this month. Last year we hired a full-time position within buildings and grounds maintenance operation technician and that was our first apprentice that we had on board. We've hired them to a full-time position. This summer we finalize a process where we can underfill technician positions in buildings and grounds and for fleet management within apprentice. The candidate will go through a two-year program where they will be required to take specific classes and complete different tasks. After two years and successful completion of program, they will be promoted to a full-time maintenance operation technician. So currently we have one employee in the program with another being processed to be hired. Also this year, FFM has been recognized by Governor Youngkin as a Virginia Values Veteran Certified Company, so V3 Certified. This is a recognition for recruiting hiring, training, and retaining Virginia Veterans and service members of the National Guard and Reserve. Also, Prince William County Schools has recognized FFM as a work-based learning platinum partner for 2023-24. And this is for being a supporter of the school division's career and technical education program. Another focus for sustaining a workforce is ensuring employees feel safe at work. The security division is taking the lead in this effort. This group is working on improving our current security systems. They are now part of a facility design process making sure future facilities are designed to account for employee security. They'll be working this year on meeting with departments to develop county-wide security protocols and training staff on these practices. This group continues to grow and to be a critical tool for the county to ensure a safe workplace. Next part of our sustainability future is our facilities. FFM is working to design and construct sustainable facilities. Currently when we design new facilities we're designing them to meet gold lead gold standards. So fire and rescue station 27, the homeless navigation center east and the public safety training center expansion will include sustainable features like solar rays, LED lighting and and they'll be all electric, they won't have gas. They'll have EV charging stations, and then two of the sites will have geothermal heating and cooling. FFM is working closely with the Office of Sustainability to develop a project to install solar rays and EV charging stations at Somali County facilities. Also with the office's sustainability, we are currently completing facility electrification studies for 10 county facilities. These studies will look at the impact of changing the facility from gas to electric. The reason you're doing that is that facilities provide the most carbon output or gas and switching from natural gas to electricity reduces our carbon footprint of our facilities. We've also been working with transportation and sustainability for a grant to add EV chargers at some of the county facilities. Another grant that we have been working on has been the EECBG, which is energy efficiency conservation block grant for completing a study on transitioning the county government buildings to net zero. It appears that we may have been successful in being awarded. At this time it looks like 421,000 and we'll be bringing this forward to the board for approval in the future. Furthermore, the future in the APSCO parking garage when complete complete, it's going to have 35 dual charging stations, which will allow 70 vehicles to be charged simultaneously. Our next thing with sustainability is space planning. We are working on some major space initiatives that will shape county facilities for many years. Currently, we are in a process of completing a master plan of the county wet space project, as I mentioned earlier. The selection of an architect engineering firm is in process for the judicial center expansion. We continue to search for suitable location for the homeless navigation center west. These three facilities, along with the existing projects, will be impactful on county services for years to come. Lastly, I'd like to talk about our daily operations. Our cyclic replacement programs continue to be successful. We've been able to create, we've been able to greatly improve many of the county facilities and parks under this program. Also, we've begun working with fire and rescue systems to bring improvements to the systems facilities around the county. FFM has been working with a consultant on fleet right sizing and electrification study. The findings of this report will guide our fleet acquisition strategy for years to come. And finally this summer we were reaccredited by the American Public Works Association. We see accreditation as an opportunity for FFM to compare its operations against national standards. It allows us to validate current practices and proactively improve by ensuring we are current with new operational standards. Ultimately, this leads to a better experience for the citizens and employees utilizing facilities and fleet. So, in closing, the future of the Department of Facilities and Fleet Management is going to be dominated by attracting and retaining called employees, evaluating the security of our facilities and implementing improvements in procedures and technology, constructing efficient and sustainable facilities that will last for many years, developing space plans to effectively utilize our current and future buildings, instituting operations that are focused on preserving our natural resources while proactively striving to improve. The department will continue to evolve and meet the expectations set forth by the residents of Prince William County and the Board of County Supervisor. So with that, I'll stop talking. Thank you so very much. I have supervisor Franklin up first. Sure, just just one feedback for some of our facilities. I know that when we do some of our taking to do road projects, we end up kind of owning some of the parcels. And I have gotten some feedback along Route 1 that some of the parcels that we have could use some sprucing up. And obviously as we revitalize the corridor, we're trying to attract private investment, but we also want to make sure that our county-owned parcels look in our well maintained as well. So just one piece of feedback, if we can kind of take a look at some of the parcels around the county that we own and make sure that they're kind of spruced up while we try to figure out what we want to do with them. Okay. up while we try to figure out what we want to do with them. All right, next we're going to have the gordie of the boardy. Thank you Madam Chair. Mr. Bill Reale, thank you for your briefing here. And as a new guy who's been trying to get everything set up for this year, I just want to thank your facilities team for, I mean, just the phenomenal work that they've done to support us and they've just been very gracious number one but number two, just so helpful in so many ways. So I just want to commend them. You have a great team. And I also want to thank you, when you were talking about Woodbridge, you were talking about thatbridge, you were talking about that program, which is like Unity Read. We get you. And so I'm really excited to hear that that's already in the works. And if when that takes place, we would love to come out and support that because that is very, very important for that school and that community. In terms of, you know, one of the things I always looked at when you're talking about buildings and there's always maintenance. So do you have deferred maintenance? Do you have, if you do, how much value, what is that price tag? From as we're kind of starting to think about budget formation, what do you see as some of the main things that we should probably invest in in the next fiscal year to help address some of that backlog of maintenance and ensuring that our facilities have, you know, are well maintained and meeting the needs of our community. Sure. Absolutely. We do have a backlog of maintenance projects. We do, right now, we get $4 million a year for the building facilities program which we use to do kind of larger ticket items for facilities for the grounds. We've shared that with the parks department and we do projects like replacing roofs, replacing HVAC systems, paving, just all the, you know, the stuff that has to be done is not very glamorous, but if you don't do it, it takes away from the experience in the building. We have a list, it's probably goes out about five to ten years and I have more items than I have money, obviously. And now with the security division, we're starting to see where we've installed cameras over, we've been doing it for about 20 years and so we're starting to see where there's cameras that they typically only have a three to five year lifespan but we've got stuff that's probably 10 years older. So that would be an opportunity that we'll be looking at to work on as well. So there's definitely, there's always more work than we have funds we make to we have a great team as you said and I definitely appreciate that. They as you know as well as good looking as I can look they make me look that good so it's it's definitely all about the staff that we have in this department they all step up and take a lot of ownership in what they do So I think you all see that every day. Well, as we, as we like to continue through this budget cycle and I brought this up during the last budget deliberations, but making sure that we're maintaining, I mean, we're building a lot, we're, it's one thing to build buildings and build parks, but if we don't maintain them, we've got to make sure that we have a robust maintenance budget to ensure that we protect and maintain what we build. So as we will probably be reaching out to you as we get closer into that cycle to see what are some of the priority issues that we need to look at and see how we can help on that during the next cycle? Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Bailey. Thank you, Madam Chair. Matt, you do have a great team. Yeah, you do. You do. The savings we appreciate, you know, every penny counts. And so I know that the community, the taxpayers, appreciate it as well. The question that I had was for the architecture, engineering piece that you just spoke about, is that something new? I'm assuming that it is. As far as the construction standards? Yeah, and didn't you say you're going to have a department or something or you're creating the well we created the security division But we are creating standards and more or less preferences for when we construct a new facility Okay, we identify the different items that we think that has to be in a facility Yeah, it was fit and finishes or it has to be this type of an HVAC system or this type of a roof system So that when they need from, they win the award to do the design on a project, we hand on this and they kind of know then to take that and implement that into their design so that they're not constantly coming to us to say, well what kind of roof do you want? So it's all laid out there and we're working with IT to make sure that we're, you know, wiring the facilities to meet future IT infrastructure. And we're gonna be putting in their information about what security preferences we have to make sure they're designing the facility to meet those. So there's some things that I think in the past, when we've designed facilities, they might not have been the forefront. By doing this, it allows the A&E firm to know what our expectations are. And so they can design a facility that really meets the needs of the department that we're building this building for. No, that's good. I see that as something new. And then the other thing I remember when you came in our budget season, either year before or last year, about the hybrid cars. Yes. Now you got 41. I have 41 and that'll probably double in the next two years because if we're buying patrol vehicles that are hybrids that's what we primarily buy each year and we're buying about 40 to 50 a year. So the cost is good. The cost is well and that's something that there is a delta between what we're buying for the internal combustion engine versus a hybrid and that's something that we'll have to work on. Performance is a performance good. Performance meets the needs of the department police. Okay. Okay. Thank you, Madam Chair. You're welcome. All right. The be and boardy. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Matt, for the presentation. It's a couple of accolades and questions. Really appreciate your mentioning of that program you did with Woodbridge High School. I would even challenge you to go deeper into the middle schools because frankly, we know at this point in time, a lot of those decisions are starting to be made at the middle school level versus high school. Sometimes, you know, by the time they get to high school, especially, you know, sophomore year, I know from my experience, I have a son who's in the Potomac High Welding Program. He had that projected out when he was in the latter stages of middle school, so just wanted to put that on your radar. Secondly, I appreciate all the mention you did of the environmental and sustainability mechanisms you are working on, initiatives, what have you, to go in a slightly different direction on access of transit to our facilities. Knowing that our facilities are not only places that people go to get service delivered, but also frankly, a place that our folks go to work, as you mentioned earlier. Do we look at, do we survey, do we talk to our employees that work in our facilities to see how they're getting to work? Is there an opportunity to partner knowing that a bunch of us are on PRTC to enhance transit to those facilities, to make it so it's easier for our folks that work at those facilities and avail them services to get to those facilities. I do not, so that would be something an opportunity for us to look into. Appreciate that. Thank you, Madam Chair. All right, thank you so very much. Madam Chair, I'm sorry. Supervisor. Yeah, I just got one more quick question. The, you thought you were gone, didn't you, Matt? One more quick question. Are you seeing the compatibility between you? Because you have a lot of projects that you work on with the CIP? Is it in alignment or because it's a lot of, you know, it's a lot? Yeah, no, I think we've got a lot going on all over the place and I hope I was able to share. No, you did. No, you did. I think we're in alignment with the CIP. I think there's obviously always opportunities but I think for the part you know that is our guiding document guiding principle with what we're doing and that's what we look to you all for guidance when you but that was just I asked that not to put you on the spot but I asked that as a spot check because that's what we're trying to do we're trying to make sure that it's an alignment and you have a big job you have a lot of stuff so that's the reason why I asked that. So thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. So it's my privilege to bring up Joe Goakerson's for human resources. Thanks, Matt. Thank you. Good job. I'm Chair and members of the Board. My name is Joe Gilcherson and it is my steep privilege and pleasure to talk to you about the great work that human resources office is doing. Just as a quick analogy of what we do, using the example of a recruitment, it's not as simple as an office calling HR to go ahead and post a job. We have to work within GovOps. We have to make sure through budget that there's money allocated for that position. We have to make sure that once that person comes on board that there's a place for them working with fleet and facilities, making sure they have the furniture and equipment they need. Also working with do it, we need to reach out to them to ensure they get the proper equipment, electronic equipment, cell phones, laptops, the software that they need as well. But also working with procurement. I'm probably going to be listed as a dependent and the taxes of the procurement office because we have no less than 10 RFPs at one time in the procurement office and we need that support in order to provide support to the county as well. And also the Human Rights Office working with my employee relations division and also my EEO division are a team to make sure that we're working in coordination with one other. So it's a pleasure to work within this group of people as well. I just wanted to list that before we went forward. What we do, so in human resources right now, we have these operations that we conduct. We have the Training and Development Division, which is led by Riley Jordan. We have Talent Management, which is led by Adrian Sims, Employee Relations, and Labor Relations that being combined as being led by Stacey Walker. Our Benefits and Retirement Management Division is led by Andrea Brenner, by Stacy Walker. Our benefits and retirement management division is led by Andrea Brenner and our human resources information systems management. Division is led by Jesse Zinn. My two assistant directors are Susan Washington and Stacy Allen. And without that combined leadership, the great work that's happening with the employees and the staff that we have wouldn't be happening. Wouldn't be sitting here before you letting and talking to you about the great work that's happening with the employees and the staff that we have wouldn't be happening. Wouldn't be sitting here before you letting and talking to you about the great work that we're doing. We also have a class and compensation team and equal employment opportunity team that does investigations, works with human rights office and coordination with that and with our employee relations, labor relations division as well. Class phase classification and compensation team works to ensure that people are properly placed within our pay scales, but also if there's any need to look at jobs or at scales, that's the work that they do, the great work that they do. Breaking it down, this is what we look like currently. We have 40 FTEs that we have been allocated to do this great work for the county. With the, I'll just go through each of these divisions quickly. The benefits leave in retirement division. They're there to do exactly that. Take care of everyone from getting them onboarded to when they want to retire or they want to offboard with us. They're responsible for health insurance, retirement, life insurance, the flexible spinning plan that we have, long-term care insurance, leave administration. We work with ADA and a reasonable accommodation as well as the AAP program that's out there as well. The employee and labor relations division is just that. It's been newly stood up, especially labor relations division. With that, right now the ELRD, as we call it, has been committed to creating a healthy organizational climate in which employees are our valued stakeholders. Employees and labor relations have a philosophy that encourage mutual responsibility, but also a constructive work relationship and communication. Communication is key in any organization. When we start to peel back issues that we have, typically it revolves around communication or lack thereof. Some areas that ELRD responsible for policy and procedure clarification, performance management, disciplinary, unfortunately, when it happens from time to time. We managed the grievance process. We also managed any separations on the labor relations side. I want to acknowledge that we were the only jurisdiction in this area that did not go to empaths. And that's a great work of our labor relations team and HR, but also fire and police labor as well. I can't say enough good things about how that interaction happened. And it continues to grow and get stronger every day. So I want to give a shout out to them as well. The shared services or HRS division, shared services, they manage all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes. The data and they are doing the centralization of reporting, creating reports, county-wide quality control for payroll and benefits processing, and implement employee related workflow initiatives for greater efficiencies. We've just, we're going into our second year with Mobius, which is an Oracle platform. Every day we get better at it. Every day where we're finding better ways to utilize that system, to be more efficient and to provide more access and resources to our employees and our leadership here in the county. One of the other areas that shared services in the H rest division work at is the time sheet review. I'll go over some numbers here later on this presentation about the amount and volume that they work through. But also onboarding and offboarding. Every employee that comes onboard has to go through shared services, or they won't get paid. And every time that we do process out for our seasonals, our part times, our temporary, that's in an out process that we need to do for everyone. The talent management division, they work with the department managers and support staff. They lead the efforts to pair talent management with the top talent with the right career opportunities. We do this by maintaining the accuracy integrity of the county's job classifications, recruiting campaigns to attract a diverse pool of talented candidates. Some of the other things that talent management does for this is we're the beginning of the hiring process, posting on job boards that we have out there, performing initial screenings when people apply to us through NeoGov, also vacancy reporting, career expo, we'll talk a bit about that down the slides here, but also job fairs. As we continue to develop and grow as an organization, NHR, we're starting to do more outreach with job fairs and with other outreach with the citizens and the communities. Training and professional development division, this is also a fairly new division we've stood back up. Training support the leadership at all levels by offering professional development opportunities through eLearning, live online and in-person training classes, as well as self-paced eLearning courses. We have what we call the PWC University, which is an online platform that provides a lot of training and skills for employees to use. I have some numbers for that and the following slides. But also we do outreach. We do one-on-one trainings. Departments will call us, ask for certain trainings, or we'll have required trainings that we need to push out to the employees. We'll go out and do that one-on-one with them. With our Equal Employment Opportunity Team, they ensure that compliance with federal and state laws, regulations, executive orders and ordinances for county employees and applicants to seek employment with us. Providing proactive prevention, I'm sorry, proactive prevention, proficient resolution, and strategic enforcement on the achievement of non-discriminatory, non-retalatory, and a harassment-free workplace. That's what we strive for and that's what our goals are. Some of the items that the EEO team does, again, ensures that compliance with employment laws and regulations provides EEO related trainings and also conducts EEO investigations when necessary. The classification compensation team, right now they play a key role in how we track quality applicants. They ensure that those positions are graded properly, that we're within the salary scales that prevail outside of the county as well, but also we look at internal equity as well to make sure that that is happening as well internally. Some of the other things that the classic conversation team do for us, they do salary determinations through evaluating the information provided, writing and updating job descriptions as a never-ending task as jobs evolve. We're always looking to update those job descriptions while working with those departments. Also performing assessments with departments, just overall general assessments of positions where they're at and if there's been any expansion or creep on those positions. So, for our strategic objectives, we follow our people. And for that, I won't reread everything that's up there, but it's a very important role. I take very seriously for the county. We're very active in supporting the strategic plan. Under the attracting and developing, I guess we're Attracted, developed a highly skilled workforce. We're doing the PWC career expo. We're going to job fairs ensuring that we're getting the word out, that we are the premiere organization to work for. Not only in this region, but I would venture the East Coast at this time. Also training for internal staff, for building a stronger resume is one of the classes that we give so that internal candidates now are getting the opportunities to move around the counties. That's important. Talent management division is actively engaged in various activities to address staffing needs just to date since January. We have processed 508 non-public safety hires for this county and received 49,134 applications just since January. Year to date we have attended nine job fairs that showcase the county career opportunities to applicants. One of the highlights earlier this year, we went to a job fair for historically black colleges and university students and alumni that had over 2000 attendees getting that word out and ensuring that everyone knows what a good place Prince William County is to work at. Leveraging the market data, our benefits team, our sorry benefits division, is surveying county employees to see just what kind of benefits do county employees desire. Our demographics shift and change. We shift in what our desires are and what we want for benefits. Talent management, complete surveys annually and after each hiring process is to see what we can do better, what worked well so we can continue to do that as well. And we continue to communicate with departments at every chance we get. Every time we get to speak to a department, whoever it is in that department, leadership or employees, that's a touch point for us to create a positive environment and a positive interaction with county employees and citizens as well. Also in supporting the department's growth, the training division has been extremely active in creating and providing both in-person and public, sorry, PWC University courses to continue that growth for our employees. One thing that I will touch on now is the career expo. On September 21st, this coming next week, we have a career expo at the Hilton Center. It'll be going from 9.30 to 1pm, to 1.30pm. It is an excellent opportunity for the citizens or for anyone in this running area to come in and see what we do. We have jobs that are out there posted. Just some statistics from the first one we did back in March. The first ever career expo that we conducted here in the county, 22 departments participated in that. We had 28 new hires come out of that career expo. That is outstanding. And we continue to do this. We're setting bigger and bigger goals each time as we get better and better at doing this. We had 30 computers. Thank you, do it for the support on that. What those computers provided was that the employees or I'm sorry the citizens could now sit down and create applications and apply for jobs for the county in a controlled environment where we are actually there to support them to help them and walk them through any questions they may have on that application or for the job they have. That was huge. All 30 of those seats were taken at all times with a line out the door. That's how important something like that is for us. We had over 400 roughly, I'll say over 400 attendees. Some people snuck through, we couldn't count them, but we had a good turnout and we're expecting even more this time. I do want to say thank you to CXO, Mr. Chris shorter and Mr. Haynes as well, for their support in this initiative. This probably wouldn't have happened five years ago, so I appreciate the support that you've all given us for this. Okay, strategic initiatives that we have. The Human Resources Office continues to grow and develop. Every year, every event is something new for us to become better at, to grow, to better support the county and better support the employees. The first one we'll talk about is the first college internship program for the undergrad college students. We had 24 selected students come in from undergrad programs from around the country. It was an eight week paid internship so we ensured that they were getting compensated for the work that we were providing them. Over 20 county departments participated and over 20 colleges and universities were represented throughout the country. That's amazing. It was great to come in to help meetings and you'd see an intern give a presentation. So as nervous as I am, they're even more nervous because they may feel a bit better about my nervousness. So that was huge. Thank you, Mr. Haines for the support on that. We worked really hard at it and Mr. Haines gave us a great deal of support for that. So thank you for that. Our benefits division We've centralized the leave program in the county. So now I'll FMLA Other leaves that we have are gonna be coming through the HR departments. We can better track and manage it and make sure we're consistent in how it's being applied across all the agencies in the county and departments. We're managing the newly approved PPL program, which is six weeks of paid FMAWA. And we're proud to say that we now, for the Anthem Plan, we now have coverage for in vitro fertilization, IVF, for all the county employees. We're able to negotiate that through our contract with Anthem. And it's something that we make sure that we take very seriously. HR doesn't go out and make money, but we recover money. That is our ROI. Every time we negotiate contracts, we recover money. We make sure that we're getting the best deal for what we need out there. So those are some things that we take very seriously, and the benefits team does a great job ensuring that that happens. Another initiative that we have, that we have going on, or other initiatives, the police, they're not listed, but fire as well. In general government with the Sheriff and ADC pay scale reviews with procurement help. We are diligently going at pre-tearing that work to be done right now. We're creating content for the Leadership Development Program. Again, we briefly talked about the first career expo we had back in March. In my opinion it was a huge success. We're continuing to grow and expand our career outreach via local and regional employment events. Most recently we're two silos with the Amazon Veteran event. We set a table up there we make sure that we interact. Any chance any opportunity we have to get out and put a table somewhere we're going to it at this time. Also, the Mobius Update is called Redwood. No sooner do we implement it and get everybody trained, they're giving us a big update. So we're pretty excited about the big update, pretty excited about retraining everyone and what they're going to see on the screens now. Thank you, Oracle. But it's another touch point for us. It's an opportunity to have a positive interaction and just so and say or and show people exactly what this can do for them with that self-service interface. One other thing that I'll say is that we are also going through what's called reimagination of HR. This is not a knee jerk reaction. This is a well thought out reimagination of how we want HR to look in the future. I'm sure there'll be more information coming, but this is something that we're all looking forward to. Staff has been briefed. Both to the staff is excited. I'm excited about it. This is something that will help us better support and enhance what we do as HR professionals here within the county. So by the numbers, as I said earlier, I'd have some numbers for everyone. We currently have 8,483 people that are using our health insurance. That is active duty, that is spouses, family members, retirees, and their family members as well. The benefits team does an excellent job of ensuring that all of them are receiving the best quality health care and an affordable price. That's the key is the affordable price. We are now able to say 100% of all personnel actions are being processed electronically. No matter how many pieces of paper I get, I kick them back and say go through Mobius. Because that's what the platform is there for to do. 63,000 biweekly time sheets are projected for fiscal year 25. That means every time sheet that a county employee submits goes through share services before it goes up into the payroll department for their final processing. We queue those. We look for anomalies. We look for anything that may be out of whack on them. Or we may get a phoenix phone call on a Thursday saying, hey, I put the wrong numbers in and we'll go and fix that. Last, in fiscal year 23, we looked at 52,262 applications that were received in the system for jobs in the county. Employee relations and labor relations division had 800 consultations. That could range from, hey, I need a policy interpretation. What do you think? Two, I've got a serious situation going on. Each one came out with successful results. I can assure you of that. 4751 employees completing one or more e-learning classes. We provide the PWC University out there as an e-platform platform for learning and our employees are using it. I think that is a great testament to the employees that are seeking and craving that development and that professional development that that platform is giving them and we're looking for ways to better improve that as well. 8383 total tenants for instructor led county wide training. That is a lot and it's a testament to the commitment from the county, from the other department directors, from executive leadership on training, and why it's important. It ranges from new employee orientation, departmental trainings, but also we go to the police and fire cadet trainings to give them that information they need to have to be successful here in the county as well. Mobius training was a big training event that we've had and it's ongoing. We continue to do sustainment training with the Mobius training and with Redwood coming on. I'm sure those numbers will be higher next year as well. We do employee evil training. Employee relations training. Other trainings as requested by county departments. And that's just a snapshot of the various trainings that we provide for the county. All right, at this time, I'm open to take any questions. Anyone may have. Thank you so very much. We're going to start with Supervisor Bailey. Thank you Madam Chair. Joe. Yes ma'am. You are, you're excited. You are, you're energized. You're usually kind of introverted but today you're not and I'm liking that. I just got three questions. One is the traction that you're getting through mobias is excellent. And what that says is that people want to live in Prince William County. That's what that says. And where my friend is, like Mr. Mancini, thank you for partnering with the HR department. What are the opportunities high level that you see in terms of us having different talent in the county for the needs that are in the county? You understand what I'm saying? What do you see? I think it's limitless to not to just kind of give you a canned answer. It's limitless. The area that we live in and we operate in, there is a talent set for whatever we need. We just need to be able to access it, find it, and get them on board. Okay, and so I was hoping you would say that because we're so diverse. I was hoping you would say that. And the other thing I had, not to throttle it down at all, but for me, something that I've noticed, do you see the morale, no, yeah, see the morale changing? When I see, it's a good thing when I see EEO complaints and we get the finalization of those, do you see that subsiding? Doiding? What do you see with that? Because that's not to bring out the good bad and the ugly, but that's a part of us sustaining and protecting and working with our employees. So just to kind of give you my perspective on it, it's a right. It's a right of every employee to utilize the human rights office to utilize the EEOC. I think it's extremely valuable because employees now have another venue to be heard. And I think that's important. Our employees need to be heard. If they feel that something isn't right, they should be heard by someone. Hopefully it's their leadership chain. Hopefully it's HR or the human rights office. But all employees have a right to be heard. And I think that whether we have a higher number, or a lower number, to me, the goal is they're being heard. Whether or not they're substantiated or not, it's an venue for them to be heard. Hopefully that answers the question. Yeah, and does it seem like once they've been heard that we are retaining or we're retaining those employees or are they leaving? I don't see. Just overall. I think overall I think we're retaining maybe we'll have more information at but from what I'm saying, employees are not leaving. I think they value the fact that they're being heard. Feedback that I've received is personally one on one in conversations is thank you. You heard me, you listened to me, it may or may not have went what they thought it was going to be, but they appreciated the fact that it was transparent, it was done on, on bias way, and that they were heard. Okay, that's important to know. And then the last question that I have, Madam Chair, thank you, is the outreach opportunities. I think we have been very good. I was so impressed with the internship program. They were excited. I even heard that in Churchill, so you don't reach out. But the outreach opportunities that we have, you mentioned historically black colleges and universities. Very important also, but what other outreach opportunities are we focused on? So we're continuing to explore the different avenues we can go down to see how we can do better outreach. Right now, we're focusing on the outreach to those colleges by having people find applications coming for internship programs. We may do two internship programs instead of one to be able to expand out and bring in more people Certainly we have the opportunity with those veterans programs that allow us to bring in veterans I just read actually this morning that the DOD has tweaked that a little bit So I'm gonna have to go back into a deeper dive on that But I can tell you that I believe the police departments already actively in that We are making inroads now to be able to make that something we can do for the rest of the departments here as well. Okay. Okay. And that's all I have for now, Madam Chair. Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Gordy. Thank you, Joe, for the presentation. It's kind of piggybacking on what you were just talking about with veterans, but I like to spin it a little bit to military spouses and engaging with, is there an effort to engage with Quantico and maybe some of the other and Belvoir to communicate opportunities that potentially military spouses could fill. We know that this is a massive problem for a lot of our families that are coming into our area. Could you speak to that a little bit? Thank you. Yes, sir. So just like we are with the veterans, we're continuing that outreach for spouses as well. A few months ago we had an outreach program at the Marine Corps Museum that was for spouses. So we're going to continue to work that as well, both. Especially Quantico, Marine, but we will go to Belvoir if we have to. We will go to Belvoir. They're a great partner with us. We have excellent inroads with them as well. We hire quite a few spouses of military and veteran spouses. We are a V3 program. I know Matt has a specific one. We have one for the county. I turn in reports every three months, every quarter. We're very active in that. HR's had veteran spouses and military spouses, active military spouses working for us as well. So it's something that we don't take for granted. We know it's a great resource. We want to tap into that resource, especially if they want to live here. You know, a lot of veterans or a lot of military people, this is the last duty station for them. We want them to stay here. They have houses here. They have roots here. We want to keep them here as well. So, you know, one of the big challenges that they've faced in the past is certifications and, you know, Virginia passed a law to adopt or accept other certifications. Do you see any issues in the execution of the certifications transferring into Virginia? So on our end, we just get the certification. Unfortunately, that's going to be more of a state. How they get it? But certainly, I can tell you, I sit on it probably four different veteran committees. One's with NACO, IPMA, various ones, ICMA. Just to see how we can do better outreach. And part of it is doing that internship program with ICMA, doing outreach with IPMA, trying to figure out what certifications can translate over. Medical is a big one. You've got a corpsman that's been doing basically surgery on a combat zone coming over here. Can't even get a job as a CNA. That's an issue we need to work through to get people to understand the value of that. One of the things that I've been doing in just in talking with the Marines at Quantico and in Belvoir when I get a chance to is get certifications before you get out. It translates that military work into the civilian lingo. Especially if you're an admin or human resources. Army has a robust human resources program. Get those certifications that translate over. Now you're talking apples to apples. You're not trying to figure out what that translates into. So those are things that we're looking at in every conversation we have with this veteran outreach that we do. That's a message we're communicating to them. Yes sir, thank you. Supervisor Bowdie. Thank you Madam Chair. Thank you Joe for the presentation. Gonna did a lot of what was said already. Also, some of the comments I made to some of your colleagues. One, definitely encourage you to go down to that middle school level as well as you look at the school system and recruiting folks. Again, those decisions are being made much earlier than they used to be. Two, again, earlier question I posted, Matt, are we surveying or doing demographics looked at how people are getting to work? Because to me, transportation is part and parcel of the housing and the other benefits that we rely on. And so our ability to say, hey, you know, as a community and as a county were devoted and committed to allowing you to get to work in multiple ways is to me a benefit that goes well beyond the immediate. My last sort of question, such comment is looking at the change in demographics on how people work, especially coming out of COVID where we had a lot of folks go in and experience a remote work where frankly they were told just four or five years ago that their job could We're trying to make a difference. We're trying to make a difference. We're trying to make a difference. We're trying to make a difference. We're trying to make a difference. We're trying to make a difference. We're trying to make a difference. We're trying to make a difference. We're trying to make a difference. We're trying to make a difference. We're trying to make a difference. We're trying to as a result of that. Absolutely. We've recently created some procedures around telework and remote work. I can tell you that thanks to do it, I say things behind us back to this positive as well, but they really were ahead of that curve when it came to COVID, getting people out. My entire department went out, myself, Susan and Stacey, only two that came in the office, because we had a few people that had to be at the front desk. So we were ahead of, I think, the rest of the region when it came to teleworking and telecommuting. Those procedures and policies that we have in place now, completely support that for the positions that can do it. That's the key. Unfortunately, there are some positions you have to be here for. But the ones that can, we have a robust program to allow them that opportunity. I appreciate that. And so my last two points, there's one that I think it completely then informs what Madden, his folks are doing in terms of county-wide space. Because frankly, if you started to decentralize and have less folks working in spaces, you can obviously then utilize the spaces we're looking to do more effectively in the last thing, just terms of housing, making sure we're continuing to have a good bead on where folks in the county who are working live. Because I think that a miss opportunity that we don't talk about is if we frankly have a lot of folks who work in the county but live somewhere else, those are a lot of missed opportunities in terms of effectiveness, morale, what have you, but also frankly, more folks work in other localities. The more often they get poached by those localities. So I would hate for us to do what we used to do in the old days where we would train people up, then fair facts would take them. Staff would take them. Fuckier would take them. All these other folks take them, staff would take them, fuck you, would take them, all these other folks take them and frankly a lot more folks are more right for that. They already live in those communities. So as much as we can link those and can you do work in getting data on that I think will be better served? Absolutely, I'll just add that our work environment is excellent and we treat our employees well and treat them right for the hard work that they provide for us. It's getting harder and harder for them to leave us now because we're doing such a good job of taking care of them. So I'll make that statement. Yes, sir. All right, thank you so very much for your presentation. Thank you, man. We're just supposed to queue up the next person. Madam Chair, I guess I'll introduce Raoul. Raoul Tore is Office of Human Rights Executive Director. Madam Chair, members of the Board, as I see said, my name is Raoul Tore. I'm the Executive Director of the Human Rights Commission and the Human Rights Office. I'm going to focus today on certain things, on some highlights. I have met with all of you individually, so you have an idea of what the human rights commission is and what it does. So I'm going to focus more on what our mission is, on how we are organized in our office, why we're important to the Prince William community, our immediate goals, our results that we have brought to this community and our immediate future. So those are the things that I'm going to try to highlight for you. The mission of the Human Rights Office is to eliminate discrimination through the investigation of human rights complaints both internal and external, meaning county employees and private sector employees and to prevent discrimination throughout rich and education. Those are the two main things that the human rights office do. How we are organized? Well, it's like a little engine that could. Out of those 400 employees in the Quadrat, we have six. So we have a big mission in this county with six employees. So most of them are utility players. They can play all bases. We have two investigators, one at the East Ferry Specialist for the office. We have an outreach and education coordinator which we lost is a vacant and we expect that we will hire before the end of the year. And very important person. And we have myself as a director, giving guidance to this office, and assistant director, dealing with the first-lang supervision of the investigators and the rest. Whenever we did a liaison to personnel, one of these persons is going to be, one of the rest. Whenever we need a liaison to personnel, one of these persons is going to be, or one of the six. If we have a liaison with procurement, one of the six will be. So they have to be utilities because we don't have a budget person, we don't have any other resource but those six that you see there. What is our place really Prince William County? Well, the human rights office is part of theosters respect and dignity for the residents and the visitors. So, anybody that resides in Prince William County, anybody that we want to attract to Prince William County, anybody that wants to establish a business, be in a place where it's safe. That's part of the community quality of life. That have good health and good educational systems. Our economically developed, and also respect the dignity of its residents. So when you see all that, we play an important part in attracting people here. If they feel that they're gonna be happy here, because they're not going to be discriminated at all, that they will share like everybody else on the equal opportunities of this community. Our main goals, and by the way, we serve within the people area, people service area of our quadrant, of the GovOps quadrant. Our goals are to increase the awareness and enforcement of human rights laws through the investigation of complaints and adverse endocations to the public. That's our main business. But also to provide high quality and accessible county services to our external and internal communities. That's the other goal that we have. The high quality and the accessibility of our services. And third, to demonstrate by actions how much we value our employees by fostering a working environment that is free from discrimination. That's the best way of valuing employees, respect their dignity, and provide them with an environment that is free from discrimination. So, as Joe said before, we are an alternative for internal employees to file complaints, each day wish to. So they have that option. And when they do, we have a process and we have a set of remedies that might be different from the process and the set of remedies provided by the internal process of HR. Through 31 years, this office opened doors for business in January of 1993, 31 years ago. It more than 30 years of operation, the human rights office has investigated more than 50 hundred complaints. Internal and external have provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation to victims, making them whole. Have mediated internal employee management relations issues we are available for other agencies that we have three certified mediators. So if an agency has an issue that they want to employees to be mediated or a supervisor or an employee to mediate an issue, they have three certified mediators in our office that they could request those services. And we have established a reputation here and outside for conducting fair neutral and thorough investigations. Shifts may fall where they fall. For the private sector and for internal process. So those are some of the results. In partnership, we have partnered with businesses, chambers of commerce, other agencies, nonprofit sector, you name it. And we have had a list of community partners that is very long. We have engaged our diverse ethnic, religious, occupational and racial sectors of our community at community meetings, fairs and events. We go to every event you have one, you invite us, we'll go there. We have participated and created community dialogues, for example, with different sectors of our community. We have created a World Weeding Student Leadership Program within 2020 was for the first time for his William Worn the best leaders award the best achievement award for that particular year. We are going to start our ninth cohort in next November. So we go beyond the investigations of complaints and the mere algorithmic education. In collaboration with the police department, we monitor hate incidents in this community, meaning that incidents that are reported to the police in the community are also reported to us by the police. And what we do with that information, we monitor the statistics to determine if we can do something to better the community. For example, last October, we had a community dialogue with the Jewish community based on the fact that we have reported from the police more than 60% of the hate incidents were against the Jewish community, where anti-Semitic issues. So we felt that it was needed for us to meet with the Jewish community to align their concerns and to get them information about what to do on those kinds of issues. Few months after, we had a community media community that with the Muslim community, because they want to share their concerns, mostly on the school system, about things that were having anti-Muslim or Islamophobia, as it is technically called, that was happening against some students that were in particular garments, et cetera, et cetera. So by doing those community dialogues, we are given some valve for the community to express themselves, express the concerns and also bring you and executive the fact that what is the pulse and what is happening in terms of the community. So that's what we do. That's what we've been doing for the last 31 years. What is our future, immediate future, well? Our main problem right now is making our services accessible to people that do not speak English. That is our main concerns. We serve everybody, but we are having an increased number of complainants that either call our office or submit there because we have our, for example, we have our intake of a form in Spanish, but when it comes into the office, nobody but me speaks Spanish. So what to do with a Spanish form that nobody can read in the office? So there's a number of issues that we're having with language and that we have to address. That for us is our main concern right now. Because if we're gonna to give a good service and make it accessible to our people, once they, we outreach them and they come, we have to be able to get them the service. So we are trying to acquire some funds that we can use to run into some as writers in two contracts that we can use for interpreter and translation services. We don't have funds for that, but we're trying to see the 26 bless us with some funds that we can use for that particular purposes. Remember that these persons are probably the most vulnerable for discrimination issues. They are the type of work and the things that they do probably. Our second future outlook is to strengthen and establish and strengthen the community, our referral network of community volunteers throughout the county that can be there for letting us know what the issues in the community might be. We call them community liaison program and what we eventually want to do is to have this network of people out there. So if they seek concerns in a particular neighborhood or particular area of the community that they can refer them to us. And we can go and maybe I'll give them a fair housing training, maybe give them a, if it is a housing issue or an employment training, it is about employment issues that they're having. But if we don't know, we don't know. So that's another thing that we're working this year. And finally, we almost have, by the end of the response, we'll have a data collection system that will be internet-based. So we will be able to see where complaints are filed by zip codes, types of complaints, where they are in the county, where they were filed by discrimination and litigation, by discrimination issue. So we'll know where the age complaints are coming from, where the sex complaints are coming from, how many of them were for males, from females, et cetera, et cetera. We eventually want to have that in the internet for the public. We would like to have the public to play with it and know all this information. No personal information is being disclosed. This is at right now at the zip code level. But also is designed to help us to target our outreach and education. Because we know that in certain parts of the county, most of the complaints while are on age, we might concentrate at outreach in terms of information and education about age discrimination on that particular part of the county. If on another part of the county, most of the complaints are employment, then we can target our outreach education with our limited resources to employment training in that part of the county. So it's a way of doing sensible data driven information and outreach and location. So those are the things that we actually are pursuing and I was the briefest of the brief. Yeah. Thank you so very much. The briefest of the brief. I am. We're going to go to supervisor Bowdie then Bailey. Thank you Madam Chair. Thank you, Role, for the presentation. Continue to work on these issues. I appreciate your data driven emphasis at the end of that. And trying to collect that data and also a dashboard available to the public, I think, is a great idea. Just two things. You mentioned interfacing with different communities that have issues and outreaching. I think part of the schools is a great idea as well, so I appreciate that. On the radar for the future, I look especially, since I know the board is at least given, at least tacit approval for an inter-jurisdictional committee, is looking at barriers to interfacing with the cities. I know that based on Converse Hays I've had with my own Human Rights Commissioner Evelyn Brumar and the Chair Curtis Porter, who's also at Citroen O'Mine, that There's interest among the commission with being able to extend that outreach, extend those resource to this, especially the city of Anastas, know that they deal with some of the issues but knowing that right now we don't have a way of fully having enforcement there. So I just want to put that on your radar as well. It is of the radar. Thank you. Thank you, Surveyor Bailey. He said it is on the radar. What do you mean? No, obviously. But I just want to reiterate, thank you. What did you come 2018? No. He has out the six years. More than six years. More than six years. He's out of the six years in November. Yeah, that's what I thought. He turns out of hiring here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But just to piggyback on what my colleague is saying, I think that you do, you and your team do a great job in engaging with the commission. But it's time for you to take your show on the road. I'm just offering that as a suggestion, because you're very good at what you do. I love the fact that you work very closely with our county attorney's office. I know you should, but I like the relationship because the information comes to us in an immediate fashion. And it's succession. It says that you're working on things. And that's important for us to know as we serve the community. So I appreciate that. But the thing also that I think that I would like to see, Ro, is for us to address the language barrier issue that you mentioned. We've been talking about that for too long. Because as we talk about it, the community grows. And we want to make sure that we are communicating. And we are talking about the services that we offer. We are talking about who we are. And that's, I know Nikki and her team is they do really good with that. So we just need to broaden that a little bit, I think. What's your thoughts about that really quick? That's a long question. But I feel that colleague executive bit, I think. What's your thoughts about that really quick? That's a long question, but. I think the colleague executive is working on that through the office of the inclusion they're working on a language access policy. And that language access policy may address many of this issues. Now agency, so many agencies have addressed it better than others because they have more resources. I have no resources. Maybe the Department of Social Services have a lot more resources to use them because they have, you know, a pressing need to provide those services. But I think that we are working towards that goal. And pretty soon we should have an answer, our answer to that kind of issue. That's comforting because I know yours is an element of confidentiality as well. And respect of that, we still need to have that communication on. So I appreciate the response. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you so very much and thank you for being the response. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you so very much and thank you for being the briefest of the brief. You're welcome. Okay, let's go. I have to introduce you to the mayor. Madam Chair, members of the board, the all-knowing budget director, Dave Sinclair. I don't expect this to be brief. Okay, real quick. Office of Management and Budget, we pursue the county's strategic goals in building communities where every dollar counts in terms of scarcity of resources, right? Our office is 15 people and our mission is to help the board shape the future, partnering with you, elected leadership and government agencies to recommend the very best use of public resources in pursuit of the community's strategic goals. And in terms of strategic objectives, we improve the development, spending and monitoring of the county budget and capital improvement program. And also we are also managing the redesign of the county's community partners program. So our total budget is $2.5 million and our staff develops a $2.5 billion county government budget that does not include the schools. It is comprised of 35 plus agencies. Why do we budget? Many of you already know the answer to this. Besides the fact that it is mandated by a state and county code, yes, it is written in the county code. We also, the budget is a statement of public policy and a community's priorities, right? Follow the money. But also plans how funds are prioritized to provide services and infrastructure. And I get it, you hear that there is a lot of needs throughout the community and among county agencies. There's lots of strategic goals, lots of initiatives going on, but we also have to balance that against the community's willingness to pay through our revenue policy. One of the things that is paramount to the office of management and budget during the budget process is that we have a transparent and accountable process. And that is something that the office of management and budget provides itself on a transparent and accountable process. And that is something that the Office of Management and Budget prides itself on is that we are responsive to your questions, the community's questions about the proposed budget, and that we respond to you in a timely manner and in a transparent fashion. I think you're all familiar with our annual question and answer database. We try to receive those questions and answer them as fast as we can. And so if the board loves the budget, dislikes the budget, we hope that there is universal agreement that we're at least trying to be transparent to you in the community. This is our budget timeline. Now I know you're all familiar with three months of the calendar year where we are living that that external budget process with you but it is really truly a year round endeavor and we actually kicked off the FY26 budget process with agencies last month in August. And we start that with budget trainings. How to navigate mobius budgeting, for example. How to build a better budget request. One of those important elements that results in a successful request. We are meeting with agencies this month to talk about their performance and their spending plans for fiscal year 25. Agency budget requests are due to our office in October. And then we have meetings with those agencies to talk about their request, their needs in the month of November, and then we develop and work with the Office of Executive Management to develop the County Executive's proposed budget five-year plan in capital improvement program through the month of December through early February. And then you're all very familiar with the external process that runs from February until budget adoption in April. So I, but the big takeaway from this slide, it is a year round process in terms of developing and monitoring and working with agencies to ensure that they're making those investments in the community that you authorize through the budget. Final project that we are currently developing is the redesigned community partner process when the board approved the FY24 budget. You issued a very clear directive to county staff that you wanted the community partner process examined and we made recommendations. And so the Office of Management and Budget is working closely to redesign that program in the interest of enhanced accountability and transparency, utilizing a standardized framework to evaluate requests from nonprofit organizations, and identifying who those essential providers are that we will transition to contracts and MOUs moving forward. And also enhanced participation in the community through the Community Partner Selection Committee that is appointed by the county executive but is comprised of members of the community and county staff moving forward. And we'll have more information on that in the coming month. And as soon as we have that, we will include your offices in disseminating that information, specifically with a town hall style meeting that we're gonna have some time in October to it kick off that process. And unless there are any questions, I'll turn it over to Rob Mancini. Well, I assume this might be the long one because I'm surprised we don't have more people on the queue for questions, but let's start with Supervisor Weir. How you ended with the community partners, I'll start with it. Is there any thought to reviewing where the either current or proposed community partners actually spend the money? In other words, are we doing things like looking at their Form 990 and determining what percentage goes to admin or salaries versus what percentage goes to the benefits services that they're providing. That is a consideration moving forward. Something that we're developing, Mr. Weir, is a standardized matrix to evaluate applications. And I don't know if that specifically will be looked at, but it could be a factor moving forward. Second part of that, there's a community partners committee. Great. My question is, that there's a community partners committee great. My question is are there any current community partners on that committee and if so why because that would strike me as an inherent conflict. I would have to get back to you on that sir. That's your leisure. It's all I have Madam Chair. Supervisor Bailey. Thank you. Boy, Paul, you were quick. Okay, so I love that. Theater chart. Well, you know, I'm good. I love that chart, the timeline chart that you did. It just makes it clear. That one. I love it. I love it. Thank you for including that. And then how to build a budget better. You mentioned that. Go a little deeper on that. That, that, just a little bit. Some of the things that we want to help agencies develop in terms of a better budget request is linking the request to the community's strategic goals. How does it apply to the adopted strategic plan? That seems like a no-brainer to you and me, but it may not be as prevalent to, for example, someone just starting with the county and is asked to put together a budget request. We want to help them utilize performance measures that we have extensively in our budget to use performance trends to help justify their request. If there's a significant increase in inputs to a particular program, for example, you can help use that to justify and communicate the return on investment in terms of justifying a budget request. Those are the types of things we're trying to make more of an effort to help agencies process and include in their numbers. Love it. Okay. Thank you, Mancher. For example, during the pandemic pre-trial supervision in the Office of Community Justice Services over three years increased, I think, more than 50%. That's just one example. All right. I was wrong. Thank you so very much for your time. All right. Thank you. Who next? Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the board. I'm Rob Mancini, I am your CIO. I've met most of you. A couple of you I haven't spent much time with, so it's very nice to meet you. I'm going to go very quickly here because I know we're short on time, so I'm going to start on my overview slide and then I'm going to go to my initiatives. And I won't read my slide to you, I'm going to tell you straight from the heart what IT is all about and why I'm here. So let's talk The mission statement is pretty straightforward. We see ourselves as a catalyst for this county. All right, to deliver outcomes for this community. Dedicated to IT excellence, that's what we do. I've been in this business a long time. That's what IT's job is. We also have a motto. We don't sustain the foundations of democracy. Like some people do. I'm still getting my mind around that one. But, yeah, it's quality, innovation, and business partnership. That's what we want to be known for. You have a business problem. You should be able to go to your IT department and work towards a solution. That's our challenge. That's what we try to do. We have a few departments in do it. I'll tell you what they are The first one you see there is customer service business group. That's the PMO. That's the on ramp to IT We operate a department full of propeller hedge you have to have somebody who can speak your language and have a Conversation with you about your business problem. That's the PMO's job to intake IT and hopefully come out the other end with a good business solution, right? We have a financial services and HR and admin team, our administrative group. I have a leadership team, my executive leadership team. There's a communications and infrastructure group that builds foundational technologies in infrastructure. You all use it every day. We're using it right now. We have an enterprise applications division who delivers applications and supports applications. They do some great work. I've got some good news on that one by the time I get out of here. And then our tech inclusion team, which is our opportunity to try to deliver an outcome in the community by not only delivering access to broadband, but helping people understand how to use it and the value for their everyday life so that when we deliver transformative services to technology and the government, everybody can participate. That's what tech groups all about, right? So that's our overview. I'd like to say this, we deliver services for others, to others and through others. A lot of departments know a little bit about IT. IT knows a whole lot about every other department. We are in every one of our departments, our colleagues. They can't do what they do without us. We wouldn't have a job without them. So we recognize we're like 3M. We make the things that other people make to deliver products to you. We know that the products that you see in the community, and I'd like to say all the things that you really like about your government, we're right in there helping to make that happen, right? And so we recognize that we have to be mission-centric, mission-focused for all of those who are trying to meet their mission and help them get the technology and the tools they need to do it, right? And have a good experience along the way. We have 95 FTEs, 40 contractors, a 48 million dollar operating budget, 12 to 18 million in capital depending upon how you slice it up. So we're involved in a good bit of money and we were pretty good stewards of that money I'd like to say. So I'm going to go here to this slide where I said I'd talk about some initiatives and you can dive in on any of the other slides that I've skipped here and we'll go deep dive into any one of them if you want to but I'm trying to save you some time here. So initiatives that we have I'll boil this down for you. The first one broadband adoption rate. In this county, it's probably about 95%. Our goal is to get it to 99 as fast as we possibly can. And that's why we're doing tech inclusion. The second row here, adoption of platforms and streamline processes, that's innovation right there. That's second row. We are an innovative organization. Our job is to help this government innovate, where it needs to. You can see plenty of products on the right side of that table that tell you some of the products that we brought to bear in order to do that. Increasing feedback loops and responsiveness. This is all about the IT Department understanding what the organization and the community needs from us. So, if we have proper feedback loops and we can optimize, we get better at IT. We want to be the IT department that everybody wants us to be. So we need those feedback loops. And the last one there is adopting agile methodologies and everything that we do so that we can deliver as fast as possible using modern frameworks. Those are initiatives that we have. I put some takeaways on that last slide. I do want to say one thing. I've got a great group of people that I work with at doing. I love my staff. They're great people. We've got our warts like every other department has, but we truly do care and work tirelessly to help this county be successful. Day in and day out. We are on the line, 24-7, 365. We are operating things that everybody needs to operate, and they can't go down. And so if you hear the sound of silence, like you hear often in this county, remember that we're there. We're like the refrigerator. You don't miss the refrigerator until it's out, right? You don't have a lot of allergies. I got here seven seven and a half years ago. We were having several allergies per week. I was stunned that this workforce and this government tolerated it. Now you've got the sound of silence. We have our problems. We're not perfect, But we know how to do IT. And we're wailing away for you, right? So there's a lot of stuff between my first slide and this last one. But bring some questions. I'll take any question you have and I'll dive as deep as you want to go on it. It's a very proud of my team. I want to say one thing about my GTS team. I said I get back to that. I'm heading to Richmond after I'm done here to go to the Commonwealth of Virginia IT symposium conference. At that conference, I'm going to accept an award from my GTS team. A Governor's Award for Innovation for the demographic dashboard that you all use on a regular basis. So I'm hoping you, you're happy about that. Okay, so here I am. How can I answer any questions for you or are you gonna let me get out of here? We do, oh, all right, we don't have any questions. If we're gonna give out grades, you got a name. Okay, come on, Gordon, you know you get a question. So first of all, Ryle, was that a human rights violation when he called his step propeller heads? So I just wanted to. Could you speak a little bit to cybersecurity and the, you know, the, any, just kind of how, you know, we're living in a world where this is increasingly a challenge. And what do you see of the greatest challenges from that perspective? And is there anything that from the board perspective we can help help support greater efforts ensuring the reliability and the protection of our data and our systems? Okay. Great. All right. So let's get serious. I love IT. I love what I do, but I'm dead serious about IT. I made joke around about it a lot. I'm dead serious about it. We take cyber very seriously. To the tune of three million events per month, we are looking at and evaluating in this infrastructure. We take it very seriously. There are things you can do for us. You'll see that in the budget process. I won't advocate for any of them here. It wouldn't be appropriate. We're on the job. We need good products. We need good people. We need good cooperation from our colleagues when it's called for. I'm not laying awake at night. We're worried about it. We're in a pretty good position. But you never get comfortable in cyber, supervisor Gordy, as you know. But we're not level three maturity for our cyber practice and we can always use more product But we're not looking to buy a bunch of product and claim victory the product has to have a job in our reason for it And it has to be you know valuable for the county or we're not gonna go there. So I'm very comfortable Saying that you know we're on the job, but it's day in and day out You're welcome. All right, I'm gonna say thank you so that we can, hurry up and move this along. Well, thank you so very much. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Hayes, for your team. You know, all the great presentations. This is wonderful. Thank you. All right. We will go into our next presentation. So I'm going to bring up, oh, you're out here. Hey, yes. I thought he's been believing me. Yeah. So set through their presentations. This is a presentation to give the board and the public and update on our strategic plan process and development of that process. As many of you have worked very closely with Kay, really want to publicly say thank you so much for all the work that you're doing and helping facilitate and ush our students process. So Kay will also provide some information on next steps and what we're asking for from the board and so I'll turn it over to Kay. Thank you Mr. Haynes. Good evening Madam Chair and Reservant of the Board. My name is Kay Wallace and I'm the County Strategic Plan Coordinator. I'm here this afternoon to give you all a quick update on the development of our next strategic plan. So what I would do during this presentation is remind you all about our current strategic plan development process. I'm also going to review the strategic plan goals that the board selected by the community input that you are received a few months ago. Then I'm also going to show the objectives that are being recommended by the community input that you are received a few months ago, then I'm also going to show the objectives that are being recommended by the Executive Cabinet to help accomplish some of these goals. And finally, I'll review next steps in the process. Development of four-year strategic plans in Prince William County is an institutionalized process, and each iteration of it changes as we try to improve. The intention of our current strategic plan process is to create an inclusive process that inspires ownership of the next strategic plan, to create an aligned and measurable plan to got the execution of our work, to create an aspirational plan where staff understands their contribution to his success, and finally to create a strategic plan that our community supports. This slide here shows and you all have seen it before the five phases of our current strategic plan process phase one was planning and launch in phase two we engaged the community by speaking to residents, community stakeholders, county staff, and board members to solicit input regarding what our priorities should be in the next strategic plan. And I do wanna thank you all right now board members for being willing to host your community town halls that you did a couple of months ago and to also assist us with finding participants for the resident focus groups that we did. We are currently in phase three of the development process where we are drafting the goals, objectives and action strategies for the plan. In phase four, we will present a draft of the plan and seek community feedback before we present the final document to you all and ask you to ratify it. At which point we will transition to Phase 5, which is implementation of the plan. As stated, we are currently in Phase 3 of the Strategic Plan Development process. The community input along with each board member' perspectives on future priorities for PWC were used by the board to select our strategic plan goals for the next four years. The board, as you all will recall, participated in a marathon six hour work session on July the 9th to identify those goals for the next four years. So strategic plan goes every strategic plan depending on whether it's nonprofit, private sector or government they have different definitions for what is the goal, what is an objective. So I just wanted to spend a little bit of time on this slide to give you all the definitions of that we are using here in Prince William County for our plans. Strategic plan goals are very high level goals or outcomes that we as a community want to focus on. So, strategic plan goals are the what we want to accomplish over the next four years, very high level. After we received strategic direction from you all on July 9 about the goals in the next plan, the executive cabinet then used those goals to develop objectives. Objectives are mid-level things that we must do over time or that we must do continuously to be successful in accomplishing our goal. So goals are very high level. Objectives are kind of like an amid-level of things that we have to continuously do to be successful to accomplish that goal and I will give you all an example in a minute. So to be successful in a competition at goal, there are many things that we could do to accomplish a goal. Like when you have a high level goal, you could have 50 objectives. But when it comes to strategic planning, you have to prioritize and decide what objectives do we want to focus on? What are our priorities for the next four years? So objectives are those mid-level what we must do continuously to accomplish those goals. So after we finished finalizing the objectives then next we will identify the action strategies in the plan and the county leadership team comprised of the executive cabinet and department directors will draft and recommend the action strategies for our plan. So action strategies state how we will accomplish the objectives to reach our high level goals in the plan. So I like to give you all an example. An example of a strategic plan goal could be to enhance the quality of life for all Prince William County residents. Very high level goal. A whole lot of things could come up underneath that with regard to help housing safety. A whole lot of different things. But what you would do for that high level goal for your objectives coming down one level is look at what do we want to focus on as a priority over the next say for years. So an example of an objective under that to enhance the quality of life for all Preseroom County residents could be an objective of to reduce and prevent homelessness. Because anybody's quality of life is negative when you don't have a home and it's positively enhanced if you do have somewhere to stay. So focusing on homelessness, how to reduce it or prevent it could be an objective, one example of an objective up underneath that high level goal. So in action strategy, up underneath that objective, the more lower level things, an example of that could be a program that provides temporary housing or financial assistance to a person or a family who is currently homeless. Another example could be a program that addresses foreclosure prevention to avert possible homelessness or another example could be an initiative that increases affordable housing in the county. So those are, that's an example of how for our plan, goals, objectives and action strategies are defined. Before I present the goals and objectives, I'd like to take a minute to remind you all how we got here today. We engaged in a very robust process to solicit input for our next strategic plan. Those efforts included eight community town halls, resident focus groups in each Magisterial district. We did a focus group with our strategic plan community advisory committee. We did focus groups or community conversations with business owners in Prince William County. We held a focus group with the leaders of our cities and towns in Prince William County. We also did employee focus groups. We did a survey that we sent out a written survey that we sent out to our county boards commissions and committees. We also included some strategic plan questions in our community survey. And finally, our strategic plan consultant conducted individual interviews with each one of you as well as Mr. shorter. Therefore, I think it is fair to say that we did make significant efforts to be very inclusive so that we could hear from everyone and as many people as possible that wanted to participate in this process. So regarding the eight goals that I'm getting ready to show you that were selected by you all, as well as the objectives that are being recommended by the Executive Cabinet, we chose wording for these objectives and goals that we felt would resonate with the residents, community stakeholders, and county staff based upon their input. And because all of these goals are equally important, they are listed here in alphabetical order. The first goal is education. The goal statement is to advance equitable high quality learning opportunities that build and strengthen an educated talented and skilled workforce. There are five recommended objectives for this particular gold area. The first objective focuses on lifelong learning and I'm not going to read all of these but I'll read like one or two and then tell you what the highlights are of the other ones. So objective number one under this goal is to foster an integrated ecosystem that provides equitable, lifelong learning opportunities for all ages. Other objectives for this goal area focuses on awareness and access, creating a talented workforce, and other workforce options. So for goal number two, this focuses on the environment. The goal statement is to preserve the county's natural beauty and resources where residents can enjoy nature in open spaces are created and maintained. There are four recommended objectives for this goal area. The first objective focus is on natural resource protection. The objective reads to safeguard the quality of our natural resources to ensure they are not compromised for the current and future generations. Other focus areas of the objectives under this goal area look at maintaining and expanding green spaces. We are looking at focusing on climate mitigation, achieving our climate mitigation and resiliency goals, as well as doing community collaboration and contribution. The theme of goal three is government. The government goal statement is to innovate and sustain a collaborative organizational culture that is high performing, data-driven, customer-centric, and values employees. There are five recommended objectives for this goal area. The first one focuses on Prince William County being an employer of choice. The statement, the objective statement reads, position PWC, as an employer of choice, by cultivating a safe, diverse, and inclusive workplace where employees are treated fairly, compensated competitively, and recognize for their contributions. Other focuses under these objectives look at development of staff and leadership, capability and capacity, use of technology to improve service delivery and cross collaboration. The fourth goal is mobility. The goal statement is to foster an interconnected and accessible transportation network that advances the county's mobility infrastructure, broadens transportation choices, and enhances safety measures. There are five recommended objectives for this goal area. The first objective focuses on enhancing connectivity through multi-modal options. Other focuses areas under these objectives look at design and infrastructure, making sure that residents are aware of transportation options in the county, providing equitable access to multiple options and safety. Go 5 looks at the quality of life in Prince William County. The goal statement is enhance quality of life and increase resident retention where residents can afford to live, work, play and retire, and experience the benefits of a resilient and healthy community. There are six recommended objectives for this particular goal area. The first one focuses on affordability or affordable housing. The other objectives focused on topics such as workplace options, amenities and recreation in Prince William County, the ability to be able to age in place, the use of green spaces, and the last one focuses on Brandy. The theme of goal six is safe and secure community. The GO statement is called to evade a safe and secure community that advances stakeholder engagement, collaboration, and evidence-based results. There are five recommended objectives for this GO area. The first one focuses on developing coordinated community responses. The other objectives focus on topics such as expanding data capabilities, prevention, and planned preparedness. Goal 7 is service delivery. The Goal Statement provide exceptional and accessible county services to residents, businesses, and partners. There are four recommended objectives for this goal area. The first objective focuses on access to services. The other objectives focus on topics such as capacity and capability, reducing barriers to services and user experience. The theme of goal eight is smart growth. The goal statement is advance strategic and intentional community oriented growth that strengthens and enhances the diversity and sustainability of the economy and county. There are six recommended objectives for this particular goal area. The first objective focuses on place making. Some of the other focuses of these objectives are on balancing the development with climate impacts, diversifying our commercial tax base, agribusiness and agritourism, as well as strengthening local businesses. So those are our eight goals. I do know that you all just received this information last week and with your very busy, full packed schedules may not have had a time, had time to read through all of these yet. So we're definitely want you all to be able to digest it before you give us some feedback when the goals and objectives that are being recommended by the executive cabinet. What I want to do is right now, as I work to work concluding this presentation, is just review again the timeline with you all. This slide shows our current timeline. We are making progress and doing well as far as the time frame is concerned. Timeline is concerned. Our goal is to have this strategic plan finalized and ask you all as a board to ratify it in February of 2025. Approximately one week before the FY26 budget is proposed so that you can move from strategic planning and focus solely on the FY26 budget process. As far as next steps we are asking board members to review the recommended objectives that came from the executive cabinet to see if these objectives align with or support the strategic plan goals. Your representatives on the community advisory committee have been provided the information of the goals and the objectives and they've been instructed to, if they have any kind of feedback or input as far as the objectives and goals are concerned right now, to send that information directly to the supervisor who appointed them to the committee. Once we're asking you all to send your recommended edits or changes or additions to the objectives to Mr. Shorter by Friday September the 20th. I believe you all will receive an email from Mr. Shorter within the next day or so, they are too, along with instructions of how to reply to him to give any feedback you want to, as far as the goals and objectives are concerned. After we finalize the objectives, we will move on to the next step, and we can't move on to the next step until we hear from you all to finalize the objectives. But once we finalize the objectives, then the leadership team will begin to draft the action strategies that addresses the how we will accomplish some of these things in the strategic plan over the next couple of years. And then finally, we work on finalizing the draft in November and December. In January, we'll put the draft out for the community to review and make their comments on. We'll make edits as appropriate. And then in February, Mr. Shorter will ask you all to ratify your next four-year strategic plan. And if you all have any questions, I and Mr. Haines and Mr. Shorter will be happy to answer them at this time. Thank you so very much, Supervisor Weir. Thank you, Madam Chair. In reviewing this, I think I now understand why the consultant got so angry with me for photographing the slides or comments from the work session. I'm going to be setting quite a lengthy list of things shorter at the end of the day. But I think I have a fundamental difference of opinion with respect to goals and objectives. Yes, the board sets the goals, but I would also suggest that that six hour marathon meeting set particular objectives, many of which I don't see in the strategic plan or things that were specifically enumerated by a variety of members of the board and concurred with by most and made it as priorities on those task lists and discussion boards. I'll give you two examples. Whether you put it in the government section or the streamlining of services section, I think the two most, one of the two, some of the two most used words of that entire session were transparency and accountability. And that's nowhere in here. And it was also a, the number one component, I can't speak to all the districts, but for the gains of one of the Brentsville districts, it was the, the number one priority for the residents. Number one priority for our representatives to the committee. And, you know, I've had a number of people tell me, and even at the meeting, why are we bothering to do this if nobody's going to listen and take down what we want and include it in there. And just sort of not having that in there, sort of buttresses what they said. I'll give you another example, and I'll let everybody else go on. With respect to the smart growth stuff. I mean, it's great to have a smart growth goal, but the objectives quite frankly don't have very few if any recognized smart growth principles in it. So if we're going to talk smart growth, we should at least define it properly, and put an objective in there that matches what is the generally accepted standard for what smart growth is. I'll follow up and writing with all this. There's no sense beaten this horse tonight, but I just want to go back to the point that yes, we set the goals, but I think we also set quite a number of the objectives. And then from what I recall from the meeting, a lot of our joint objectives don't appear to be in here. Thank you. Madam Chair, if I can. Yes, Mr. Shorter. Supervisor, we really appreciate that feedback. I wanted to just acknowledge the appreciation for the time that the board spent together during that six hour marathon, as you say. I just want to remind the board in the community, our last or our current strategic plan does not include a government section, and it certainly doesn't include a streamlining or government effectiveness section. And so if you can go back, this is our first time really engaging staff in the way that we did for the specific purpose of making sure that we created a portfolio of actions around transparency and a portfolio of actions around accountability. So when we look at this goal in particular, we are essentially saying to the government and certainly to our community that you as a board really want to make sure that our government is best in class. Madam Chair, from I get that and you could infer accountability and all the wonderful words that we want in there. And I get that. However, unless the public sees transparency and accountability and explain how it is. Most of them are not going to be able to square that set of objectives with what they see is the problem. So unless we address it directly and label what the concern is or what the goal that we want to address is what the residents want us to address so they can restore their faith in the county which is quite frankly some of them don't have if we don't directly address the issue with the essentially the hot button words that best describe it I don't know that we're we're going to make a whole lot of headway. That's just my two cents. Thank you, Supervisor Franklin. Sure, I guess I'll just start with with the comment from Supervisor Weir. You know, I don't I don't see a huge problem with including language about transparency and accountability accountability. I think I think that's probably fine. And then also I would just say to my colleagues, it's going to be on us to kind of be the bearers of that messaging too. Explaining how the strategic plan will help with those two elements and all these other elements as well. So just wanted to point out that. Kay, thank you for the work that you've done on the strategic plan. I think we've had some fruitful discussions in the Woodbridge District. I helped to kind of lead some of those discussions and the residents were very clear about what they wanted to see both along the route one corridor as well as for the county at large. So I thought that our sessions were very helpful. So thank you. I do just wanna point out a couple things for the environmental section. In these are high level, so obviously, it's not gonna be a lot of specifics in, the particular objective, the specifics will really come out in the programming and I understand that. But I do want us to make sure that, and I think this falls under probably the first one, but in the first one just for the public, safeguard the quality of our natural resources to ensure they are not compromised for the current and future generation. Just want to make sure that we specifically look at water quality. It's something that we've talked about over the past couple of years, but discussions around those forever chemicals have, I think, become more and more of a forefront discussion over the past year, both here in the county and nationally. As our EPA has started to take steps to make sure that our water systems across the country are being mitigated against these forever chemicals. So that's one thing I wanted to point out. And then obviously, salinity is something that has come up here and there. But we haven't talked a lot about the impact of salinity on our water. And that's something that I'm hoping to elevate as a discussion, particularly in the winter months, as we're using salt on our roads to kind of rebuild the rows after we have some of our snowstorms, but the reality is it's not great for our environment particularly as it runs off into the streams. So I want to make sure that we're focusing on water quality, particularly on those two issues, salinity and the PFAS, the forever chemicals, and making sure that this county at least is starting to do its part in mitigation. And we've talked about the service authority and the work that they've been doing. They're really leading the effort on this, but really how the county and our residents can have best practices amongst ourselves to make sure that we're making it easy for our service authority to be able to mitigate against those. So I just want to make sure that that's part of our environmental discussion. I don't know if you have any comments to that, but if not, I'll move on to the government section. I do want to talk about it and we've talked about this before and Mr. Shorter, I know you're going to bring forth probably some processes that we can do moving forward but are permitting process. Having that as part of our government section in terms of objectives. Many of our residents may not have brought that up because most residents don't have to go through the permitting process. But I can tell you that every entity from small businesses to large developers have come to us, many of us with the same issue. And that's, it's so hard to get the permitting process underway and complete and finished within a timely manner. I just met with an apartment complex this past Friday who raised the same issue and I said, well, I said, don't take it personal. It's not personal to your entity. It's just a challenge that we have here in this county. So permitting reform, as I call it, I think it's something that we need to take a close look at. And quite frankly, when we talk about delivering high quality services and goods, we have to also make sure that we're talking about our business community, whether it's a small burger joint that's trying to open up that doesn't have the money for lawyers to go through the permitting process to even the big developers who do have the money for lawyers and have the lawyers who still have the same complaint. So it's something that we really do need to focus on and I think that our strategic plan should reflect that. Thank you. All right. Before I go on to Supervisor Boate because this screen is not where it's going to be Boate and it's going to be Boate than Bailey because Kenny unfortunately has screen's not, his iPads not working. But I just quickly want to tag on to permitting reform because that's something my office is taking in a big interest in. And certainly meeting with businesses to discuss this. And I had a great conversation with Russ Gessel, who's a developer behind the courts just last week about this and he was giving me a lot of guidance and things that he's seeing and he kind of put things in buckets. That's and I don't know if that's going to have to be a directive but that's definitely something I'm going to speak with Mr. Shorter and others about because we need to have a discussion on the day is about what's going on with our permitting process and how we can look at fixing that. So I mean, I think it'd be great in a strategic plan, but I definitely would like to see something action taken as soon as possible, more near term on that. So with that, I'm going to go to Boatey than Bailey. Thank you, Madam Chair. To piggyback off of someone was already said, to earlier Supervisor Wears Point on the transparency and trust, I'm going to give much more detailed feedback in the email soon, but I agree 100 percent. I think that service delivery should also include some mentioning of community relations and tweak the goal to include words like foster trust, transparency, what have you because you're absolutely right. What all these goals and objectives within that speak to that and on the government side speak that as well. I think as an explicit mentioning of that verbiage, there are still some folks, frankly, that are even giving us feedback now, that there were there's a disconnect there where yes, you're speaking to it, you know, sort of at the periphery, but without explicitly using those words, it still feels like tap dancing to some folks. So that's one thing I wanted to offer and concur. In the education section, we'd love for us to be a little bit more explicit in talking about something that I know came up during our work session, which is fostering a deeper and more collaborative relationship with the school system. And to a better align our county government policies and priorities with the infrastructure of the schools. I know we talk a lot about our relationship with the school board and I think that talking about that sort of highlights in two different ways. One, it still delineates that we are the funders of the school system. We're not the school division so we don't actually deliver those educational resources but it does highlight a real need that get often communicated to us a lot by our constituents that there's still a disconnect between our school planning, our facilities, especially in the older schools, and what the government's doing, right? We have a housing crisis that we're trying to address. We have growth issues that we need to address, but our school system side doesn't always seem to be hands shaking with that. And so that's a real pain point that I see that we should probably be a little more explicit about. Government already mentioned that, but I've been talking about this part all afternoon with all the other presentations that were given, but being more clear and pointed at aligning that our housing and other county policies incentivize and allow us to have as many members of our employee workforce live and thrive in the county they serve. I cannot highlight enough how important that is, especially that we do have that new goal area that Mr. Short had talked about that we haven't had before, which is more of an internal facing goal. Hey, we are one of the biggest employers in the county. We are the county, and that we should really have goals that speak to that so I agree with that but again That means that our policies as a county that we're doing from the day It's we're doing from a county staff side should be also fostering a thriving Set of workforce folks that are able to partake in our community as well as everyone else because they have a good paying job Because they have access to good housing because they have access to transit and other benefits that avail themselves of it. And the last sort of bit is, again, at that service delivery and community relations, just frankly highlighting more an education piece and follow up. Because I feel like a lot of our processes, frankly, while they're not hidden from the public, they're very arcane to the public. Our land use process. We talk how very often some folks never interact with the county's land use process. It's a planning commission, whether it's us as a border of public hearings, until there's a project next to their house that they hear about. Now, we can't fix that all the time, but we can at least put more resources out there to do a lot more proactive positive communications around how we work from that perspective to really help follow up with that. And frankly, the last thing I'll say on that is, we put a lot of policies in place. This strategic plan is one of the monomas. Well, as you'll remember, from four years ago, when we had the same discussion, how we communicate the follow up and follow through processes when we adopt these things. We have the conference plan that we adopted a year and a half ago. We're still working through the zoning ordinances and we need to continue to have sustained communication with folks because otherwise they feel like they, again, participate in these forums and these hearings and these community meetings and they don't necessarily get communicated with what happened next. How their feedback fed into that, the trajectory of that policy, maybe how it was changed by what they did. So making sure that we're not just, as soon as it's adopted, we sort of leave it on a shelf in terms of a communication standpoint. That was a lot. All should leave it on a shelf in terms of a communication standpoint. That was a lot. All right. Supervisor Bailey. Thank you, man. Chair. Slide three. Okay. I just, just this is, this is just a small thing. Bullet three, where it says an aspirational plan. This is an intentional plan. I'm saying that because we've done a lot of work with this plan and I get it, I mean it's not a biggie but this, you know, just to tighten it. We use the word aspirational and inspirational but aspirational means they're very high lofty goals that we know are gonna possibly take a long time for us to accomplish an achieve. That's what we mean but absolutely this is attentioner plan as well. I accept that. I just want to let you know I'm reading your stuff. And you know, and this is intentional. Now, I'm going really fast because I want to be respectful of time. Go one under education. I agree with what my colleagues said about our relationship with the school board, but life learning for all ages, providing those services. I think that's essential because, you know, for all ages, because we've got a season senior community that's, okay. Okay. And then under, oh, goal number three three government. It would inspire me if you could change the language to continue to anticipate growth under government. The third bullet, you mean? Uh-huh. Okay. Yes. just the acknowledgement that what does equidably mean because my goals in Potomac may be different than Bob's goals in Gainesville or Brent's field you know so how do we justify the equity of that I think that's still an opportunity for us but just to bring that to the fore and then goal six we're on our way with that I think we're nailing that. Where's Dan, Dan's here. Okay. I think we are nailing that. I'm talking about you, Dan. In terms of coordinating community responses and having the community have input and our safe and security. So I think we know that. And then, smart growth, just to, no, seven, service delivery, we've got to nail the delivery of projects and what that means to build a trust. Because I agree with Bob about building the trust. But I think that comes with educating, and it's a lot worse, but educating the community of what we're doing with the strategic plan as we talk about smart growth. Because we may be saying the same thing, we may be saying the same thing, but you know what I'm saying, you know, to build the trust. because I think it's there because we are not where we were five or six years ago. We're in a different space. So we got to have smart growth, but we got to build the trust and bring the community along to help them understand that we are there where you want us to be, but what else is it that you're saying to us? So that builds the trust. And then lastly, if that makes sense, it does. Okay. And then lastly, I think that's it thank you thank you thank you. Thank you so very much for the presentation. Thank you. I'm trying to keep it short and sweet. Appreciate your time. Thank you. So now and Mr. Hayes thank you for you know your your quadrant. So now we are going to move on to Supervisor's time. I am going to actually start off because I just want to make a quick comment, since we brought up permitting process. I don't necessarily feel this requires a directive, but if it does, I'll make one up on the fly. But I would like for us to have a discussion, or I have a presentation about some of the problem spots with the permitting process. And we can certainly work on that together, like for us to have a discussion, or I have a presentation about some of the problem spots with the permitting process. And we can certainly work on that together because it's an issue that I've heard too much. And it worries me, I mean, restaurants are having this problems. I got pulled into a nail salon that was having these issues. Obviously, you know, we know that, you know, the developers are having this. But I'm really also nervous about the small businesses because when they have an issue with the permitting process, that for them is life or death. So I just wanted to raise that. Thank you, Madam Chair. No directive is needed. I know you and I have had a conversation about all the work that development services in particular, Mandy, and the team is doing. I know she's gonna get around and has for some of you to do rounds to talk about some of the work that she's doing some of the partnerships that have been established with the business community. We certainly plan to put this up front along with the number of other initiatives that we have heard from you all. And I hope next week to be able to really introduce a platform for us to do that. And so no directive is needed. We hear you. We have certainly been talking about it because we've heard it from almost all of you. And so look forward to the conversation that will certainly start next week, but we'll continue. And I really appreciate that. I know the squeaky wheel gets to grease and this one, this wheel has been squeaking for a long time. So hopefully we will, rather than later, be able to get some resolution to know, resolution to this. So I'm just going to make it quite quick things. Obviously tomorrow is the 9-11 ceremony at 9-30, the Liberty Memorial Fountain. I am also going to be doing a joint town hall with the professor here on Wednesday, October 16th. I'm also hosting local government day on Saturday, October 19th. So that's going to be an event we're going to start to advertise it soon. It's for middle school students. Really introducing local government to our young folks and middle school is a great age to kind of get people interested. That's when they're starting to think about careers in their future. And you know, I still got a few other town halls. I'd like to to plan with people so that's all I'm going to say hi Tom all right so with that I am going to go to Mr. Gordy start the updates all right thank you Madam Chair yeah I know our staff is working on dates so at least my I'm responsive. I don't know about that, but. Yeah. Well, yesterday was a great day. This is going to be a great week for the Brinstville District. We cut the ribbon on the University Road Extension. Unfortunately, you can't drive until Thursday, so don't go through the barriers. A Thursday the road will be open. But I know that is a great, long-awaited project for our community. And then as we talked about, also we've got some economic development announcements coming up on Thursday related to the Innovation Park and then also the kickoff of the Soulheim Cup, which is going to be a great event and hope we've gotten a tremendous volunteer response from the community and look forward to having a great group of spectators out to support this incredible event for our community. A couple of meetings I've had since last week. I was able to meet and really much enjoyed the meeting with Rabbi Shemuli Pyrostine from over in Haymarket and his community. It's been a tough year for their community since October 7th of last year, but as they enter into the many of their observances and celebrations coming up, just wanted to wish that community very well and look forward to being with them at some events coming up. I also had the opportunity to go to Richmond and meet with Dominion Power. Again, it's not a secret. We have many challenges related to electrical transmission and generation related to the data center development and within the data center overlay. And trying to understand a better way of planning for what's coming. And so I really appreciate Dominions willing to have that discussion and looking at more holistic approaches rather than just simply responding to a load letter and doing a siloed approach to meeting these needs, but it's clear we're going to hit a ceiling in terms of generation. And so these are conversations that we will have continuing to go forward, but I really do appreciate them taking the time to educate me and help me better understand this process going forward. I wanna thank our public works team for executing a fantastic dumpster day on Saturday for folks in Western Prince William County. We had a good turnout. We also had the shredding event and just want to commend the public works teams for once again just doing an excellent job. And just to remind our community that on Monday, we are having the Multidistrict Town Hall with Supervisor Weir and Supervisor Vega at Unity Read High School to discuss community safety and the Affordable Dwelling Unit ordnance. And it will begin at 7 p.m. and look forward to having everyone out to come share their perspectives on those issues. Thank you Madam Chair. Thank you, Supervisor Franklin. Sure, yes, thank you. On September 8th, this past weekend, I attended Bethel A.M.E. Church Friends and Family Funday. And so thank you for the invitation for everyone that came out. They're annual Family Funday and certainly had a great time and saw some of my colleagues there as well. I also attended a meeting with Bayview Apartments, their management company, meet with them every so often, probably quarterly just to talk about what's going on in their community and the upgrades that they've made. They've done a lot of work over the past few years alongside us in revitalizing the Route 1 corridor. They've made a lot of upgrades to their facilities. They've made a lot of changes with regards to security and management. And Bayview is now one of the safest places to reside, particularly in my district. So very happy for the partnership that we were able to create with Bayview and thank you to Dan Alexander, the police department as well as Elijah and our social services for really working with them over the past couple of years to make those upgrades and to make it a safer community. They are incredibly thankful to the county for our support. Now they need some help with some permitting and so we'll talk about that on the side and I'm sure we'll be able to get that done. But I like it when the apartments come to us and say we need help, especially those that are trying to kind of rebrand because we want to make sure that their residents have a safe and nice place to live as well. So thank you to Bayview Management for that meeting. I also have the opportunity to meet with Rabbi Pearlstein about some of the challenges that his community has been facing over the past year. We had a really good discussion about the community within Prince William County and so looking forward to continue partnerships with this synagogue and with other others across the county. So thank you for that meeting. And last night I held a community meeting with the residents of the acclaim at Belmont Bay as well as residents of Beacon Park to talk about both the rezoning proposed for Belmont Bay as well as some of the the berms that have been set up for some some additional development that's taking place in that community. And so thank you to the residents that came out. We were also joined by Chair Jefferson who was able to speak with the residents as well. So thank you for that. Some upcoming events, September 13th, recovery rocks, rise, recover, rock on together, a Prince William County Community Service Community event at the forlazo building. I will be participating in from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. So we invite the public to please stop by. September 14th is Stonebridge Annual Fall Festival and the Chilli Cook-Off. The Fall Festival is from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. and we'll be doing the Chilli Cook-Off where I will be a judge once again around noon. So please come out to that. And then September 28th we're doing dumpster day at Ripon Middle from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. and then October 12th, Woodbridge District Community Fund day from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. so all of those events will be on our website and social media so please come out and then share Jefferson and want to thank you for the efforts with regards to permitting reform because as you mentioned this is something that we've been talking about upgrading our permitting process for years. And I know Mr. Short or we've had conversations when you came on staff and Wade, we've talked in and Mandy has been doing a great job in trying to upgrade those processes, but I think we still have a long way to go. So I'm looking forward to the presentation, But I will say I think we should keep our mind, keep an open mind with regards to maybe needing to do a directive down the road because I want to make sure that officially we can go on record as having this board be in support of putting together some process. So obviously I won't put the cart for the horse but curious to see the presentation and just understanding that this is very, very important. Every type of business has come to us about this and at some point we just need to really address it. So thank you all. Thank you, Supervisor Vega. Thank you Madam Chair. I'd like to issue my notice of intent to real point Lynn Meadows to the Solid Waste Citizen Advisory Group, the resume should be on file. And just wanna to remind folks that our annual Coals District Code Drive is starting. So I would like for folks who are interested in providing a warm coat for a child this winter season to reach out to my office before October 25th. That's all I have, Madam Chair. All right, I'm gonna go or I'm gonna do a little different as a supervisor angry. All right, thank'm going to go or I'm going to do some different as a professor angry. All right, thank you, Madam Chair. First, I want to thank the Chesapeake Bay Foundation for their outstanding boat trip. We went down to Potomac River last week. So it's always good as we start talking about water supplies and in the water, you know, how well it's doing. They give a good trip every year, just to let us know exactly how the sediments are doing, what's happening out there. So I'm happy to say that the blue crab is in livestock again. So apparently they've been able to bring that back to about 80% of its inventory of crabs. So that's always good to hear. And they basically were saying that the Chut Spe in its best but is doing better than what it was 10 20 years ago so that's always good to hear. I also want to thank the committee for dollars they did a 2024 sustainability infrastructure and scooty infrastructure breakfast and I was very good they hear the panelists and talk about you know the infrastructure around in the region. So that was a good session. Also congratulations to NBTC Northern Virginia Transportation Commission for 60 years. They celebrated their anniversary last week. And also I want to congratulate Kit and Fay Wallace on 50 years of marriage. And so you've heard about the 9-11 piece coming up, the ceremony tomorrow. Also, so high, we're going to be kicking out off with some practice rounds early. But then Thursday at 4-30 starts the official tournament. So that's the place where you really want to be. And then on Thursday, September 19th, I'll be hosting a virtual affordable housing town hall. So there'll be a link on the social media website and platforms. On Friday, September 20th, I'll be with supervisor Franklin. We'll be co-hosting a Latino around table at Freedom High School at 7 p.m. We got some food, local organizations, and music. So I hope to see folks that have a good time. On a somber note September 7th Saturday I attended the funeral of a long time assistant chief here in Prince William County Del City Law and State Department Steve Chapel. He's one of our assistant chief. He was a dedicated public servant and his contributions throughout community will not be forgotten. I extend my deepest condolences to his family and the members of the first responding community who served alongside him. Madam Chair, Felum Sulla Supervisor, as it is with a heavy heart that acknowledged the recent passing of assistant chief Steve Chapel of the Dills City Volunteer Fire Department. Steve Sutton-Passen has deeply impacted our community and we are all more than the loss of a truly dedicated public servant. Steve was more than just a firefighter in paramedic. He was a hero who for over 20 years put his life on the line to ensure the safety of the residents of our district. His own wavering commitment to his work and his selflessness left a lasting impression on everyone who had the privilege of knowing him. Steve's leadership, kindness and sense of duty will be solely missed. I extend my deepest condolences to Steve's family, friends and his colleagues at the Delci de Valentine Fire Department and Department of Fire and Rescue. Rescue and Peace Assistant Chief Steve Chapel, your contribution to this community will never be forgotten. Thank you, Madam Chair Thank you so very much to Professor Hagriss to Professor Bodie. Thank you Madam Chair Just a few quick things for me Last week I was able to attend the the monthly or the weekly Woodbridge Rotary Club meeting I'm always great to drop it and visit that that club. I know rotary, whether it's the woodbridge, one of the lake ridge chapter, do a lot of great work in our community, so it's always great to spend some time and meet with them. Also, that same morning, last Thursday was able to visit our friends over at Westminster at Lake Ridge with delegate school and get a little bit more understanding of how they are a unique community and how they function as they have and assisted living portion. They have an skilled nursing portion, they have an independent living portion and how they're sort of managing to collaborate all that over the last few project that'll be going up just on the corner there of Harbor that is going to be hopefully an extension of their of their community so wanted to think those folks out there for that and delegate soul for all of her collaboration on that. I know that over the last few weeks I know everyone has seated around the county but especially in my district, there have been a tragic set of traffic accidents. Pedestrian struck motorist accidents. There was actually a vehicle which exploded and caught fire near Tanyard Hill on an old bridge road a couple of weeks ago. So I know that as we continue to have conversation on traffic safety, things are continuing to happen, that sort of alarm and frankly, justifiably so, scare residents about the current traffic situation. So as a follow up to the transportation and pedestrian safety listing session that I know that Wesley Dawson, his folks had last week at Chin Park. My office will be hosting a traffic safety town hall near the end of October. To give more folks a more inclusive look so we can talk through what's being done currently. I know that we're working on a lot of different things from the county perspective. What folks are seeing and we can continue to do community perspective to address those issues. Because yes, we do need to continue to look at more mechanisms, getting our friends in Richmond to give us more authority to do things about the end of the day. A lot of this is still centered around human behavior as folks drive around our communities. And frankly, a lot of the speeding and stuff like that, it's part and separate from a lot of the other things that we're seeing. So folks are continuing to drive recklessly. We need to do something about that. But a lot of that will still need to come down to changing hearts and minds about how to navigate our communities. Thank you so much, Madam Chair. Thank you, Supervisor Weir. Thank you, Madam Chair. I guess I'll put another plug in for Monday's Town Hall with Supervisor Gordy, myself, and the lovely Super supervisor Vega. I would just ask everybody that comes that it's bringing their rocks selective targeting not all of us are responsible. I don't want to get hit with all the rocks. Same thing. Gainesville people be nice because we're apparently having on October 16th, join hall with the chair. Join Town Hall with the chair. Target differentiation, please. That's all I really have except I would, I wish I had gone last. I would like to wave the rules procedure and consider an item not previously listed on the agenda to extend the tax payment due date for the vehicle classification of tangible personal property by 90 days until December 31st to 2024. And I have a friendly amendment to do that till November 30th simply because when we discuss this there was a meeting that we want to get passed and I believe that member meeting is. Oh, ahead of time. That date is acceptable to me as friendly amendment. All right. All right. So let me look and see you. Let's have Supervisor Franklin. Yeah. Thank you for that, Supervisor Weir. I'm happy to support this. I will say we extended this last year under a directive that I issued and that was because the amount of inflation that had impacted car values with regards to property taxes. Part of the directive was also looking at how we evaluate our cars in terms of we do not want to do that. We do not want to do that. We do not want to do that. We do not want to do that. We do not want to do that. We do not want to do that. We do not want to do that. We do not want to do that. We do not want to do that. We do not want to do that. We do not want to do that. We do not want to our residents. I don't think we ever circled back on that, but I bring that up because I don't know if it's sustainable for us to extend payments every single year. So at some point, we're gonna have to get to the bottom of, do we just let the markets dictate, or continue to dictate kind of what the assessments will be, or do we want to go in a direction of looking at using a different model than what we currently use. So I think at some point we're going to have to have that discussion because I don't know if it's going to be sustainable to continue to extend the due date for property taxes. And so I think I don't know if it's appropriate to have that discussion right now. Perhaps we push that off, because I am gonna support this and I do support it. But at some point we gotta get to the root calls and decide if we're gonna let this continue to be an economic issue, or if we want to actually look at our valuation model. Thank you. Madam Chair, for my in response. I agree. I am not fond of the particular evaluation device that we use. I bought for a number of reasons. I'm not fond of it for reasons above and beyond what's happening. I think what we have to realize is that in recent years, there have been a number of things that have sort of skewed it. Yes, COVID had a lot to do with it, but a lot more of it had to do with supply side issues, particularly with computer chips. It impacted some models more than it did others so that you had extended wait times and less less data. I don't know that it's going to be an issue perpetually if even more than this year, but I do think we need to sit down and have a discussion with finance about which model, which data source we're going to use. I I just quite frankly don't like the one we currently use, but that's a personal issue. I just want to interject because the data is actually November 26. We have a work session mobility, economic growth and resiliency. Isn't that one we're going to be talking about taxes, Mr. Shorter I believe, because we have another taxes that we were going to look at like meals tax CNP if I'm not mistaken. It may have been the meeting before the 26th meeting where we were going to talk about the taxes. So that's November 19th, which is a regular meeting. And that's fair. So I think that that's something again, we can tackle. We can have the longer discussion when we actually have that presentation. And with that, Supervisor Bodie. Thank you, Madam Chair. And we've talked about this a couple of times in the past few years. And again, Ramani folks, that the other compounding factor is the personal property tactfully fact and how that has not been reformed in Richmond for a number of years. So we have a diminishing part of relief that goes to our residents every year. So we have that and the local side of it. I'm not I'm going to support the motion for all the reasons they already but I will add to that that ultimately we also control the rate in which we assess that we do the tax rate. So if I could if it's not too much work I would love for that to be part of that conversation about taxes that comes back to us in New Set-A-Wiz in November. If we could talk about that as well because I feel like we're in a situation where every year now where we get told, hey, things will be normalized and no one will be sort of, everyone will be seeing a diminishment of their property value of their vehicle, but that is not happening formally as we've been told every year. So I think we should look at among all the other issues where time on terms of taxes, the actual rate we set. Thank you. All right, we don't have any other speakers. So are we ready to take the vote? Right, Chris? Oh. Yeah, this is Saturday. That makes it do the same week as those big tax. First week can December. I just... November 30th is a Saturday. Okay. So just a point of information Madam Chair, November 30th is a Saturday. It's the same day as the real estate. It would roll to the Monday, which is the same week that real estate taxes do. I'd also say that yesterday, just as a reminder, we sent a memo out from Michelle Atreed and team regarding the valuation process, regarding JD Power. It has information about the number of jurisdictions in Virginia that use JD power and also the coverage. So the JD power is one of the only models that covers 95% of vehicles in the country. So just wanted to make sure that was referenced. And that is all. And I appreciate that. Let's go with Friday, November 29th. Thank you for catching the Thessalonica Saturday. So Friday, November. I mean, I don't want to go too far. OK? I, you know, you know, yeah. OK, thank you so very much. Friday, November 29th. I think we will be fine. We will be fine. All right, so we're ready to take the vote. On the 29th, okay, because that's. Madam Chair. Yes. Oh, wait, hold on. Let's take down the vote. Go. Yes? I'm sorry. I do think this is... Okay. I do think this is worth probably another 30 seconds of discussion for this having being due right after a holiday. I do think it's worth maybe an extension for at least a little bit more. And that's fair, hold on me look at the calendar one thing I do want to note because it wasn't the material so we got from Michelle at trade. My only cause of concern is when we delay this we are losing interest so the county is actually losing money. So I want to strike a balance between us giving people additional time so that we can have this full discussion, but also us not losing a significant amount of interest. And so that's my concern. And so yes, we could take an extra couple of minutes to discuss. Looking at my calendar, I don't want to go to the end of the year because we can also make the argument that's the holidays as well. How do people feel about Friday, December 6th? I'm sorry, supervisor. I was going to say either Tuesday, the third or Friday, the sixth. Friday, the sixth? Going once, twice, supervisor Franklin? Yeah, I was just going to say historically I think we've made the due date at the beginning of January. There are a number of challenges with moving the date into the next calendar year. I'd also want to make sure that I add that the real estate tax is due December 5th. So our part, so then it will. All right, I'm sorry, I can't quite hear. So you're saying that so the property tax is due Thursday, December 5th. Correct. So there are people still who own their houses out right. Does anyone see any problem? And I don't want to keep beating the dead horse. I mean, we could do it the same day. Is Thursday, December 5th? I don't know if there's a real difference in a day. I don't know if it presents a problem. If you do think it presents a problem, do you go a day after or the same day as the property tax? The same thing. the day after or the same day as the property tax? It's been a time of time. I'm going to take cash and all that. Yeah, one check. That same day for the time of time. Both. I can't personally property. I'm trying to ask you, it's easier. Yes. So I don't know if the board would be willing to consider a November date. It seems from, and the challenges I just don't have the data on how many taxpayers would be impacted by this, but we are concerned about taxpayers who own their homes outright retirees who would be paying the property tax on December 5th along with the vehicle the personal property tax and What impact that might have on them to be paying both on the same day Well the thing is I guess we're closed. Or, um, so, but I just want to say this real quick. This is a deadline. People can pay. If the deadline is on the, on December 5th, people can pay it on the fifth. They can still pay it sooner. So that's where I think we're splitting a little too many hairs here. We're splitting too many hairs because again, they can still pay it early. And if people want to pay on the deadline or on the last day, that is a personal choice that they can make. So I think that we're getting into splitting hairs just a little too much from my comfort. So I heard the 27th, I hear the 5th. You know, I think December 5th is adequate. there is, I'm sorry, Supervisor, I'm sorry, you know, Supervisor. Mr. shorter, is there a reason you think December, I'm sorry, November day? There is no administrative barrier to us as long as we are in the same calendar, you know, administrative barrier to having that date or deadline Establish on the fifth or December. All right, let's go and think good. I think Thursday, December 5th is easier for some people. You're good with it. I think folks are good. No one. I mean, your fingers need to work out, Bob. All right. So are we good to take them up? All right, let's go. Vote unanimous. All right. Thank you. And supervisor Bailey, it is your turn to close us out to what's supervisor's time. Defeat. Fifth. No one's OK. All right. Thank you, Madam Chair. Pass against September 5th. I just want to thank Elijah and Josh for coming and talking to me about the aging programs in my district. And we came up with a game plan of how we're going to serve the community in that way and partner in that way. So thank you so much. I had the pleasure of along with some of my colleagues attending the Bethou AME Family and Friends Fund Day and I want to thank former secretary and the whole of education and Houlton for coming and being our guest speaker at that event in my community and being with the kids. They really enjoyed her. Upcoming events on September 25th, I'll be having my Potomac District Community Town Hall. It'll be a Covenant Harper Elementary School from 630 to 830. So Madam Chair, put that on your calendar. We send an email. Please put that on your calendar. Just a reminder for special events. This is Mental Health Awareness Month and then Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Then I want to congratulate my Latin ex friends Hispanic Heritage Month September 15 through October 1. The theme for this year is pioneers of change shaping the future together. And I and thank you, Madam Chair, that's all I got. All right. Thank you so very much everyone. This concludes our meeting. Our next meeting will be next week Tuesday on Tuesday, September 17th. Can I get a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. All right. Let's vote. Vote unanimous. Thank you. you Thank you.