All right. Good morning, everyone. And welcome to this session of the government operations and fiscal policy committee. We are beginning. This is our first session beginning the review of the FY26 operating budget. We are going to kick it up with our Board of Elections and then go to Compensation and Benefit for All Agencies and then look at our collective bargaining And one, I just want to thank our Board of Elections. I know we had to reschedule this, and it is for an earlier time, so we appreciate all of you being here. I'm going to pass it over to our staff Miss Gisalia to go over the packet and then we'll have the Board of Elections introduce themselves., great. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for having me. So just to get right into the budget for the board of elections, the county executive is recommending a decrease of about $2.9 million or $16.96% from the FY25 approved operating budget for the board of elections. The executive's recommendation includes a $192,000 $137 increase for the compensation adjustments and required operating expenses. These items reflect continuation of current staffing and service levels. The operating budget equity tool analysis for the Board of Elections, states that the department demonstrates commitments to advancing racial equity and social justice across all areas of the GARA framework, with particular strengths in organizing and operationalizing. The executive's recommended increases includes $1.2 million for five enhancements included within this is the overtime adjustment, funding for seasonal temps, funding for rebuilding the election worker management system, funding for restoring the election judge stipend, and funding for the addition of two office services coordinator positions moved from part time to full time. For the executives recommended decreases, this would include about $4.9 million in reductions for five items. Included within this is the printing and mail adjustment, the annualization of FY 25 personnel costs, money for a lapse adjustment, and a decrease for the state board of elections expenses, as well as the elimination of one time approved items in FY 25. On page two of your packet, you'll find that Table 1 shows the board of elections budget from last year and the county executive's recommendation for this year. There's also information about the background of the Board of Elections and that's just for you to look at. And then moving on to page four of the packet, BOE shared with Council staff some of their additional RISJ activities, which are detailed for you. One of note is particularly their work on translating their materials into multiple languages. On page five of the staff packet, you'll find that table two lays out all of the puts and takes for the board of elections and the miscellaneous operating costs were all lumped together at the bottom of that table. Moving on for the proposed budget changes for committee review, you'll find this starting on page six of your packet. The first one, well, I'll begin with the increases, I think that's a little bit easier. The first one being for the overtime adjustment in the amount of 463,786 dollars. When the board of elections was asked about the rationale for the overtime adjustment, their response stated that the overtime line item had historically been underfunded in order to bring the budget in line with the increase and the increase was recommended so that it is consistent with the average historical cost. Moving on to the seasonal temps, this increases for $300,19. When asked about the rationale on the cost increases for seasonal temps, the Board of Elections shared that the county executives recommended increase, would accommodate for increased costs related to election operations, administration, and compensation. The Board of Elections needs to maintain the funding level for this item, and the requested increase brings the budget in line with the average historical cost. The increase also addresses operational mandates, such as having an adequate time frame to process all incoming mail and ballots, and changes in voters' preferred modes of voting. Additionally, the Board of Elections projects that 22.68 FTEs are needed for the temporary team members. Moving on to rebuilding the election worker management system for an increase of $300,000. The county executive is making this recommendation and when asked the board of elections, let me know that in FY23, the board of elections engaged tabs to develop a new version of the election resource management system as a legacy system had been developed on an outdated platform. Development of the new system was planned in multiple phases and this was done to enable its utilization for the 2024 election cycle with project completion scheduled for the 2026 election cycle. The external portal was completed for the 2024 presidential general elections and facilitated recruiting, training, and staffing of election workers and future vote students at early voting centers and election day polling places. When asked why this funding was needed, BOE responded saying that Tubs anticipates completion of the internal modules in FY25 with maintenance, post testing, use enhancements, and licensing costs for FY26. If the internal modules of the Election Work management system are not completed and operational for the 2026 elections, the board of elections team would need to manually do tasks such as processing 7,000 applications and scoring over 5,000 online quizzes. Several of these other tasks are detailed in your packet. BOE shared that manually conducting all of the processes would result in significant operational delays and the need to hire additional temporary employees. Next is to restore the election judge stipend for $200,000. When the board of elections was asked about this increase for the election judge stipend, they responded that the amount fluctuates every year and the $200,000 increase reflects the estimated amount needed for FY26. Estimations are based on a wide variety of factors including the type of election, the projected turnout for early voting, the projected return rate of election judges who served in the previous election, and any additional legislative or operational requirements. And lastly for the increases is the addition of two office service coordinator positions which moved from part time to full time for the amount of $21,867. When the Board of Elections was asked about the purpose for moving two positions from part time to full time, the Board of Elections stated that the change will address the increased operational needs in the voter registration section, and this need is also reflected by increased volume and complexity in the received data sets and list maintenance processes. For the recommended decreases, the one of note for you is the State Board of Elections Expenses in the amount of $708,598. When asked for more information regarding the proposed decrease for the State Board of Elections Expenses, B.O.E. explained that the decrease reflects anticipated charges from the Maryland State Board of Elections, and that these charges are illegal legal requirement per election law 9-106. Lastly, on page 9 of your staff packet, you'll find a summary table of the recommended budget changes for committee consideration. Terrific. Thank you for reviewing the packet and an excellent packet packet and I appreciate the new format as this is the first budget we are reviewing and is very clear. I'll turn it over quickly to our Board of Elections to introduce yourselves and to say some opening comments. Well, thank you. Good morning, President Stewart, Council Member Katz and Council Member Freetson. For the record, I'm David Naiman. I'm the president of the Montgomery County Board of Elections. To my left, in actuality, not politically, is our board secretary, Ami Hober. To my right is, with no political comment whatsoever, is our election director, Boris Brighovich, andist, Lisa Marina. We're very pleased to appear before you today. We're here in support of our FY 2026 budget, and also to thank you for our FY 2025 budget. Last year, you guys gave us a one-time $70,000 increase for our outreach advertising for the 2024 General Election, which we very much appreciated and put to good use. We could always use such funds, but we are not requesting it this year because of indifference to the difficult budget year that we're all having. We have lots of data on the 2024 general election. The bottom line was that a little more than 76% of eligible voters turned out to vote. Roughly one-third of those who voted chose to vote by each of the methods. Mail and ballot, we had 167,000 mail and ballots. Roughly one-third chose to vote during the eight days of early voting. We had 155,000 people who did that. And a little more than one-third voted at the 232 polling places on election day, 172,000 did that. They also were provisional ballot voters in addition to that. So the numbers for early voting and election day were actually a little bit higher when you add those in. We also have more than 120,000 voters on the permanent male and ballot list. So that gives you a sense of what we're dealing with. Starting this afternoon, we have a meeting this afternoon, and over the next few months our board will be deciding about our plans for the 2026 elections. But our general inclination is to continue doing what we've been doing with roughly the same services as in the past as in 2024. That would be 58 drop boxes from which ballots are collected at least daily by bipartisan teams, 14 early voting centers with your approval, and roughly 232, the same number as 2024, Election Day polling places. I'm also happy to report that our board successfully proposed legislation in anapolis. I say that with, I say successfully, it's passed both houses and waiting the governor's signature to move the primary election day one week earlier than previously planned. And that would make it on Tuesday, June 23rd of 2026. And it passed on the last night of the session, which was not an indication of how controversial it was. But we do understand that the governor is likely to sign it. By moving the primary election one week closer to the end of school, we expect it to support larger voter turnout. We avoid having early voting on the long weekend created by the Juneteenth holiday and Father's Day. We keep our elections from interfering with REC department camps as far as early voting is concerned and the MCPS construction schedules as far as Election Day is concerned and we make it more convenient for recruiting election judges before the heart of the summer vacation season. I'll turn it over to my colleague Ami Hober and to our election director Boris Brickovich and then we'll obviously be happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you. Thank you, Council members. We appreciate the opportunity to be here. My main purpose is to be available to answer any questions and to indicate clearly that this is a bipartisan supported budget. And if there are any questions, I'm happy to address them. Good morning committee members just very brief I think David successfully covered where the board of elections stand I just like to express my personal gratitude for the support that we got from the committee from the council from the 24 election cycle. It was my first election cycle as election director. Some things were, I would say different, in 2024, I think that we certify primary election day fastest in 20 years. While the general elections brought some challenges both for us and for the state in terms of provisional ballots. The budget that we put together is aiming, as David said, to provide the continuity of service and trying to adjust to obviously changing patterns in voting behavior that we have in Montgomery County. Thank you. Thank you. For being here and for that presentation that update on the last election, I do want to just say thank you to all of you and all the volunteers and everyone I was able to come out to see some of the counting and I know this last election as we're looking at future elections, we're in very different times. And so being able to prepare for that adequately is important. I just had before I turned to colleagues one question on the budget, which is very straightforward this year, and that was on the rebuild election worker management system for $300,000. Obviously that is in the works, something we need. You all have acknowledged the difficult budget situation we face us in. And so just wanted to dig into the $300,000 maybe a little bit more. What is certain that we will need in FY26 to make sure we're prepared for the upcoming elections and is there any wiggle room there? Thank you for the question. When we talk about this system, there are three different angles to view it. One is operational, recognizing that we have a 232 polling places, and that our volunteers delivered between 6.5 to 7,000 service days. We need automated system to help us assign those volunteers to polling places, recognize their party affiliations. And on the top of that, we have 1,000 Canvas service days and 500 dropbox attendance days, which provides a volume that is beyond paper and pen approaching the size of the county that this is. The second thing is the customer service. We are very grateful for our volunteers to come forward and help us do the election. We believe, and I believe the council member is no better than I do, that our residents have moved away from paper and pen. They prefer to do everything online, preferably on their phone, and this is what system allows them. Allows them to sign in, or online allows them to do the test online, allows them to take the, to assign for the in-person training online themselves without calling the board of elections or inquiring with this stuff. And the third thing is this was a legacy system. This was a 12-15-year-old system. The county invests a lot of money in its IT programs, in IT security. We have to bring this platform on the level with the rest of the county. When it comes to the future costs, we can always work with tabs, but this is the estimate of the work that developers and testers will need going forward to put the system in place for the 46th. Council Member Freetza? Well, thank you very much. First of all, I just want to thank President Naaman and thank Ms. Hober and thank you Mr. Rechovitch for all of your work. I really appreciate the United Front coming and showing a bipartisan effort if ever there was a time where it was important to continue to send the message that our elections, our elections board, the oversight of free and fair elections are a nonpartisan and a bipartisan issue. I say both because I think both points are important. Partisanship should not be part of those efforts, but we need the participation of the parties to ensure that we are following through on our efforts and our commitments. I really do appreciate that and the spirit with which you're here and really appreciate the professionalism that you have brought and overseeing the staff and every effort that you have undertaken. I was gonna ask the question specifically about the management systems. I appreciate you answering that. I think more and more we need to be leveraging technology and making sure that we're keeping up with the expectations and demands of voters and of the public so that we're responding and reacting to that. So I really appreciate all the efforts and thank you to the rest of the staff, thank you to all the volunteers, as was noted, democracy is a participatory sports. It's a team effort and it requires everybody, not just the candidates who run, but the people who commit themselves to make the actual process work. So I just want to express my appreciation for that. My only other question, you know, you were mentioning Mr. Namin, all of the dynamics of the, you know, three different types of voting. There's really four if you include provisional, although provisional is really a classification within the types of voting. But are there changes that you are looking at or there are trends that you are seeing in terms of adjustments that you think the board is going to need to make for future elections? You noted the 120,000 permanent mail requests. So that's an ongoing dynamic that we can prepare for whether that grows over time. We'll have to wait and see. But are there changes to behavior, there are updates, are there ways in which the board is viewing the future and the way the staff is viewing the future and how we ought to be preparing? Let me take a stab and I certainly want others to pipe in. There are definitely changes that we would want to encourage from the public because we had a record number of provisional ballots in the last election. And anything that can be done to lessen that would be of great help to everyone involved, including our voters, so that their experience at the polls takes less time, etc. So for example, if someone chooses to vote by mail and gets a mail-in ballot, we really need them to use the mail-in ballot and not come to the polls in which case they will vote provisionally. Now, if they don't get their mail-in ballot, that's a different question. But if they simply say, you know, I really want to go to the polls, we would advise them to fill out their mail-in ballot and bring it to the polls. You can either put it in a drop box or hand it to an election judge either way. but then you don't have to wait in line and you don't have to make the people behind you wait. Wait, wait. Is there any analysis of the difference of the reasons for provisional ballots and also the difference between someone who did receive it and just wasn't aware? I mean, it's hard to have that specific information. But right here, there are two different standards here. One is I literally didn't get my ballot. I knew I know this is the rule, but I I don't have it. And I didn't know what to do. I didn't hear back from anybody. So I just showed up because I want to be able to vote. And the other is, I didn't realize I had signed up or I didn't know that you couldn't sign up and still vote but in person because my self-impses change. And let me add to that, there's also the people who have signed up or I didn't know that you couldn't sign up and still vote in person because my circumstances changed. And let me add to that, there's also the people who have signed up to have their ballot delivered by the web and printed it at home and may not realize that that's what they did. So they may be waiting for their US mail when it's in their email inbox, a link to where to get their ballot. The other thing that happens is that people on the permanent list are getting sent their ballots 43 days, 45 days if they're overseas 43 days if they are domestic before the election and they may not be thinking about it at that point or may not be ready to vote at that point and they forget. You know that they all up and believe me I would be capable of the same thing. I'm not casting this version on people who forget. And we have limited data because when someone says to us I didn't get my ballot. We don't always have a way of we know what happened up to the point it was sent, but we don't know what happens up to the point of delivery. And so we obviously have to deal with what we're told. We do have data on the reasons for provisional ballots ballot because I mean I have to go through essentially all of them after the staff does in order to confirm the reasons. And there are a number of different reasons. We have voters who come to the polls on primary day and insist that they are a political affili are, even though if they're listed in the registry, we can't count that. Under state legislation, we propose we'll be able to count their Board of Education vote, but nothing else. We have voters who, I think the largest category are the voters who come to the polls after requesting a mail-in ballot. We have a number of other reasons that I'm sure others can can rattle off, but we do have some data, but we don't really have the ability to distinguish between those who think they didn't get their ballot and those who didn't get their ballot. But the best thing that we can do, as far as I'm concerned, as far as I'm concerned is to educate people about what to expect. I personally want to stop calling them web-delivered ballots and start calling them printed home ballots because I think that that gives people, we have a lot of people, we have more of those ballots than anyone else in the state. We have a higher percentage of requests for those ballots than anyone else in the state. And I'm not sure that everyone who requests them understand. a lot of people, we have more of those ballots than anyone else in the state. We have a higher percentage of requests for those ballots than anyone else in the state. And I'm not sure that everyone who requests them understands the work required for them and us if they get those kinds of ballots. I'd like to make sure that people understand exactly what they're getting. And if they want them, I don't have a problem with that. But if they would consider it to be more convenient to vote in a different method. I would rather that they decide that before they are on a list to get something or before they request something Rather than have them decide at the last minute that they're going to change their mind and come to early voting or come to Election day, but I would say our biggest Issue would be and something we work on year round every year is how to have fewer provisional ballots in any way that we can. For us, I don't know if you had more to add. Just the, you want to move? It's okay, you want me to go over? All right, I'll make a few comments first. The key issue that I think it impacts our budget in addition to having to pay, you know, canvassers additional time to do things like that is we need to continue to educate the public on how to help make the election process smoother. There are lots of things the public isn't consciously aware of that would make our lives easier and more efficient and smoother. Like for example, following the direction not to use pencil, but rather to use pen. I don't know if you all are aware that if a mail-in ballot comes in that's been marked in pencil, we have to have canvassers cover those pencil marks with pen because the scanner doesn't read pencil. That part is confusing because we have ingrained in our minds that number two pencil. I know. From school. It's very hard to train people to train. I. The only scantron that requires pen and not pencil. But that's why we need to have real education efforts on how to make the election process more smooth. And so that's where it can impact the budget. Boris? Just very briefly, the number of provisional bellows that we experienced in general election, 2020 was, I was told once in a lifetime. I'm not sure that's the case. We had $27,000, but that is a reflection of $192,000 male in Bellatric fest. I believe that we are trying to be a dynamic agency to try to response as issues as they rise, but this problem might be here to stay for a bit until the water gets to pick up mode of voting that they would prefer. If you look at the provisions, the largest number is vote by mail requests, who were not returned, but people showed up in person. We had the highest number of same-day registrations in 2024. I believe the total number was equal to the same-day registrations since they were introduced in general election in one year. And we had over 1,000 residents of Maryland who I believe worked in Montgomery County who decided to vote here and triggered provisional ballot by default. I can tell the committee we were the first county to prepare a forms sent out to those voters who request the mailing ballot to sign on the spot if they want to be removed from the future mailing. That would free them from the provisional voting, make their experience faster, make our life also an hour efficiency faster. We were also the first county that utilized our colleagues from tabs to send around 400,000 emails in the afternoons, reminding voters what to do if you requested this and I don't know if the council, if the committee members share the email addresses with us if you did most likely you got an email from us. We are trying to reach out to the voters. We are trying to prevent this. And I believe we had a high number of senior day care centers that generated provisional ballots for different reasons, non-registered, different polling place, request of mail-in ballot, just like two weeks, I think we got the list of all the centers from our colleagues ages just, and we are going out this year. We are going out to those centers trying to talk to everyone, trying to make sure that when they go to the polling place, they have 10 minute experience instead of two hours waiting in line to make them regular voters instead of individual voters. If I could just add one thing to that, well actually I'm going to add two quick things. One is the Boris left out one of his initiatives that is also a first in the state, which is that we've sent out emails to the voters who are requesting those web delivered printed home ballots that I mentioned to make sure that that's what they want. We can't hit every voter that way because they don't have email addresses for everybody, but that also resulted in some people switching to other methods. And then the other thing I was gonna mention is that, obviously the US mail system is, we have a very good relationship with the local postmasters. We met with them all. They've been very accommodating, but we don't control the US Postal Service. And as you may know, the executive branch of the federal government is looking to have tighter control over the US Postal Service, which makes me very nervous. And under those circumstances, we want to continue to have alternatives. So that's why the printed home ballot and the drop boxes are very important. We actually have more mail and ballots that are returned by drop box than we do by U.S. mail. And we're very proud of the fact that if people put their ballots in those drop boxes, we get them in our building within a day. So we think that essentially all of these different options are necessary. And as Boris says, as our voters get used to what they're most comfortable with, I think we'll be able to make some adjustments. Just last fall, in terms of the provisional ballots, how many of them are election day the 27,000 I think I have the right number 27,000 number. How many of those are election day and how many of those From the top of my head I would say around 1819,000 very election day 18 or 19,000. Yeah, that's overwhelming overwhelming. I would expect it, but I just wanted to check. OK. It was overwhelming election day. I apologize for not carrying the figures from the people of the figure. I can provide that. Yeah, if you could follow up with that, you don't need to apologize. But I appreciate it. And I'll go back. Yeah. If I could just add one thing to that, which is another thing we have to educate our voters about. And I realize we're continuing to tell you about the things we could do with that 70,000 that we're not asking for. But the to that, which is another thing we have to educate our voters about. And I realize we're continuing to tell you about the things we could do with that 70,000 that we're not asking for. But this year, yes, this year. But our voters love early voting and they love being able to vote wherever they want in the county. But on election day, the rules are different. And I think a huge number of our provisional ballots are people who go on election day thinking rules are different and I think a huge number of our provisional ballots are people who go on election day thinking that it's like early voting and discovering that it's not especially if they happen to say work in downtown Silver Spring. You know they go to the where they are used to voting by early voting they end up voting provisionally because on election day you either vote in your own precinct or you vote provisionally. Yep and I witnessed that firsthand. Mr. David I know you and I and Boris I've had conversations about that and I just again want to thank our volunteers and our election day judges because they dealt with that onslaught of folks who no matter how many early voting days we have we know those last few hours. Are there a lot of folks who turn out at particular places like downtown Silver Spring? So Council Member Katz. Thank you very much, Madam President, and thank you all for everything you do. I, and you do an extremely good job. And I think it should be noted that we appreciate the nonpartisan discussion today and Montgomery County, Maryland, and Montgomery County in particular, has had that distinction for many, many years. Many of your predecessors sat here in a nonpartisan manner to make certain that people's elections were done in the correct way. And, you know, a lot of times people take government for granted. Everything's done by magic. And therefore, you don't appreciate literally the day-to-day work that goes on. You mentioned that you said it was once in a lifetime. Well, even with a catch with nine lives, I've seen many times, more times than once. So this is once in a lifetime. This is 100 years storm and you get two in a week. I mean, it's what we go through and we have to appreciate that there's always going to be something that we just didn't plan on. I am surprised that it's a third and a third for the voting. I would have thought that that mail-in would have been, since it's the easiest way to do it. Though I understand as somebody who's worked at polling places many, many times, there's a social side, there's a side where people get to maybe see the candidate that they would like to or would not like to vote for and have a discussion with them. And so I appreciate that. And my only real question is when the rebuild management system, is there a timeline how fast can it be rebuilt? And is that work? So the phases were put together in order to enable us to use it in 2024. And the follow-up phases will allow us to use it in 2026 to the full possible extent. Tabs is currently wrapping up development phase, which means that we will move into testing phase that will test election day, early voting, draw boxes, canvas, future vote, many different segments of the program. And when the testing goes, there are big glitches. Obviously, they'll have to go back and forth. But we will be fully operational for 20 2026. Very good thank you very much for what you do and I yield back. So thank you for that. I would request before this budget comes before the full council that we asked tabs for a more of a breakdown of the $300,000 and the the dates that we just talked about to see if there is anything I don't see anything in this budget to recommend for reconciliation at this point but understanding that the $300,000 was probably something Tebs had estimated when they started this project and now that we're moving into the final stages I'd like to see what reality looks like a little bit more and what they're scheduled for for FY26 and I think that would be helpful for the full council to review when this budget comes before us in early May. But not senior objections on accepting the budget and recommending it to the full council. And then that is our recommendation. Thank you and thank you for joining us today and for all your help and flexibility in rescheduling this session. Next, we will turn now to our FY26 operating budget compensation and benefits for all agencies. This is a dense packet, a lot of information that we will go through today and then we'll take up the collective bargaining agreements. I will turn it over to our staff, Mr. Howard first to walk us through the packet. Terrific. Good morning and thank you. As we get organized here in the changeover, we will begin and we will start walking through the staff report. We have, as you mentioned, it's got a lot of information. And so we will go through sections A through K, I think if I did my numbers, sorry, A through J, and then stop there for discussion and questions before we turn back to the committee decision points in section K. So to begin with, in section A on page two, we have a summary of the requested FY26 compensation costs. The executive's recommendation, along with the agency recommendations, is for a tax-apported operating budget of $6.647 billion, an increase of 6.8% above the FY25 amount. Across the four county funded agencies, employee compensation costs consisting of salaries, as well as benefit costs, comprise about 72% of all tax-supported agency expenditures. And as such, as this committee has discussed many times, the cost of government is driven both by the number of employees and the cost per employee. The county funded agencies have requested tax-ported FY26 operating budgets with a combined $4.8 billion for compensation, which is a 9.5% increase from FY25 across the four agencies. And in table one, you can see that the percentage change varies across the agencies, with the primarily driven with county government, which is 7.1% increase and MCPS, which is a 10.6% increase. And of course those two agencies represent the majority of spending for the entire budget as well. And just as another point for county government, the council will review and make decisions on the proposed collective bargaining agreements as well as other compensation costs that are not part of the agreements, which we'll go over today. For MCPS, Montgomery College and Park and Planning, the final decisions on proposed FY26 pay and benefit costs will be made by their respective governing bodies based on the ultimate funding levels approved by the council. And with that, I'll turn it over to Mr. Trump, after the next section of the report. Morning council members. So we're going to walk through the major points. Go kind of quickly through this and please stop me if there are things that you'd like to have in more detail. We'll start on page three and again, as Mr. Howard said, we're going to revisit some of these items in the next, in the next agenda item in Ms. Wellens report on the collective bargaining agreements. But some context, of course, we're all very much aware much aware of the layoffs that have happened at the federal level for many of our constituents. of bargaining agreements, but some context, of course, we're all very much aware of the layoffs that have happened at the federal level for many of our constituents and neighbors. Noting also that the Trump administration is proposing a potential pay freeze for federal government employees that remain. I mean, at the state level, the state budget, the general assembly included a 1.0 percent general wage adjustment or GWA. I'll be using the term GWA for general wage adjustment throughout this presentation. So 1.0 percent GWA and FY26 along with a step increase. So starting with the county government general wage adjustments, GWAs, for FOP members, executive recommends a 4.85% GWA. And as we note this is a bit higher than recommended for other bargaining units. We asked the executive for an explanation for this amount and you'll see in the talix the discussion there. Key point being that the executive believes that the starting salary for county police officers should align with that of an and a rundle county to make it the highest starting salary for police officers in the region. For IFF members, the recommended GWAs 3.25% and for McGee, the nonrepresented employees, the recommended GWAs 3.0%. of page 4. We have a table that shows the history of the GWAs over the past decade. We'll note that for the 12 month period, ending in January 2025, the CPI for the area showed that prices had increased by 2.7%. And indeed, in most years, the GWAs awarded to the county government have exceeded the rate of inflation. From FY 15 to FY 25, the CPI was about 2.3 percent annually compared to GWAs for the FOP, IFF and make GIO at 2.7, 3.1 and 3.0 percent respectively over the same time period. Moving on to page 5. Service Inc., executive recommends 3.5% service increments, also an in-step increases for employees who are not at top of grade, for the Management Lead Doreship Service, MLS and the Police Leadership Service, PLS, they receive performance-based pay increases in lieu of service increments, and the executive budget includes $1.5 million tax supported in funding for those pay increases. CAE's budget also includes funding for longevity increments. You'll see in the table, they follow the schedule on table 4 on the bottom of page 5. Moving on to page 6. This year there are just a few number of miscellaneous pay adjustments, and all of them relate to the FOP. There is a personal patrol vehicle border expansion, just a one minute of explanation here. So some police officers receive a PPV, a personal patrol vehicle, that they may drive when they are off duty under the current collective bargaining agreement. Most officers may drive the PPV within 10 miles of the county border. The new collective bargaining agreement would increase that limit to 20 miles beyond the county's border and OMB estimates that the cost of this change would be about $593,000 annually. There's also an increase in the canine officer shift in a French or at a cost of about $400,000 and an increase in field training officer paid to French or at a cost of $85,000 in FY26. Now moving to page seven, which is the summary of the cost of the pay adjustments and we present the state in the table in different ways. We show the total cost, which is the cost from all funds and the tax supported costs, both for FY26 and the annualized costs. And the annualized costs represents a 12-month cost. And so something different this year, we note that unlike in previous years, all of the GWAs recommended by the executive would take effect at the beginning of the year. And so that minimizes the role over the cost that's bill into FY27. So in summary, on the bottom of page seven, you'll see that the total cost of the, in FY26 of the proposed pay increases are about $51 million, $41 million of that would be tax supported on an annualized basis, about $55 million or $45 million tax supported. So the county government tax supported compensation increase recommended by the executive is about 7.1% above the FY25 level. This in proposed increase would be the third consecutive year of compensation crois growing at a rate greater than 7% and for context, no recommended budget included compensation growth at a rate greater than 5% in any year in the previous decade. Now, when we talk about compensation cost growth, we talked about pay increases, but there are other two other elements that are important to consider. One is the cost of employee benefits, and the other is the workforce size. You'll see draw your attention to the chart on page 8 and you'll see that the increase in benefit costs this year is actually a greater dollar amount than the increase for pay adjustments. And more about that later. Page 9, the other factor that we mentioned is the workforce size and you'll see in table 6 that the C's recommended budget includes 155 additional FTEs full time equivalents above FY25, which is a 1.4% increase. Moving on to MCPS, the Board of Education has negotiated agreements with its bargaining units. They've recommended $122 million in tax-supported compensation increase. You'll see in the table on page 7, the general age adjustments across the board at 3.25% and service increments generally in the 3-3.5% range. Montgomery College has an agreement with its American Association of University Professors AAUP, which is a 5% increase plus a fixed dollar amount increased based on the year of higher. But as of today, the college boards of trustees have not yet approved their agreements with SEIU or with AFSCME. For park and planning, the county portion of park and planning, there's about $5.8 million for pay increases but also there, the commission is not yet completed their negotiations with their magio-represented employees or their FOP employees, those are the park police officers. And WSSC, their budget includes about $13 million for employee salary enhancements and of course when you meet with your colleagues in Prince George's County Council you'll be discussing both the MNCPPC and the WSSC budget. Okay, moving on in the middle of page 10 to retirement benefits, just a reminder that the county government has three different retirement plans for employees, but the defined benefit plan, the pension or the ERS is by far the most costly. At a cost recommended at about $7.71 million for this upcoming year, the divine contribution plan, the RSP is an increase of about $20 million this year. And the grip, the guaranteed retirement income plan, which is a cash balance plan, is supposed to, is recommended to grow by about $12 million in FY26. All told we're seeing retirement costs tax-supported increased by about 18% from FY25 to recommended FY26. Again, the key driver there is the pension plan, the ERS and the plan enhancements that have taken place the past couple years and higher than anticipated employees salary increases. And you'll see in the table on the bottom of page 11 the great disparity in the cost per employee for the different plans. Almost $21,000 for an ERS member on average compared to $7,300 for an RSP plan participant and about $4,700 for a group participant. Moving on to page 12. MCPS retirement costs and here again just the reminder of the background, there are two plans for MCPS. There's their local plan which is the provides the pension benefit for employees who are not eligible for the state pension plan. And then there's a supplemental benefit for both teachers and non-teachers that MCPS provides to their local plan. And again, MCPS is the sole school system in the state to provide a supplemental pension benefit. At a cost of about $94 million a year, or an FY26. Over a decade decade ago the state shifted the cost of the state plan, their normal cost to the counties under that previous formula that would have cost the MCPS about $75 million this year but as we know within the last couple of weeks the general assembly shifted some of the unfunded costs which will add about another an additional $20 million to county costs and that shift also affects Montgomery College at about a million dollars. Moving on to the pension funded ratios which is the percentage of the plans liabilities covered by its assets. It's really a measure to the extent to which a plan is set aside funds to pay the the benefits accrued by its members. And I'll note that the GFOA, the government finance officers association establishes a best practice for pension plans to be funded at 100%. You'll see on page 13 the current or the most recent valuation funded ratios for each of the pension plans in the We'll note that the Montgomery County plan, which two years ago was at over 100% is now at 94, 95%. Again, this was not a matter of on the asset side. The assets actually grew at a higher rate than expected. It's more on the liability side. again, the unfunded liability from the pension enhancements and higher than anticipated salary increases. MCPS funded ratio is about 86%. And last year, we noted to the concern about the WSSC pension plan that had a one-year drop that was quite dramatic, almost 20 percentage points. Most more recently, their status has increased to about 82 percent funded, but again, suggesting that you might want to have a conversation with WSIC about their investment strategy and how it affects rates. Turn it over to Mr. Howard to discuss group insurance. Great. We are now at the top of page 14, and we'll start with group insurance for active employees, where the FY26 tax support request for active employee group insurance benefits for all agencies totals $586.3 million, an increase of 13.3% from FY25, and these costs represent the employer share of annual group insurance premiums. premiums, you can see in table 10 that the increase is across all the different agencies. And it's largely due to employee health care costs increasing at rates higher than had previously been projected. We do want to know a couple changes related specific MCPS for this year and their group in, sorry, their active employee group insurance plan structure. A couple of different things. First is $40 million of the MCPS increase is specifically to help address their structural deficit and their group insurance plan, which the committee and the full council has discussed and we'll have a little bit more information on that later. Second, they've worked to develop prescription and GLP-1 utilization management strategies, which they estimate are expected to reduce costs by $8.3 million in FY26 and $10.8 million in FY27 when fully annualized. And then also the board and the MCPS employee associations agreed on a group insurance premium cost share changes, which are detailed in Table 11 on page 15. And over the next two years, there will be a cost share shift in the premiums of 2%, 1% a year, 1% in FY26, the other percent in FY27. So it's a shift from the employer to the employee. So as shown on table 11, you can see both the current and the new cost share rates that the employees will pay in MCPS. First, the effective NFI-20, or the beginning of January 2026, and then second in January of 2027. And so by the end of the phase in period, MCPS employees will be paying between 12 and 19% of the premiums in a plan with care management and between 19 and 26% of premiums in a plan without care management. For comparison, active county government employees pay 20% of the premiums for all plans. Parking planning employees play between 15 and 23% depending on plan type and employee group and Montgomery College employees pay 25% for all plans. The next section of group insurance is the group insurance for retirees and there's two components here. The first is the pays you go funding to pay for current year claims and the second is pre-funding for OPED. And on page 16, table 12 shows the request for retiree page ego funding, which totals $105.2 million in FY26, which is a 12.6% increase from the funding level in FY25. And you can see the biggest portion of this increase comes from MCPS's budget. Two things to note here for the page you go funding. On the county government side, the county government's request does align with the Council's approved OPEB funding policy from December 2023. That results in $13.5 million in utilization from the OPEB trust to help cover the current year retiree health care claims. For MCPS, the board's request continues the $27.2 million in funding that has occurred since FY 15 to help support from the OPEB Trust to help support the MCPS current year retiree costs, and also the same premium cost share shift that MCPS implemented for the active employees is being implemented on the retiree side as well. And so table 13 shows how the cost share will change for retirees. On page 17 we have information on OPEP pre-funding where the executive recommends $60.8 million in tax-supported pre-funding in FY26, a decrease of 1.8 million or 2.9% from the FY25 level. and this is based on the actuarial valuations for each agency. And Table 15 shows the status and the funded ratio for each agency's OPEB trust as of July 1, 2024. On page 18, we have information on the agency group insurance funds, and as the committee is aware, the council's fund balance policy for group insurance funds is a 5% fund balance. And the table 16 shows where each agency was at at the end of FY 24, as well as information that we have on projections for FY 25 and FY 26. The county government ended FY 24 with a $3.9 million fund balance, which is 1.2% of expenditures. MCPS was in a deficit for both their active employees and their retired employees of 6.4% and 2.1% respectively. Park and Planning had a 27.7% fund balance and Montgomery College had a 6.6% fund balance. On page 19, we include some additional information about MCPS and their group insurance fund balance and projections moving forward. Based on requests from the council and the E&C Committee's discussion in October 2024, MCPS has provided a multi-year plan for how they anticipate getting back to a positive fund balance in their group insurance fund, which shows the data a little bit differently. This is a retirees and active combined into one fund balance number and one fund balance percent. But they show a projected combined deficit of 10.7 percent at the end of FY 25. That would be 10.1 percent, still in the deficit in FY 26. The deficit would be reduced to 3.4 percent in FY27, and by FY28 they would return to a positive fund balance of 2.7%. So as we mentioned before, we wanted to discuss a little bit more employee benefit cost trends. For both the two largest agencies for the County Government and MCPS, benefit costs comprise about 26% of total compensation costs, but particularly for the accounting government as we mentioned, there is an outsized effect in this year. We'll note that the executive's FY26 budget includes tax-supported retirement expenditures that are level nearly 69% higher than they were just three years ago. And again, this is primarily a product of unfunded liability associated with pension enhancements and higher anticipated salary increases. On the group insurance side, as Mr. Howard mentioned, the cost is primarily due to health care claims expenditures higher than anticipated. In summary on page 20, you'll see the table and chart that shows the cost trends group insurance at about 10 percent growth rate per year for the last three years and retirement growing at about 19 percent. On page 21 you'll see a similar presentation for MCPS and I'll note that this data is before the pension shift but again about a 27 percent increase in group insurance cost over the past three years retirement at 23.6% increase. On page 22, we discuss the compensation cost sustainability. Back in 2021, the Council adopted a resolution on the sustainability of county government compensation costs. And in part, that policy reads as a means to preserve long-term budget sustainability, the annual growth rate of compensation costs should be similar to the annual growth rate of tax-supported revenues. When you go to page 23, you'll see in the chart that for FY 26, the executive's budget includes 7.1% growth rate in tax-supported compensation costs, which is a rate double the projected annual 6-year revenue growth rate, which is at 3.5 percent over the next six years as included in the executive's budget. And the whole intent of this sustainability of policies to create an alignment between recurring costs of compensation and available resources without requiring offsetting service level reductions or revenue increases. But what we show on page 24 is really the lack of alignment that we have right now. The table there compares compensation growth rates, first projected rate of growth as recommended by the executive FY26 versus a growth rate projected under as consistent with rate of of growth of revenues. And you'll see that in the first year there's a gap of about $377 million growing to about $370 million by FY31 and a total six year gap of about $1.2 billion. the summary message to take from this is that really the spending pattern will produce some sustainability challenges. And again, if these words are recur, it could constrain the county's ability to meet future spending priorities, including future pay adjustments or necessitate raising new revenues. Section G on page 25, there are four NDAs or non-departmental accounts. The data here is pretty straightforward and we'll jump onto the next section on page 26. This is the administrative costs for the ERS, the employees' retirement system, the retirement savings plan, the deferred compensation plan, and the consolidated retiree health benefits trust. The data here is on the next four pages, but in summary for each of these, they have reduced costs in FY26 compared to FY25, ranging from a reduction of 17% to nearly 40%. With that, I'll turn it back to Mr. Howard. Okay. We are now on page 29, which is the other compensation issue section, and there's two items here. The first is the proposed executive and legislative branch non-marital salary schedules. And the executive did propose the NFI26 update for the executive non-marital appointees as required under the county code. And the council also must review and approve a schedule for legislative branch non-marital employees. One note to remember here is that decisions on these pay schedules do not actually affect any employees pay enhancements. This is just the setting the minimum and a maximum for the different pay bans. Individual decisions on non-marr employees are up to the county executive for executive branch employees or to council members or council leadership for appointed positions in the council office. For the executive branch schedule, which is attached on circles 47 and 48, the executive proposes increasing the scale for each category by 10%. So again, increasing the minimum of max for the different categories by 10%. There were no changes to this scale in FY25. For the legislative branch schedule, which applies to Chiefs of Staff and Council Member offices, the directors of OLO and the Office of the County Council and the hearing examiners, staff as recommends an FY26 schedule, which is attached on Circle 49, that aligns as detailed below with that LB1 minimax aligns with the executives recommended Minimax for the EX1 scale. The LB2 Minimax aligns with the executives recommendation for the MLS1 scale and the LB3 aligns with the executives recommended Max for the EX3. And this is the same alignment that was created when the council approved the schedule originally. Then we have some information on agency analysis of personnel management on pages 29 and a table on page 30, which reports summarizes some common characteristics across the different agencies based on data such as average annual salary, gender of the workforce and race, ethnicity of the workforce as well as turnover rate. One thing we'll note is that County Government MCPS and WSSC are currently working on updated versions of their PMRs and likely will be available in late April or early May. And then the last section we wanted to go over before turning it back to the committee for questions and discussions is Section J. This is potential reductions for committee consideration and alignment with the Council President's budget approach memo staff did look at, prepare some some scenarios or options to show if the Council was interested in making some changes to compensation costs, what it would look like and the dollars that would potentially be involved. Noting that if the Council does, does ultimately want to look at making changes to compensation cost, the procedure for implementing any of these changes would depend on which agency employee group and compensation element is impacted. So the first page 31 is option number one, which is provide funding for a reduced FY 26 general wage adjustment across the county. And Table 26 shows two different scenarios that could occur from funding a lower GWA. And this is done for the purposes of this example just with county government MCPS because those are the two largest agencies. And the first scenario shows what would be the outcome if there is a 1% GWA reduction for all employee groups. And this would be a reduction of $32.9 million from the executive's recommended budget. The second scenario is shows what would happen if all employees were provided a 2.0% GWA. And this would maintain all the other elements of the compensation agreements as well. And in this scenario there would be a reduction of $41.5 million from the executive's recommended budget. Option number two, which is on 31 and pages 31 and 32 would be eliminate funding for service and longevity increments in FY 26. And table 27 provides, exemplifies the savings that would occur in this scenario. And again, it is only focused on county government and MCPS and this also includes eliminating pay for performance for MLS and PLS staff. Implementing this scenario would leave to potential savings of 55.5 million in FY26. And the third option we prepared was just showing what the change in group insurance cost share split for county government. If the county wanted to implement the same change is being implemented by MCPS, the dollars here are much smaller, but by FY28, when this would be fully analyzed, a 2% cost share shift for county government employees would save about $4.1 million. And with that, we will stop talking for a few minutes and turn it back over to the committee for questions and discussion. Thank you very much, and I wanna say thank you to Miss Harling and Mr. Donaldson from our office of labor relations for joining us today as well for our session. Before we get to our committee decision points, I wanted to see if council members had any clarifying questions on the presentation and the packet and the information that's been provided. Council Freetson Thanks so just specific questions not general comments now. Yes, we'll do general comments Okay, I'll make general comments after but I do have a specific question the personal prop the Sorry the personal patrol vehicle This expansion I just remember two years ago we expanded it to 10 miles outside the county's borders. We discussed it in a similar way. Same response that this was a way to address recruitment and retention issues. It's a benefit that we're providing. Obviously my hope is that we have police officers that live in Montgomery County that don't need to take their cars home that are 10 or 20 miles outside of Montgomery County because we want our first responders to live in Montgomery County. So that's first and foremost, but I'm just curious, the $590 to $3,000, what accounts for that? Is that increased gas and wear and tear, you know, estimated wear and tear on the patrol vehicles because they're getting modestly more mileage? Hi, Shantay Jackson, Office of Management and Budget. That cost is made up of the fuel and maintenance cost for the additional mileage. And do we have data to show the 10 mile numbers? You have the... of the fuel and maintenance costs for the additional mileage. And do we have data to show the 10 mile numbers, how the gas usage and the maintenance costs for DGS from an inner departmental standpoint happened? And is it, you know, was it about $600,000? Is that why we're, because we're doubling it from 10 to 20, we're expecting it to cost about $600,000, or where is that number coming from? There is a per mileage cost that includes a portion for the fuel and a portion for the maintenance. So this is also based on the number of police officers that live within the range. But if you want to see the details, yes, we can provide you with that. Yeah, I'm just, I mean, this is a relatively easy one in the sense that we already did something similar two years ago where we expanded it 10 miles. So we should not just have estimates, we should have, should have real details that show us what going from can't go outside the county's borders to can go 10 miles outside the county borders. If now we're going from 10 miles outside the county borders to 20 miles outside the county's borders, what that cost would be. I just think it would be helpful and it doesn't appear that we I mean it feels like very easy data to provide and that data has not been provided at least as far as I can tell. Okay. We it hadn't been requested by council staff but we can provide you the specific data on that. Okay. Well it's now being requested by council members. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for that. I will save my broader comments until after your suggestion. Councilmember Caz. And I will save mine for afterwards as well. But I did want to make a note for the, as an example, for the vehicles that are taken outside of the county. And I know people question it is. It is a benefit for the person who's driving that vehicle. But it's a benefit for the Montgomery County as well. When they come here, they don't have to change cars. And that's what happened in many cases. If they lived further out than the tin moths, they parked someplace else and came and changed cars. When we have an excitement and hopefully we don't get excitement but the reality is we do. When we have an excitement you want someone to get there as quickly and as efficiently as they possibly can. And therefore I'm certainly in favor of this change as well. They can come right away and come directly in the vehicle that they came from home and thanks. Thank you. I just had a question. I don't know. Ms. Justice, for you, for OMB regarding on page 25, just the county executive's assumption and the long term sustainability of some of the assumptions on the, oh, Cory, you're going to come up. Okay. If you could just address that because I think that is important, not only as we're looking at the compensation for this year, but long term and what are the assumptions from the county's ex office? Broadly speaking, Corey Lasky on the considerations are the global considerations that's this put together the context of the budget and The compensation is a significant component in recruitment and retention for a lot of thanks and the competition Democratic County faces in the market right now is pretty significant and weighing that against a single number on a sustainability number versus what it takes to run the government. I think that's where the weighing comes in. All right, because I just I'm curious one of the points that was raised is you know looking at not just the staff we have now but the growth as well and we are taking that consideration as we're looking at our long term. Absolutely there There's no shortage of new things that need done, new services that need to be provided, new concerns that need to be addressed, and both the Executive and Council have been apt at addressing those concerns, and on a lot of times those concerns take staff. Okay. Thank you. All right. Why don't we go to the committee decision points and then we can make statements? Is that? All right. Let's go. Okay. So on page 32 in section K, we have the committee decision points. So first, the first decision point is on FY26 pay adjustments. And so the first decision point is kind of a hold on, because you'll make this in the next items. The decisions on the collective bargaining agreements, the pay adjustments related to the McGio IAFF and FOP contracts will be made as part of the item that Miss Wellens will bring up next. So the second piece is the compensation adjustments outside of the collective bargaining agreements. So these are the compensation adjustments for the nonrepresented employees. And the table that we have on page 32 shows how those compensate pay adjustments for nonrepresented employees align with different compensation adjustments provided to represented employees. So Council staff recommends that the committee's decisions for the non-represented employees align with the decisions that you make on the collective bargaining agreements as I identified in the table on page 32. Okay, keep going. The second, the next item is the non-marry salary schedules, which is the salary schedules for the executive and legislative branch non-maric and pointees, and staff recommends supporting the executive's proposed executive branch salary schedule, and then the staff developed legislative branch that salary schedule, which aligns with that. Section B is the allocations for group insurance, where staff recommends supporting the funding for the active employees group insurance costs, the retiree pays you go group insurance costs and the op-ed pre-funding costs. Section C is the allocations for retirement, where again council staff recommends supporting the recommended contributions for the employees retirement system, retirement savings plan and Retirement Income Plan, and also recommends approving the FY26 administrative and operating budgets of the ERS RSP grip, deferred compensation plan, and consolidated retiree health benefits trust, while continuing to monitor the agency's pension plan funded ratios. For the compensation-related NDAs, Council staff recommends approval of all the NDAs as submitted by the executive pending any changes that you make to the compensation. And we also recommend maintaining language in the budget resolution that first added an FY22 specifying that council approval is required for the provision of emergency or hazard pay for more than 10 consecutive days. Thank you, Mr. Howard. Those are all the decision points before us, before I ask the committee to vote on those. If anyone would like to make some statements, Council Member Freetzen. Well, appreciate it. Appreciate the very detailed staff analysis here. I think the spoiler alert is I'm supporting the contracts. The broader issue that's been raised is that, number one, we need to do right by our public employees and our first responders. We have to address what are serious recruitment retention issues in public safety, but in general in many classes of positions across county government. And we need to ensure quality of services, public services, health and human services, government services, and public safety and emergency services. Having said all of that, we also need to address the rate of growth of county government. It's hard to do everything always and the challenge that we have is that we've been hearing about this restructuring and reorganization of county government that the county executive was uniquely positioned to work with our labor partners to be able to work through and navigate those issues. And that hasn't happened. And it does put the council in a really difficult position of trying to balance on the one hand doing right by our public employees, our first responders and our public servants who are working harder than ever and the needs in the community are greater than ever. But at the same time, addressing what is the demands both from a sustainability standpoint and a fiscal reality standpoint and the expectations of the public and the community and the taxpayers we serve to make sure that we are thinking through how to address and structure and organize county government so that we are providing the level of services with the personnel in the right places for the level of services that they need. On the one hand, we're doing right by our employees and I think that's important and that's what I'm prepared to support. But on the other hand, the second piece of that, the other side of the point, we haven't done. We haven't seen. We've been promised it, and it hasn't come. And so I just want to, you know, both acknowledge that we have to do right by our public employees, that we want to ensure quality services for our residents, that we want to address the needs that we have in our community, that we need to be serious about the recruitment and retention challenges that we face that are real. But we also need to address these ongoing issues and we have not seen it up to this point. and there is frustration that the last council had, their frustration that I feel on this council that we just haven't seen that to the level that I would hope and expect. And that's out of respect for our workforce and out of respect for the public that all of us are here to serve. And that's where I think this has come up short in that sense. Having said that, I'm very happy to be able to do right by our public employees and to support this proposal moving forward, but it is going to be an increasing challenge as we face all of the fiscal realities that we're heading towards to do right by our public employees and expand the size of the workforce indiscriminately without any level of discretion, without any serious look at the positions that we have always had that we are simply adding to as opposed to rethinking, repurposing, reimagining and reorganizing. So with that, I'll yield back and I appreciate the time. Council Member Katz. Thank you very much. Well said. I first of thank you all for once again providing a comprehensive and informative packet. And when someone sees just the size of this packet, your eyes can glaze over. And I can imagine how your eyes were looking when you wrote it. Believe me and if Councilmember Facing gets to do a spoil alert said why I obviously am supportive of this. If we want to continue the reality is if we want to continue to have the best of the best employees we we need to meet our company, indeed, our competition. We have done it in various forms at various times. And we need to make certain that we really do it up front rather than always play catch-up. You know, said earlier about the whole idea that people believe that what government does is done by magic. And the people doing the magic or the people who are in this room and beyond who actually answer the phones at 9-1-1 or 3-1-1 or wherever someone is calling, They actually, a person who is calling 911 is calling because they or their loved one is in trouble or has an issue and they expect someone to come and save their life. And we need to make certain that we have the best training, the best equipment, the best compensation, the best of everything to make certain that the person that comes and saves that life is the person is something that we all are proud of. I did want to mention in the record that there would certainly been no secret in my life, but my wife receives retirement benefits from MCPS. She worked there for 40 years. My daughter actually works from MCPS as an administrative secretary today. We talk about, and one of the things that's mentioned is about a savings in various forms and for potential savings. And quite candidly, I don't know that though we do have to make certain that what we're doing is sustainable. But at this juncture, when there is so much that is not, that no one has experience for, we need to make sure that what we're doing not only for the future, but for the moment is being taken care of. And I believe that the way that this compensation has been set up, I think that is what we're doing. And I know I've never been involved in direct negotiations with the various unions, etc. But I know it has to be a give and take. I know that there's a times that people don't always smile at each other. I can guess that. But I also know that at the end of the day, both and I say that sides, but it's not fair. We're all on the same side. It's just what you can afford and what you can't afford. I believe at the end of the day people are trying to do their level best to make certain that the people of Montgomery County are treated fairly with great respect and that their lives certainly proven an hourly basis that they matter. So with that I'm happy to vote for this. Great. Thank you. I'll just go last and I'll say that I appreciate everyone coming today and sitting here with us, our representatives from our unions. And we have Mr. Ren on Zoom as well as you sat through the packet as I will also be supporting the compensation packages moving forward and just wanted to take a few moments to really thank everybody who is in this room. As we are seeing at the federal level, many of our colleagues, residents are under attack for simply being employees of the government and carrying out the work that is so essential to our community. And we know that each of you who are here are people who work to make our community the place that everyone wants to live. You're our bus drivers, getting people to work and to doctors appointments and to school and their grocery shopping. You're the social workers who help care for people to make sure nobody is slipping through the cracks in our community. And you're the police officers and firefighters and our public safety workers who rush into danger when no one else will. And you're here to build our community and your work is essential. And we also know that people's lives are hard enough with all natural misfortunes. And on our best days, people don't even know the government's doing this work, right? And you're out there doing that. And they don't even have to question it because you're so good at it. And that's why they live here. And on the worst days, they know who's showing up for them because they're calling on you. And with everything going on at the national level and across our country, we know here in Montgomery County we're going to stay true to our values, stay true, to making sure that our employees are not only supported, but that you were treated with dignity and respect. And we know this is going to be a tough year as we move forward. And as we have to make decisions into the future, we want to be doing that collaboratively and working with you all. Because you are the ones who make this county move, you are the ones who make this the great place everyone wants to live. And so I'm glad to support it today. I will say that regarding the response I asked around just looking at compensation into the future, the executive's position, I think we need to work on that quite honestly, because his numbers on compensation growth rates excludes new positions. and I just don't think there has been a collaborative process in really thinking about how we're adding on to new positions, how we are actually supporting the workers we have now to address the needs. And that is something we are going to have to work on in the future as we're looking at making sure our government is sustainable because that's our job. You all are doing your job and our job is to make sure we have a sustainable government that can support its workers. And if we can't do that then we failed our job. And so I thank you all for doing your job and today we're going to do our job and I think as a committee you can hear there are no objections to moving forward with these compensation packages and the staff recommendations and recommending this to full council so thank you everyone for that and we're going to turn it down to Miss wellens to do the collective bargaining agreements. Thank you Madam Chair and Council members. Your item number three on your agenda is of course the resolutions to indicate the intent to approve reject provisions of county government employee collective bargaining agreements. As you know this is an annual practice that under chapter 33 of the county code, the council reviews any term or condition of a collective bargaining agreement requiring an appropriation of funds, present or future fiscal impact, or the enactment repeal or modification of a county law or regulation for the upcoming fiscal year, in this case, FY26. And the council in terms of timeline, the council makes these resolutions to indicate its intent on or before May 1st, unless the council decides to extend that deadline, which is up to the council's discretion. So for this upcoming year, there are no, there haven't been any proposed changes to county laws. So there are no unlike in some prior year, so no pieces of legislation before you associated with these agreements. The FOP, the fraternal order of police agreement was renegotiated for the upcoming fiscal year. So this is going to be year one of the FOP agreement for the IAFF agreement that were in year two, which will be the final year of this current agreement. And then it's year three of the McGee-O agreement, which is also the final year of the current McGee O agreement. So next year you'll be seeing a couple of newly renegotiated agreements. I need to apologize. I, there are a couple of numbers that I, that Mr. Trump gets stated correctly that I put incorrectly in the packet. I will submit a corrected packet to make sure there's no confusion. I apologize for that. Mr. Trump got already outlined. It was very thorough. I believe all of the provisions, which are summarized for you on pages two through three of this packet and in addition, there is a chart for you to summarize the proposed terms that have the fiscal impact for FY26 for the committee's review. and then with respect to each bargaining unit, the packet contains the proposed resolution for each agreement, the memo that was provided from the county executive regarding each agreement that followed by fiscal impact summary, followed by the proposed salary schedules followed by the amendments to each agreement. that followed by fiscal impact summary, followed by the proposed salary schedules, followed by the amendments to each agreement that are pertinent for the upcoming fiscal year. And then you can also see there are links for the full agreements, which in order to read the full collective bargaining agreements, you can go to the office of Labor Relations website. They're all available there in full. And lastly, just to note, I believe the only thing that Mr. Trump maybe didn't mention was in terms of the FOP agreement, which of course, since that's newly renegotiated, there's some more changes there than there than you'll see for the other unions for this year. There are some changes to the issue to equipment, which is appendix I of the collective bargaining agreement. And that's available. If you want to see the specific changes to the equipment, append penicseye starts at circle 108 of the staff packet. I believe that's everything. Again, I will submit the corrected packet to make sure that all of the numbers are squared away. And thank you, Dimas Harling, for reviewing the resolutions, making sure everything is 100% accurate. Thank you. Great, all right. So we have before us the collective bargaining agreements, we'd someone like to move a motion to adopt them a council member, Katz. Council member, Freightson second, all those in favor of recommending to the full council adoption of the collective bargaining agreements, please raise your hand. And that is unanimous for the government operations and fiscal policy committee. Thank you all that is all our business today. Again, thank you to everybody who was here and all of your work every day. So we are adjourned now. you