Good morning everyone. Welcome to the county council's meeting this morning. Today the council will continue its review of the FY 26 operating budget and amendments to the FY 25 to 30 capital improvement program. The last couple of weeks committees have been hard at work looking at department and agency budgets And I want to thank all my colleagues and also our staff for all their work the last few weeks For today and the rest of this week, as we will be sitting as full council and reviewing the committee recommendations, and before we begin that work today, I'm going to ask the clerk if she'll share today's announcements. Good morning. Thank you. There are a few updates regarding today's agenda. Item 3.1, income tax rate, and item 3.2, working families' income supplement non-departmental account have been added to today's agenda. Item 8, Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, and item 9, Fire and Rescue Services budgets have been rescheduled to Wednesday, May 7th, and also we've added item 15.5. The lease is non-departmental account and subsequently has been rescheduled for Friday, May 9th. Thank you, Madam President. Thank you so much. Thank you for all that work. We're going to start off this morning with a a status report and an overview of revenues and expenditures to kind of give us a sense of where we are after all the committee's work on the last couple of weeks and I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Howard and Mr. Smith to walk us through that. Thank you and good morning as the council president noted the committees have completed work on the first phase of the FY26 operating budget review and as we do each year after after the committees have finished we provide a status report to the Council of kind of where we stand. And as a reminder all the committee changes that we're going to talk about are tracked against the executives March 14th budget recommendation. So the committees have placed a total of $6.0 million in reductions in $45.8 million in additions on the reconciliation list. The committees have also recommended resource changes that would result in a net decrease of $41.5 million available to fund the FY26 operating budget. The resource changes are primarily due to a recommendation to reject the exactors proposed $3.5 cent property tax increase and to reject the exactors proposed changes to the income tax offset credit amount, which you will be talking about in more detail later today. No recommendation has been made on the exactors proposed change to the county income tax rate, and so as a result, that is not included in the summary here today. The council will also discuss the income tax proposal later today as well. So just to provide a little bit of information on kind of the minimum at maximum based on the councils, the committees work to date. If the council were to accept all the resource changes and only the reductions recommended to date, it will need to find an additional $35.5 million in reductions or additional resources to approve a balanced budget. If the council accepts all the resource changes, reductions, and additions recommended to date, it will need to find an additional $81.3 million in reductions or additional resources to approve a balanced budget. And details on the FY26 budget changes recommended by the committees is attached on pages one through three. Over the next week, the council will review all these committee recommendations. And as a reminder, the straw vote on the council's adjustments the FI 26 budget will take place on May 15th and final action is scheduled for May 22nd. One small correction I want to make in the attached summary of committee reductions and additions. You'll hear about this more later today during the Park and Planning budget, but there is an item a 2.098 million dollar item that is restore funding to the base budget needs for parks. It has some additional language saying that this is a buy county item that can't be adjusted after 5.8. That language on the buy county item is supposed to be with the 65,358 dollar item for central administrative services. So Miss Dunne will make that much more clear when you go through the parking planning budget today, but just wanted to point that out that it's only the central administrative services item that cannot be adjusted after the buy counting meeting. And without turn it back to the council president for any questions. Thank you very much. I want to see if anyone on the council has any questions regarding that overview of expenditures and resources at this time. Not seeing any questions on that. We will be I'm sure of becoming back to this list throughout the week and again thank you to the central staff and everyone for compiling that. So now we'll go to our work sessions on the operating budget and amendments to the CIP program. Before we begin this, I want to remind my colleagues that as we're working through this week and next week, we are using as Mr. Howard said, the budget as a base of March 14th that the county executive sent over as and we are looking at in addition to that budget that transmitted number of amendments that he sent on April 24th. You have a memo that we sent out to everyone last week regarding process. Just so everyone knows as we're going through the different budgets today, if there is a committee recommendation on a reduction and the council is ready to take a straw vote on that, we will do that. If there is a department or agency that has nothing left on the reconciliation list, we will take a straw vote on that department or agency's budget. Regarding additions, we will not be taking up, we will review additions, but we will not be taking straw votes on additions. If there is anything the full council would like to add or an individual would like to add to the reconciliation list, either reductions or additions at this juncture, this week, that will require a motion, a second, and a majority of the council's six members voting for that to be added as a reduction or an addition to it, because that's outside of what we got from committee recommendations. So that's how we'll be proceeding this week as we go through the budget. The first thing we'll be taking up is work that the government operations and fiscal policy committee did on the property tax rate as well as the property tax credit for income offset the eye talk, the government operations and fiscal policy committee, again, met last week and looked at the county executive's recommendation to remove his recommendation from March 14 for a property tax increase, government operations and fiscal policy committee, unanimously agreed with that and is recommending to the full council to set the property tax rate at the same rate that was approved for FY 29, which is a 1.0255 per $100 of accessible base. In addition to that, the committee did take up the County Executive's proposal to adjust the eye-talk and given that we are the committee decided that given that we are not Increasing the property tax rate this year that we would also recommend to full council unanimously that we keep the eye talk at a value of $692 per eligible property and so those are two recommendations coming out of government operations And mr. Smith I'll turn it over to you if you have anything else to add. No, I do not. Thank you for the summary. Okay. All right. Any questions on that? All right. Not seeing any. Please raise your hand if you support the committee recommendations on the property tax rate and the I talk value. And that is unanimous. All right. Next we're going to take up and have a report on the income tax rate. This is not something that the government operations of the fiscal policy committee took a vote on since we just received the request and the resolution from the county executive which we introduced last last Tuesday and we have a public hearing on that on May 13th. The Government Operations Physical Policy Committee had actually a very good discussion. I want to thank the Office of Finance also for participating in that and coming back this morning so that the full council can review this and I'm just going to turn it over to Mr. Smith to walk through the packet. Thank you, Councillor Bresnan and good morning, Councillor. Unlike the last item, we'll take a little bit of time to front load this in terms of background and understanding of what the income tax rate proposal is before the council. for the council. So on April 24th, the executive recommended instead of the property tax increase, increasing the income tax rate from 3.2% to 3.3%. In terms of background, there is a legal requirement by the state that all counties levy in income tax, a local income tax rate in addition to the state income tax rate. The minimum is 2.25%. The maximum has approved by the general assembly. This year is now 3.3%. The maximum had used to be 3.2%. The county council, or this county council set the rate to 3.2% back in 2003 for the fiscal 0 for budget and has remained a 3.2% since then. Unlike the state and the federal income tax, the county's income tax rate is a flat tax. Everyone gets tax 3.2% on all of the income they earn and report that year on their state income taxes. The general assembly has allowed counties more recently to create tax brackets, to create progressivity. But currently the county's income tax rate is a flat tax. It is not a progressive tax. In terms of approving the rate, the county council can approve a rating any time at once by resolution. A simple majority is all that's needed to approve that resolution. There is nothing in the county charter, the state law or county law that requires a different voting threshold. The only thing that matters in terms of approving the resolution besides the rate percent is the effective year. Typically, the effective year could be the next tax year, could be be any tax year, but the effective year needs to be stated in the resolution. As the General Assembly allowed for this year, and only this year, the county councils are the legislative bodies in Maryland can approve a retroactive tax rate. Effective beginning January 1st, 2025, that is what the executive proposal is for this 3.3%. It is retroactive. Most years, the county council could only do a prospective tax increase. The other requirement from the state on the retroactive tax increase, should the council consider doing it, is it must be reported to the comptroller by May 15th, and it will not allow brackets. It has to be a flat tax, as it always has been. Even though all counties are required to levier local tax, the state does all of the tax work for us. The comptroller collects all taxes for local counties, as well as the state taxes. So a resident, a tax payer in the county, or in Montgomery County or Aining County in Maryland, would file one file with one tax return with the state of Maryland, and the state of Maryland would do all the work to not only double check their tax liability but also they will make distributions to counties. And as you can see on table one on page two, the county receives multiple distributions throughout the year for multiple reasons from the state in order to collect our income taxes. The biggest items from there is to see that it's three tax years that we collect over a span of one fiscal year. Most of the tax income taxes that the county receives is from the prior tax year. So as we're collecting taxes for fiscal 25, that is for tax year 2024 and the same would be true moving forward. This is very different than the property taxes. We just saw property taxes come in kind of two large slugs in September and December and by January when the executive is putting the March budget together almost 98% of the property taxes have been collected and it's just a small portion that remains unaccounted for that they're estimating in terms of finance. For finance on income taxes, they do an excellent job estimating given the multiple distributions, the multiple tax years and the different types of distributions we get. But critically, there is a lag in our collection. I've already noted that in terms of last tax year, and what we're getting right now, it also means there's a lag in our understanding of the economic conditions when we're collecting taxes. So, as income taxes come in from the state finances, looking at those distributions and how they kind of filter into the model in terms of economic conditions. But again, tax year 2024, the one we just all filed for is a very different tax year than what tax year 2025 will likely look like. I've already noted some of the changes to the state law that has been allowed for the current proposal. But the state also changed its tax law for its own taxes this year during the general assembly. However, most of the retroactivity for the state's law affects filers who are filing greater than adjusted gross income of 200,000 filers. I have capital gains. Those are most of the filers that are going to see changes in their returns for tax year 2025. Most filers in the state of Maryland may not see any change because the rates were not changed for those over 250,000 and many filers may not have capital gains that they're reporting. As noted by Mr. Howard during the overview and also during the Go Committees review, the county will realize about $14.3 million in additional income taxes, fiscal 26, irrespective of whatever it decides for the current tax proposal. This is due to how the state has changed. Oh, sorry, lost it. Itemization, thank you, apologies. Brain is full of a lot of things. I know I was doing so well, got that out. They have changed how optimization will work for those over 200,000 AGI. And that is why the county will see additional income taxes from the state's law changes. So in terms of looking at how the county executive's proposal from 3.2% to 3.3% will impact both the county residents as well as the state fiscal situation. Council staff went and looked at the income tax statistics through the IRS. It's not a perfect analog, but it's the best analog we have and it provides data on AGI Joseph Gruss income for filers and the last one we have is from tax year 2024. And so the caveat I gave the government operations of fiscal policy committee that I'll also give for the full council is, is these are filers. It's the returns that are given that we can put data on. It's hard to know, it's most likely households, but it depends on how each household wants to file their income taxes if they're filing jointly, if they're filing separately, or if they're filing multiple returns. We cannot look at that data, finance cannot look at that data from the state or the federal and so we look at the number of returns that are coming in. So generally what I want to highlight from the table that was in the staff packet for the Go committee, most of the county's income tax revenues are generated by returns that are greater than 100,000 AGI. But most of the returns are for those that are under 100,000 AGI. And that just makes sense based on how income taxes work. Most of the returns over 100,000 AGI also report the greatest itemizations, as well as the greatest amount of capital gains. In fact, filers, even though the IRS data stops at 200,000 in terms of 200,000 and greater, likely those that are over a million or counting for most of the capital gains among Montgomery County and that's pretty hard to parse in the IRS data. For those returns less 50,000 and less for AGI, they take advantage of the earned income tax credit that comes from the federal government. Also that makes sense because of how the restrictions for that particular earned income tax credit works in the AGI requirements in order to get close to 50,000 AGI you need to have more children in order to get the higher benefit. The most important thing is that the the the fund is not received by all those that file 150,000 AGI. It's about 17% received a refund in tax year 2024 based on the IRS data. As will be noted by Ms. Gosaliyah during the working family income supplement, the state and the county's refund works a little differently than the federal refund, although it uses as the basis. And so as noted in the staff packet based on historical averages, we would estimate about 20% of the filers in Montgomery County that make less than 50,000 H.I. report less than,000 AGI would receive the benefit of the working family income supplement. Moving on from specifically filer, or just highlighting a few more items with filers. So in terms of the state law changes in the county executives proposal to increase the 3.3%. Staff broke it down based on AGI again as a loose measurement. So for filers with less than 50,000 AGI there is no impact likely to them from the state law changes unless they have some minor capital gains. Obviously the impact from the county executive's proposal to go to 3.3% will be based on how much they report on their income taxes because I said earlier the county's income tax rate is a flat tax rate. And so under the proposal, for every $1,000 reported, a new additional tax dollar will be needed in order to meet that proposal. Certainly, most of those making less than 50,000 would potentially benefit from the working family income supplement, but again, it's not 100%. It's probably around 20% would benefit from the executive's proposal to increase the working family income supplement or just benefit from that program generally. For the middle tier of 50,000 and 200,000 AGI, again, most of those residents would see a modest increase to their income tax rate based on the county's proposal. They are likely not to see much of an income tax rate increase their liability from the state proposal. Their base rates were not changed. If they are close to the 200,000 AGI, they might see some potential changes in their itemization if they were have greater than 200,000 AGI when they start their, when they finish their income, but then they have itemization. But most of these would not see much of a change other than a modest increase from the county executives' reposal. And then finally the age aggregator then 200,000 these will have the greatest impact both because the state's law has changed and as well as from the county. And then based on both the impact for capital gains and itemization. Moving on to county, our impact to county's fiscal situation. And I've provided an updated table On the cover sheet to provide both fiscal years Let me moment just to get it back up quoting the right numbers so count finance estimates that if the council approves a retroactive tax increase for tax year 2025 At this at 3.3% an estimated75 million more dollars would be generated in revenue. Obviously, if the effective date is later than 2025, if using 2026, is the effective date as asked by the council president. During the Go committee, it's only $25 million, so a $50 million delta. If we look at fiscal 27, effective date is retroactive, 20 texture 2025, it's estimated that 27 revenues would be $65 million. The primary reason for the delta there is that finances estimating that there will be some makeup payments because the retroactive nature of the accounting executives proposal. We've already collected distributions, as I noted earlier from the state controller for quarter one and quarter two, or close to quarter two of 2025 coming soon and certainly We've already collected distributions, as I noted earlier, from the state controller for a quarter one and quarter two, or close to quarter two of 2025 coming soon. And certainly if the council would approve a retroactive tax increase, it would take some time for those makeup payments to filter into the system for us to get distributions. And so finance is estimating about $10 million more than what we would get normally because of those makeup payments. And then for Tax Year 2026, it's estimated that fiscal 27 would be $57 million. And again, going back to the fact that the tax increases in income taxes, distributions are three fiscal years. It's going to take multiple fiscal years to us get to the kind of maximum amount that finance estimates. As Council staff noted, that even with those estimates income tax is one of our most volatile taxes primarily because of the county residents account for a lot of capital gains in the state of Maryland. That's one of the reasons why county residents are going to find a lot of the about 45% of the additional income tax that the state's realizing and because capital gains are behavioral not statistical like it takes time for residents residents and individuals aside if they're going to realize capital gains through sales of businesses, through investments and other things. And some years they take them, some years they don't, some years they shift them to other tax years. And that volatility is a lot of the, I mean that that behavioral change is a lot of the reason why the county's income taxes are volatile. And as you can see on chart one on page seven, the delta or the difference between what the council has approved each fiscal year from 05 to 25, and how much we've actually realized. And so finance again does an excellent job of estimating, but there's always a delta between where they're at. And recently those, the delta's been to the county's favor, but there's definitely some years where the delta is not to the county's favor. And that certainly may be one of the situations as I did during the government operations committee. I'm not gonna belabor the federal changes that we've all been experiencing, that many of our residents have been experiencing, not to be little or to minimize it, but the reality is, is we just don't know how the income taxes will look in the county, both as federal employees, their losing jobs, or shifting jobs as trade and other policies impact business decisions. And so all of that is not considered currently in the finance as estimate because we just don't have any data to realize it. And it will probably be later this fall when we get the December fiscal update or The council and the county will have better understanding of what tax year 2025 will look like and So with that I will I will wrap it up and then back over to the council president and happy to answer any questions You all have about this packet. Great. Thank you, Mr. Smith. Thank you for reviewing that and I'll also know there were a couple of questions that the committee had that are on the first page of the packet that folks can look at regarding whether or not there will be penalties for underpayments and the Berfa, the budget reconciliation and financing act did include a that waives interest in penalties incurred due to the changes in the state law and a couple of other things that people can look at in the packet. Ms. Feldman, before I turn it over to my colleagues, first I just really want to thank the Department of Finance. We know this is an incredibly difficult time for everyone, but also those who are tracking the many changes that you have. And I appreciate the conversation we had last week in government operations. And as you talked about how the Department of Finance looks at and makes estimates moving forward, the data you use. And I thought if you wouldn't mind just repeating that a little bit for everyone here on the council, just because I think it's helpful as Mr. Smith noted, we are living a very volatile time. And a lot of the changes that are happening from the federal level are hard to predict right now because we look backwards lots of times to make estimates for today and into the future. And so I think it's just helpful for us to know how you all are proceeding over the next couple of months next year as you're looking at changes in our economic outlook. That's a heavy lift to remember what I said last week. Nancy Feldman, Department of Finance. I think that the first thing to comment on is that we look at this every day with the information that we see. Unfortunately, we see mostly anecdotal information right now, a lot less specific data as it relates to Montgomery County. Part of that is county level data tends to be delayed. Report, if we were a state, obviously the state gets much more current information, whether it's related to unemployment or employment or personal income. So we're monitoring what we can and we are getting ready for our meetings for the revenue estimating group. We have a report due to the Council and the executive on May 15th. We have a technical committee meeting this week where we're going to take the opportunity to look at the forecasts that are coming out from some of our assumption providers, whether that be Moody's analytics or standard SNP global, I guess is their name now, and among others to try and see what we can glean from that to discuss with the revenue estimating group so that we can produce a report that helps us look forward as best we can. We'll continue to do that work on an ongoing basis. We have a follow-up report due September 15th. We're not going to sit here and wait until September 15th. We're going to start seeing some income tax distributions at the end of May and some in June and July, smaller ones in June and July, where we may get some direct information about income and income tax payments. The thing that is difficult for us to expect that we're going to get information before the fall is for those federal employees who took a go home and will pay you till September option that we're not, they can't file for unemployment that we're aware of, and therefore they're not unemployed. So their income is expected to continue, and so we're not going to see changes in withholding, which is sort of our most current piece of information until after that occurs. if somebody retired, they will have a change in their income potentially to a retirement or pension income. But they will also not be considered unemployed because they're now a longer part of the labor force. So there's a lot of moving parts. And I wish that we were smarter than the average bear, but we're not. And so we're going to do the best we can with the information that we have available to us. Thank you Ms. Elvin and I think you're all doing a great job and really appreciate all the work. Council vice president Jawanda. Thank you. You handled that tough question well. And really appreciate your work and the staff's work. And I was able to watch the geo session and appreciate the geo committee for their work. A couple just framing questions for whoever's best answer. Maybe start with you, Mr. Smith. You mentioned just to talk about the income tax amount so the retroact the retroactivity, 75, well, backing, backing up. Good news is we voted 11, there's no property tax increase. So I think that kind of just sailed through that. But that's a bit of news, so that's good. We're happy about that. 75 million if the income tax is made retroactive, which is the county executive proposal in 20 for 25 is the best estimate based on all these factors we talked about in 25 million if it's 2026 that okay or in between if it's somewhere in between. Correct so the staff report included the council can do 100% so they could do 3.25 3.26 the council president had asked and that's in the staff report included that the council can do 100% of a percent so they can do 3.25, 3.26. The council president had asked the om and that's in the staff report but the table on the cover page is just 3.3% at retroactive in tax rate 2025 or per crescent. Our perspective in tax rate 2026. Okay. The retroactivity, so my understanding is obviously the state increased taxes in cut taxes for some to a little bit of both. I want to talk about that in a second. Their increase was retroactive, correct. And my understanding is that they're they always any recent in recent memory. It's always retroactive starting January tax year or idle as far as I know. I can't speak to that. But this one was retroactive for the items they changed. Yes, I don't know about finance. No, okay. Mine is that's my understanding. I look back a few, you know, the last few times. But and so that the impact of that on you mentioned that it's filers over 200K that make up most of the revenue increase. So that would be true for the county income tax as well, correct? Yes, as shown in the chart, the filers over 200,000 will make up the largest portion. Unlike, however, filers under 200,000 for the most part were not touched by the count. The state's income tax changes and so they would pay a different, they will have a slightly higher tax liability of the county. Reases its income tax as opposed to what the state did. Well, yeah, because one of the things is just we're thinking about, glad there will be no prepayment penalty or fees, which is something I was just concerned about as well. But it's just the administrative ability of people trying to update their return. And so my understanding is that 94% of people in the state either got no increase or a slight reduction based on the actions at the state level. So if you've got a slight reduction or increase if you're in the wealthier brackets, you're going to have to update your taxes in that regard anyway, correct? Yes, the filers when they get to next year, 2026 and they file, unless they're in the highest echelons, they will just do their taxes like they normally did, and they will update the rates, the deductions, the center deduction, whatever they take. As noted, I cannot speak for the fileers. The behaviors of the fileers that are in greater than 200,000 H.I. because they're just making decisions in terms of whether they, how they wanna do quarter of the payment. I'm not saying that. Oh, sorry, my apologies. Thank you. most of them will likely not change anything until they get to tax year to 2026 and do their filing for 2025. And that would be true. So my policies, thank you. Yes, for the most part, most of them will likely not change anything until they get to tax year, to 2026 and do their filing for 2025. And that would be true for the state changes or indoor any potential county changes. I was only speaking to the state changes in terms of county changes. I'm not sure how employers would handle the county's change to withhold in tax year 2025 retroactively. Okay. to finance as many thoughts on that. Our expectation is that if a filer wanted to avoid having to make a referred to in the packet as a make up payment or catch up payment, they can file estimated taxes. During the second half of this calendar year, they can change their exemptions on their, I think it's their W4, or they can wait until they file in April of 2026. It is, it does go to behavior, and it also goes to financial ability to weather estimated tax payments and or higher withholdings. So it's a choice. So for example if you're the $100,000 earner teacher you have you could decide to pay $25 a quarter to meet your $100 change or just wait and pay the $100 additional liability all when you fire taxes in April of next year. That is correct. And I think the point was made a moment ago that the Burfa budget reconciliation, right? No penalty, we're not going to do it. No penalty for late payment for the changes that have occurred. If you had a late, if you were late on the rest of your problems, it would probably your income would probably still have kind of to see. But not related to this change. So you could just file normal like you would next year and you just have a whatever additional liability if you fell into that category. That is our understanding. Okay. And then for the $50,000 unless I know we're going to talk about this a little and I can maybe hold this but I do it's obviously related and you mentioned it for the WPA. What would that mean for those filers as far as how would it impact the liability that they would have? I'm assuming it would go. You said it would go down for about 20% and I'm not sure I understood that. Certainly. Thank you. Vice President Joano, so the the note is that based on IRS to cystic state, it's not 100% that's less than 50,000 that receive a refund through the working family income supplemented based on the recipients from finances data, which again, and Ms. Gosul Lee's packet is included. We'll get to that in a minute. It's about 20%. That's less than 50,000. So certainly based on the executive's proposal, their refund might increase some for that 20 percent, but I think the note there was that it's not a guarantee. It depends on whether you are eligible for that particular refund or not. Okay. Okay. So some would see it. Some wouldn't. And then, just I guess the last question I have for now is I'm thankful that or comment. I'm thankful that the county executive pulled back the property tax and suggested this. I think it's a much better way to go. Based on our first report, it was $81 million and I know Mr. Howard's up here now, but you did the report too. If you took everything that went through committee plus minus change, 75 million estimated if you do the 3.3 across the board, so I'm assuming that would leave a delta of 6 million ish if you did everything that the committees did. Okay, got it. Good. And obviously if we could, again, it could change depending on where we are. Well, I think this is a real viable option. Glad we're discussing it. My colleagues know that I do have a lot of interest that we have the authority now to actually make this a more progressive income tax. My understanding is that we could do that for tax year uh, 26 but just can't do it for tax year 25, is that correct? That's correct. If you want to increase the 3.3% for tax year 2025, which is retroactive, the state restricted brackets and said no. But if we wanted to, so that would apply to that text you, if we wanted to come back later in the summer fall, spring, and change it for the following year, we could bracket it at that point. Yes. Is that your understanding? You could. My understanding is the notification to the Comptroller's office is I don't think you can just do it in September. Right. I think it has to be done by July 1st. That's right. So that if you were to do it, this July 1st would be for January 126. Next July 1st, January 127. Right. So if we wanted it to have attacks here, 26, we'd have to pass it before July this year. I believe that's correct. Yeah, that's right. Okay, thank you. Thank you Madam President. Thank you. Council Member Albinas. Thank you. So, you know, there's obviously multiple conversations here. There's the discussion over the overall wisdom of increasing taxes, period, and light of the volatility and everything that we have before us. That's a policy decision for sure. But I guess if you look at the chart that is on page seven that goes over chronologically what happened and the history of us receiving a percentage change from approved to actual income tax revenue and those years that it went down significantly, particularly fiscal year 2010. Mr. Fence, could you talk a little bit about what would happen if our best case scenario, projections that we've laid forth don't come to fruition and we do have to make some significant changes. I believe that would result in the possibility of a mid-year savings plan or what other resources would this body have we have reserves that we could tap into but can you talk about what what that process would look like if the forecasted projections that come back later this year are much worse than we thought they were going to be, and we don't know what they are right now, what would this body have to do to make up for the adjustments? Certainly, thank you, Council Member Alvin. I'd be already touched on the primary mechanism. I mean, certainly finance staff and the county executive's office will have the initial understanding of what's coming because they're the ones that collect the data and they can see it coming. And certainly if the delta as it was in fiscal 10 is 15, 20% over what was approved by the council and for fiscal 26, my apologies. Yeah Yeah, I mean we would either need to be reserves or savings plan in order to maintain the balanced budget going into fiscal 27th operating budget conversation But that a savings plan would need to be recommended by the county executive and so they would have to parse through the data the delta in terms of revenues across the board not just income and make a decision, and certainly include the council in that process at the right time. But yes, the two you said is the primary ways to fill the hole. And I just know this in the first person that the county's policy, if a reduction has to be made, and as we know over 80% of the county's budget is in personnel, I don't know what the total figure of additional positions were projecting adding both in the executive branch as well as in MCPS, but it's in the thousands. And if a reduction did have to be made mid-year, that would likely mean people who were recently hired as per the county policy. the last folks hired are the first ones to have to go through a reduction in force process. Is that correct? That is correct for the county's policy. I'm not as versed on MCPS's policy, but I assume it's similar. Also the other thing that happened in your also familiar with this is furloughs and there's other ways to fill personnel holes. But if the decision is that the number of positions need to be reduced, it will be the last 10 first out. And while there's active volatility, even within the federal government, whether people take buyouts, when those buyouts go into effect, there are still a number of positions that are caught up in legal battles right now. And there are perspective, there was an article recently that the administration is targeting 40,000 additional federal government jobs that they're hoping to reduce by this summer. And of course, the majority of those impact our region and many of them here in Montgomery County. But we also don't know the volatility of the ripple effect that that has on government contractors and other businesses that are affiliated or associated with the federal government or that receive significant federal grants. That impacts our biomedical sector as well here locally. So the volatility overall within our income tax bracket is obviously keeping all of us here up at night not knowing exactly what the full implications will be and where we will end up. I guess the last question for now is when will we have, what are the time timeframe of the best case scenario updates that we're going to receive? What tax information we will receive from the federal or state government? Where are the clues that are going to happen or are we just not aware? So is it the fall that we expect to really have better baseline information or is it this winter,, or is it the summer, what's the timeframe where the picture is going to become more clear? We get distributions of withholding and reconciliation income tax payments. May is a big one for now, but that is related mostly to 2024. That's when everybody files their taxes and sort of catches up for what might have occurred in calendar year 2024. So going forward, we will be receiving distributions from withholdings that tells you how many people are working to some extent, right, because we have patterns in that. My best guess is probably after September unless something unusual occurs with respect to the federal government and the buyout program. I think one question was asked last week, which has been responded to in the updated packet, which is where do people file their unemployment returns and they file them where they work? A follow-up question to that was asked, is do we share information among states or local governments and to the best of our understanding, it's only shared for the purpose of fraud prevention. So people filing in two states, as opposed to letting us know where our residents, the residents who filed are located. And so our best information will come from, our withholding information and then also about two, is it about two months delayed on employment data from QCEW, it's one of the quarterly census of employment and wages where we might start to see some information on our county employment. So I'm going to say no earlier than September, but we're watching all the indicators to see if there's something else that triggers a further review. And related, unrelated, assessed property values. So they've been dramatically increasing over the last 12 years in particular with this most recent cycle being one of the biggest that anybody has ever seen. When will we receive if the market flattens out or God forbid decreases, what would the time frame be for us receiving access property values and how would that potentially impact the proposed FY26 operating budget? I think it was mentioned a moment ago by Mr. Smith. At the point we put the budget together, we know with pretty good certainty the majority of our assessed values and property tax for the upcoming collection cycle. So January 1 of this year, which we get updated on a monthly basis, we've updated for the budget recommendation to the best of our knowledge. So property assessments for FY26 absent appeals, and I'm going to have Mr. Folly King talk about appeals in a second, are pretty solid. When we start seeing appeals, if they are significant, that could impact our assessments because they go into effect. What I'll say immediately for that current fiscal year. Do you want to take a little further? Todd Folly King, Department of Finance. As my colleague noted on January 1st, we received a report from the State Department assessments and taxation with the anticipated assessments for all properties in the county, about 350,000 properties for their anticipated assessed value for the upcoming year. We then get a report monthly with how those assessments are changing and the report that comes out in July pretty much corresponds to the bills that go out that month to property owners to be paid. We track January, we track July, the delta between them is the sort of some effect of the appeals that have occurred through that part of the year. It is generally a fraction of a percent and we adjust for it in our model taking where we're at in January and cutting back slightly for the anticipated appeals. One detail that homeowners can't appeal at any time, there are prior year payments which is that balance of somebody appealing a tax year from the past and either generally receiving money back if they won that appeal. And that is also a fraction of percent of the revenues in the model. Thank you. So I'll just note that fiscal year 2008 was when I believe the property says values went down, so last time they've gone down. And then of course the perfect negative storm, because then you see an FY 2010 is when almost, you know, 15% reduction in what we had projected for income taxes. And that's of course what led to those catastrophic reductions that we had to make. And make and it just you know I talk about it often because the scars are never going to leave me it is something that I just in the back of my mind is we're having this conversation conversation we're going to have over the next few years and why all of this just gives me so much pause. I yield back to you Madam Madam President. Thank you, Council Member Sales. Thank you, Madam President, and thank you to staff and OMB for all of the projections. I just wanted clarification because I know there was a lot of concern about the retroactivity. do we have to, if we choose to support the county executive's recommendation, do we have to support the retroactivity, or can we request the brackets this year over retroactivity? So the council can pass a resolution, however it wants. So if they want to pass tax brackets it would need to be for tax year 2025. I'm sorry. 2026. 2026. That's a bad slip. So yes, for tax year 2026 the council could certainly adopt brackets. Just to benefit my colleagues and finance I think doing estimates on brackets at this point in time would be challenging for tax year 2026. Based on what we talked about earlier, you would need to notify the comptroller by July 1, 2025 and that's a different level of analysis than I think we've ever done, but I'm just, I'm buffering that right now in terms of a budget and whatnot, but certainly the council could adopt tax brackets for tax year 2026 if they want. But not for not for tax year 2025. Okay. Okay. And okay, that was my question for now. Thank you. Okay. Council Member Fannie Gonzalez. You're not going to like this. Guys, I said it last week. I'm going to say it again. Numbers don't lie. We all want to pay, you know, we're going to do the right thing. But this year is so complicated. What happened was happening at the federal level. I had neighbors, I had friends who had been laid off People who decided to leave their jobs by September that they won't file People who working DC believe in Montgomery County and so on and so forth. There's so many uncertain things right now We do not have the data We just don't you're not gonna get the data until in the fall, you have no idea what's happening. No idea, and I'm not blaming you, is outside your hands. I, and the fact that, you know, we, and I don't mean to attack the panic sector, if I really don't, I'm just talking about the facts. Let's do a kind of property tax increase. Oh, no, let's not do that. Now let's do an income tax increase. They support. And now having the council to solve this is irresponsible, especially when we do not have the data. We don't have the numbers. Next year, it's a different story because we're going to get data in the fall, in the winter time that can prepare us to make sound decisions for the next fiscal year. Not this year. I just don't feel comfortable. And I just don't think it's right. I just cannot see myself voting in support of a tax increase, an income tax increase at this at this point that was given to us as a proposal What two weeks ago? Oh, crazy, it's insane And I just can't, I can't do it I, again, numbers don't lie You really want to be responsible and make sound decisions because we were elected to make sound decisions based on data, based on facts. We don't have that right now. And it's not like I don't want to support all the different needs and things that we have in this county. I do. But let's meet the reality. And I just wanted to share that right now. And I think you can read between the lines and see how I'm gonna vote on this one. That's all, thank you. Thank you, Council Member Bailcombe. Similar settlement, sentiment, not maybe not the passion. But I can't help you, I'll channel. Okay, so a couple of things. One, the retroactive aspect. I have a lot of concerns about this. Our residents will have tough choices to make. If they're even aware that this is happening, right? Because when we passed the increase for property tax, most people weren't aware until they got their bill, right? That's when we heard. We didn't hear about it. We heard it from some people inside the bubble when we passed the tax increase. When we really heard about it was when they got their mortgage increase from their bank. So similar, same thing's going to happen with this. So people might change their withholdings, people might file an estimated return, the vast majority won't. The vast majority will have to pay at the end of the year when they do their taxes. So I think that's a concern for me for the retroactive. But also, given the federal government layoffs, some people will be paying taxes on jobs. They don't have anymore, right? And I think that's an issue, and I know some of my colleagues have mentioned that publicly. So I am not in favor of the retroactive. My concern about the income tax overall, similar tomember Elbernos, the volatility of that tax and we know that residents are impacted. We know we hear about that. We're spending a lot of time and energy helping those individuals. So we know that our tax base is going to go down from the federal government perspective and income tax most likely will go down. Which to me, in essence, means that we're almost using one-time money to pay for ongoing expense. Now, I know that that in general, that's the nature of income tax. We already have a 3.2% income tax and we deal with that volatility all the time. What's different about this is that we know that the tax base is going to go down because we are experiencing these layoffs in real time. We all know individuals who have been laid off personally know them. We also know because of our constituents. So I have real concern about the volatility, the nature of the income tax, and certainly I'm not in favor of retroactive. Thank you. Council Member Freeton. Thank you, Madam President. Thank you to colleagues. Thank you to Finance and to Council staff. This has been really helpful and also has highlighted some of the challenges that we have here in trying to navigate through very difficult circumstances with a lot of unknowns. And we've only shared the known unknowns and we don't know the unknown unknowns. And I think that is a real challenge. I have spoken quite a bit about the property tax. I've spoken quite a bit now about this retroactive income tax that has been put forward to replace it. I have real concerns about swapping one tax increase for another tax increase in this moment in particular as families are struggling in deeply uncertain times. I have real concerns about a retroactive income tax on residents and wages for jobs they no longer have as Councilmember Balkham noted as well. And I'm particularly concerned as Councilmember Albernaz was noting that the message that we'd be sending, if things don't turn out in our rosiest of circumstances to add to that uncertainty where all of the disruption is happening for thousands of our counties residents who are part of the federal workforce who are dedicated public servants as they are being laid off and let go in the most inhumane of ways if we are forced to make horrible decisions because of revenues not coming in at the level that we expect and having to make some of those choices under much more humane circumstances based on different dynamics, but the message that it will send to the community won't be all of that dissimilar. And that is a real concern if we're setting ourselves up with tough decisions today, but impossible choices that were forced to confront in the months and the years ahead. So I'm just really, really concerned about that. I just want to note a couple things on the going progressive in terms of the brackets. We would have to do that by July 1st. Is there a separate public hearing that would be required or a public process to formally notify the com troller of that? I do not believe there would need to be a separate public hearing. The council's already advertised one for this particular resolution. Going to 3.3%. The sale law is only concerned about the maximum rate when it comes to advertisement. In terms of notifying the comptroller, we just would need department of finance to give the comptroller the tax brackets, the council adopts before July 1st, 2025. So ultimately, this notice could serve as moving in that direction if that was the will of the body. I think so, I would like to double check with the council attorney on that one, but based on how the state law is written, it does not concern, the advertisement is only concerned about the maximum rate, not tax brackets. And not here. And not tax here, correct. Okay, all right, well, if you could check on that, I think that would be helpful because the way that we're talking about I think would be important. I also think it's important to note what we're discussing here is to have the public hearing for this is May 13th. Is that correct? Yes. And when would the decision need to be for this tax year? Before May 15th. Before May 15th. So there's going to be a public hearing on May 13th, and the council is going to have to take action prior, or on May 15th. So within 48 hours, yes. The council will have to make a decision on this. Okay. All right, I just wanna note that, in terms of the revenue picture, and Council Member Balcom was also noting this in terms of ongoing versus one time, the 75 million is mostly ongoing expenses. Is that correct? Most of the estimate, yes, would be ongoing in some way. I think that, well, yes, we'll leave it at that and see if you have a follow-up question. Okay but not all of it is right because some of the 75 million are to catch up payments and so it's basically a double-dip. So you're basically getting two tax years in one and so you don't you only get you only get one year of of year of the double dip and then after that you only get a single dip. Correct. I think that's shown in the table on the other page where the fiscal 27 is less than fiscal 26 is estimated for the. Yeah, so the 81.3 million, I think the number was in terms of the gap. How much of that is ongoing versus one time? So we would have to double check that. I believe most of the expenditures on the list are ongoing expenditures. Okay, so I just think it's important to note, and I think this is the point that Councilmember Alalkham was identifying. That's, it's not a one for one revenue source in terms of the 75 million being some of which one time and some of which ongoing and the 81.3 being mostly ongoing. But we have to reconcile that. So if that could be reconciled and shared with us, I would very much appreciate it. Yeah, my views on this are, well, Dr. Moultana, let me turn to. Sorry, I apologize to the rep. I did a good no from our council attorney. Public hearing on May 15th would also, you could adopt brackets for tax year 2026, if you want on that public hearing. The deadline for that would be July 1st to give to the comptroller for a tax year 2026. But I just wanted to, since we were here in the moment, give council that information. So there was no question about whether that public hearing would work or not. May 13th. Just. I'm sorry. Yes, May 13th. Yes. The public hearing gets infusing not. It's May 13th. Just. I'm sorry. Yes, May 13th. Yes. The public hearing is made, it's, it's, it gets confusing because they're so close together. I'll just note that and I'll let others make their own judgments on what that means. But May 13th public hearing, decision by May 15th. And do we think we're going to have a revenue understanding before May 15th on, you know, what not doing retroactive but doing progressive would look like in the out years? I know you talked about how difficult that would be in preemptive finance, but what understanding might we have at that point when we're going to make the decision, if we're going to make the decision to move forward with? Okay, so just a slide. I'm more progressive. I'm more progressive. The notification on May 15 to the Comptroller is only for the retroactive. Okay, so May 13th is a hearing and I understand your question, which is how do I decide if I don't have revenue numbers for each? We We have to figure out brackets the state gave us the option I believe to choose among certain brackets the law. I need to double check there was a proposal to increase the number of brackets I do not believe that passed. Correct, although I will note that the state law allows the county to create any brackets they want. They can be the same as the state brackets or they may be different. Okay, there was a proposal with specific brackets that may not have, I believe that did not pass. So we would have to, we have to have a target in order to figure out what that might mean. So for instance, and just to make it clear, if you were to have brackets and increase the top rate to 3.3%, that person who's paying 3.3% would benefit from all the brackets below. So the first $50,000 whatever that bracket would be, that person at the top bracket would have $50,000 eligible for the lowest bracket. Just like that is the nature of the progressive income tax model that the first the first amounts that you have in are tax at the same level as everybody. Correct. And it just as you go up, this is why there's some myths about paying taxes in terms of who pays what the challenge with, I would just note to everybody is it's just a revenue loss. So at this point, based on the numbers that we have, so it's important for us to note that. I will note the May 15th dynamic here. We might have told July 1st to make a decision for next fiscal year, but if we're going to make a decision that has any impact on this budget year, it would have to be done essentially by May 15th also. Because if you're starting at January 1st of 2026, to not do retroactive, in order to get any revenue and think about that revenue for this budget. We have to understand what that revenue picture would actually be or we can't budget towards it. And then the other question in dynamic here is when we actually expect the revenue and from a balanced budget standpoint because of the cycles of when revenue actually comes in, when is a reasonable expectation for closing out of a fiscal year in terms of revenue receipts to the county, can we budget off of an increase? So the timing, I'll go with the easy one first. The timing, if you were to pass a progressive income tax for January 1, 2026, there would be some income in FY26 from withholdings. There would be time to change for people to adjust and for withholding payments to be made to us based upon that set of tax brackets. So we would get some in FY26. How much depends on the brackets? And whether all of the things we've talked about today, that we don't know, whether we know more in order to assume what those payments, but only two quarters, two quarters. So January to July, could occur in FY26. So for us to do the estimates on brackets, we can back into some ideas, unless you have ideas that you'd like us to run. Yeah, but here's the issue. The issue is to reconcile all these different dynamics. What we heard earlier, which has been my experience and which has been borne out over time, is that the disproportionate amount of revenue is coming from a very small number of high income earners, mostly from capital gains. Overwhelmingly, those are not withholding taxpayers that are making their money through wages. They're likely paying estimated taxes and they're likely paying those estimated taxes on a quarterly basis. The time at which we receive that revenue for for folks that are gonna pay those on a different timeline is going to be different and the choices that it make are going to be different. That's the volatility in the income tax. So the money that we're going to get is the less volatile in earlier on, but it's also the most unknown, overwhelmingly most unknown, because the major fluctuations happen in capital gains and the major fluctuations happen among a small number relatively of high income earners, business owners, those who are selling businesses and selling large amount of stock, etc. Is there any way that we're going to know or have even a reasonable sense of that between now and the next 10 days? I'm just real. And I'm not asking you to do something that's unrealistic. I just want to be honest about what we have to work with. We're just one point to point out in the updated packet that Mr. Smith put together. 60 to 65 percent. That's an average for range of our income taxes received from withholdings from wage and salary. Your point about the other portion of it, proprietors income, interest earnings, rents, capital gains, they are not all received in quarterly distributions based on withholding. But the volatility is coming mostly from the 40%. Right. It does come from there. And it is today is May. We have no idea what capital gains are going to look like in calendar year 25 until it's over or close to over. And people behavior affects how capital gains work. People do get capital gains even if the stock market is down year over year because their individual investments may have capital gains during the course of the year. But that's their individual information. Generally, it's actually the opposite. Generally, there's kind of a sugar rush because in terms of revenue, because what happens is, as the stock market is crashing, people are selling, which is the taxable event. And so that's actually where you get a revenue pop for a temporary period of time, but it precipitates then a dramatic drop-off. And that's what Council Member Alburnaz was noting earlier. That's where Lee Mian Brothers falls in August of 2008. It wasn't until 18, 19 months later, when revenues fell off a cliff. And so that's what we have to be mindful of, at least, of whether there's, the revenue here is worth the level of uncertainty that it's creating in the potential difficult choices that we're making even more difficult moving forward. Thank you, Madam President. Thank you. And I just wanna clarify one thing. I understand that the May 13th public hearing is rushed. We are bound by state law in terms of when we had to notice this, when because we didn't know we had this authority until the very last day of the session in Annapolis so when we could introduce notice and have I know it is not ideal. But I just want to be clear of the why this is timed in such a way. There's a lot of things in this budget this year that are not ideal given the context at the federal level. But we are all doing our best to do that. But I just wanted to clarify why the public hearing was scheduled for May 13th. Councilmember Glass. Thank you, Madam President. Thousands of our neighbors have been fired by Elon Musk. And now there's a proposal to raise their income tax retroactively That is insane The economic anxiety in our community is palpable I See it when I'm walking my dogs in the morning from neighbors who were first let go Sorry sorry, fired by USAID and then NIH and FDA and HHS, and there's a proposal to raise their taxes retroactively. As the Council President noted, this became, this was approved by the General Assembly, very late into session. The last day, it was passed. My understanding is that a NAPA-LIS proposed this and passed it because they were concerned about large pension shifts for the school system. The county executive's budget had some wiggle room regarding pension shifts and we didn't quite know how big they would be because Annapolis was working it out. And one of the remedies that they had determined was to allow revenue enhancements, aka the income tax piggyback increase, to facilitate any shifts that they might send. The shifts did not manifest as large as we feared. And so to use this mechanism to pay for something that it was not given to us to pay for, doesn't quite add up. There is only one other jurisdiction I'm aware of in Maryland that is looking at the income tax, looking at an income tax increase right now and that is the city of Baltimore. And what Baltimore is proposing is increasing the local income tax to offset property taxes, not to just raise revenue to offset property taxes. If colleagues in the county executive are interested in restructuring our tax system, I'm all for it. Let's do it. Let's roll up our sleeves. It might not be. Well, it's not going to be this year, but we could do it for next year. We could do it the year after because it's complicated, but that's what Baltimore City is doing. And so this clearly is not right for right now. And I just wanna to share real quickly conversation I had with a father in Rockville just last week. He asked me my thought on this and I expressed concern. And he lives with his daughter and his wife, both of whom used to be federal employees, used to be federal employees, and he is now the sole breadwinner. And he said, please do not increase my income tax, my two family members no longer have a job. I yield back. Thank you. Ah, Council Member Luki, thank you Madam President. And I want to thank the GO Committee and everyone assembled up here. I did listen to the full committee hearing from last week and I appreciate the level of detail. You all brought to the discussion in challenging times when finding ways to project things is quite difficult. And so I want to commend the work that you were able to do and bring forth because this has not been easy. And also to focus on three things, three reasons why I am opposed to doing this. First and the Council President did interact about this, want to make clear the logistics that we are under are the result of the circumstances of the General Assembly, what the Comptroller's Office can or cannot do with its systems presently, and so on and so forth. We know, we are doing our best. And we will continue doing that. But also, you know, knowing and thank you for highlighting that any changes that might need to be in effect if we were going to take action for January 1st, 2026 would need to be done by July 1st of this year. I don't think we're in a position to increase that the tax now retroactively. Nor do I believe within the next 45-ish days we are going to have any greater clarity that's going to say, yeah, you should definitely move forward with this. to say, yeah, you should definitely move forward with this. And that brings me to my next point, which is, you know, to Councilmember Glass's point about the family he spoke with last week, the gentleman he spoke with last week. Read the audience, right? Everyone is anxious right now. Everyone. Not just our federal employees. There's a trickle-down effect that attaches to all of the folks living in this area right now. And we've made national news in Maryland as being disproportionately affected by what's going on down the street. Right? So I very much view this as a time when what the public is expecting since they are not going to get it from Washington is they need to know that their local leaders and their state leaders are exercising prudence, caution, sound judgment, making sure they're digging deep into these issues to explore all the possibilities because we have so many different things coming at us every day when I say us I don't mean the council I mean people residents the news cycle is is astounding and so you know when we have that on the one, where that's an expectation that people are craving, that kind of responsibility and ethic in what public figures are doing because they're not able to get it from our federal system right now. When we have a county executive who, again, this wasn't about the pension shift. This is something our county executive has been seeking for a long time, waiting, waiting for an appleist to please. Let me give you authority to tax more. This is not the year, and sending that message to the public from our executive leadership of, well, first it's a property tax, then it's an income tax. And oh, by the way, I know all of you are stressing about your personal financial situations right now, but I'm just going to keep swapping things in and out in an effort to try to increase our revenue when really what the public is trying to get us to do is rein it in. And the governor's been sending that message since he took office and it is not been a message that had been repeated here very often. Although it comes up every year as we have our discussions about budget and I've raised it every year. But we are in a make or break moment where we have got to do that difficult work. There is is no alternative and that is what the public is expecting us to do. And finally, in terms of the data and I certainly appreciate the sentiment that you said we can go back into some run ideas, take requests for different types of analyses that we could do, we need to do that we absolutely should be doing that and and I said this I believe I said it to council president start last week we should be treating this like the pandemic it's a fiscal pandemic right it's not a public health issue but we we need to keep coming back to this time and time again, willing to take a deep dive and explore the possibilities and the ways we can manage and make the best of an incredibly challenging situation on a regular basis. And I certainly will commit to sitting in on-go sessions whenever I can, whenever the schedule permits, but also I think we need to have more regular sessions that are of the full council diving into these aside from what we would have normally done with our regular fiscal updates as a body. So with that, I yield back. Can you, council member cats? Thank you, Madam President. And much of what I'm going to say, I did say at the government operations committee meeting a couple days ago, it seems like a much longer ago right now. But I am in agreement with my colleagues who are saying they have great problems with the proposal to increase. And I say this very publicly, Mr. Smith, Mr. Howard, Ms. Feldman, and others are truly gurus on this issue. But the guru business is a tough job. And we don't know what's going to happen. The word volatility has been mentioned many, many times and it continues to be mentioned. And of course, the whole concern, I tell you one of the most eye opening items for me was about the 50 people or whatever it is. I always like to think of his 50 people pay about 50% so I can remember the numbers. But and we'd all like to do more for the public. We'd all like to be able to help more people, but we need to have revenue in order to do that. And candidly, by raising the rate, does not mean we're gonna have more, we could easily have less. We have heard that any of the 50, in many cases, have houses in more than one place. They have one in Montgomery County, and which is their home, and then they have one in Delaware, Florida, or wherever else. And if they decide, I believe the number was 183 days, to clear that other home, they're domiciled, and we're going to lose it all. We're going to lose every dime from their income tax. Truly a problem. And I, you know, I've struggled with this. I mean, it's really a true problem for all of us. And I was reminded of that nursery rhyme that says, for the one of a nail a shoe was lost. Of course, it's not going to horse shoes. I had to look that up. it talks about how an insignificant act can have a grave and unseen consequences. This is not an insignificant act, and it is going to have, it could easily have grave consequences for all of us. You talked about it, and I appreciate you getting the information about the unemployment. That in some cases cases We're not even going to know that somebody who's living here is unemployed because they're getting their unemployment someplace else They're getting it from the district. They're getting it from Virginia wherever but there's still air Public and they're still unemployed here and let me say very clearly that the retro active idea is just plain ridiculous and it's unfair. And I certainly am not in favor of that at any degree. And just as an ending of this, you know, I was, as everybody knows, I was in retail. Nobody ever said we need more revenue. Let's raise the price of that shirt. It didn't work that way and it can't work that way. You might lower the price. You might come up with something else to try to help out. But you don't raise your prices. And I'm not going to suggest that, and I know that we're going to have a public hearing tomorrow or I guess tomorrow. And whatever day it is that we're going to have a public hearing and we certainly should wait to hear what others have to say. But to quote my friend, Council Member Finne Gonzalez, she certainly I'll send it with more passion. You know where my vote will be. Thank you very much, Madam President. Thank you, Council Member Mink. Thank you. We have some very difficult choices in front of us. And my feeling is that we have a responsibility to do our very, very best to put residents in the driver's seat of this decision. Obviously, a week is not enough time to do the kind of outreach that we'd like to do. And, you know, by the time the public hearing comes around, we're going to have wanted to work functionally, like a lot of decisions are going to have to be made. And if we were to change our decision at that time, it would throw us into a loop. So it puts us in a very difficult position. That said, again, our responsibility, my belief is that our responsibility is to do the very, very best we can to do as much outreach and hear from as many people as possible within this very limited time frame. So as such, I know that I am not the only one who has been making a lot of calls over this weekend to try to have this tough conversation. And my approach has been to try to lay out the facts and the numbers as best we have them and to hear from the folks I'm talking to about what they would like us to do. And I will give an example of a PTA meeting that I was that I was at on Friday evening. We asked folks in the room to raise their hand if they were being impacted by the cuts at the federal level. Or if they anticipated being impacted by those cuts sometimes soon. And almost everyone in the room raised their hands. Almost everyone at the East County School PTA meeting. They had brought me there to lobby for funding lines in the MCPS budget and to talk about how those funding lines are going to very directly impact their schools. They're children's school experience. And so we had to kind of backtrack and talk about the numbers that we're talking about here a little bit more broadly. And what it means to have to consider, you know, in order to fund those lines, some of which are in what MCPS has termed their discretionary, the discretionary section of their budget, that would require not only an income tax increase, but a retroactive income tax increase. And like I said to them, you know, you're taking it on the chin right now. And this is, it's not up to me. I would love to fund the entire MCPS school budget as well as other things. But and I'm the one who's going to to take a vote. But, you know, what is right for your family? I would really like to hear from you all what you would like us to do. You know, here's the text, the 10th of a percent. Think about what does this mean for your finances? What does this mean on the ground in terms of your schools, et cetera? What do you think that we should do? What would you think that we should do? What would you have me do? And the room said we will chip in a little more. There was agreement. And I found that very moving again, because almost every hand was up in terms of being impacted by the federal increases. And there was still a consensus there and it was, you know, it was an emotional room but that was the consensus. We have not gotten to have and are not going to have time to have very many of those conversations where we're able to present all of the information and say what do you want us to do because we have just gotten a lot of this information ourselves and so I know that we have all ever since Mark County Executive all urges budget came over we have all been getting emails that say no taxes understandably we have also been getting emails that say you know fund the schools fund the DDS supplement fund the primary, fund the parks. We've been getting all of these. And the public is not going to have as much time as they should have to be able to truly understand that we can't do both of those things. We cannot do both of those things. And so what would you have us do? That's the question that folks really deserve the time to think about and to weigh on on. we have now a week or less depending, you know, functionally to get that figured out. So here's what I would ask is that folks, is that colleagues, all of us wait to really dig into a position until we can hear from as many people as possible. Keep making all of those calls because some of these responses are certainly surprising me. And folks haven't should have an opportunity to say what they think with some clarity in front of them. And what we now know is that if we do not do the income tax rate increase at all, we will have to cut an additional 35 and a half million from the C.E.'s original proposal that's after committees have already trimmed 6 million and most likely everything on the reconciliation list, the additions that committees recommended would all would entirely be cut. If we do the full rate increase but don't make it effective until 2026, no retroactivity. We would, again, have to cut the entire reconciliation list as well as including the 6 million that committee's trimmed as well as an additional 10 million from the original budget. Funding any of the additions on the reconciliation list with either of those two options, funding anything on the reconciliation list using either of those two options would require us making significant additional cuts to the CE's original budget, again, beyond those that were recommended by the committees. So cutting items that committees have currently recommended funding, as well as cutting the entire reconciliation list, which includes millions of dollars to cover parks employee compensation increases and critical operating expenses. It includes more than $2 million for aging and disability, 1% rate increase for DD providers. It includes $4 million for important HSE projects. It includes $4 million for additional medical transport units for fire and rescue services. It includes $4 million for additional medical transport units for fire and rescue services. And includes, it's a county executive on the line. But residents, that's right, call. Please call everybody. Keep it coming. That's right. We should have a radio show. And it also includes $18 million to fully fund the MCPS budget as requested. And that goes, and that $18 million goes beyond what is discretionary. So that means cutting into the non-discretionary portion of the MCPS budget as well. So and more, and a lot more. So again, while I completely understand and relate to the instinct to say residents have are taking it too much on the chin already in Montgomery County, we cannot ask them to chip in more, especially with any of it applied retroactively. Also my instant, my gut instinct, I will say. When you look at the numbers and when you see the depth of the cuts that it would require, I think we have to put aside the emotional reaction for as long as possible and looking at, let me not say it because I know that everybody's going beyond the emotional reaction here. I know everybody's doing their due diligence here. But we just have this very limited amount of time to try to convey what we are weighing here and to hear back from folks. And I have had many, many meetings, phone meetings over the course of this weekend as well as some in person. And I am hearing repeatedly from a variety of nonprofits, from primary care, coalition members, as well as from everyday residents through PTAs and neighborhood conversations. I am hearing, including from people being impacted by the federal cuts, wow, when you look at the depth of the cuts you're gonna have to make, I will chip in a little bit more and I'm scared. I'm nervous about the cuts that are gonna be required if you don't do that. So I'm gonna continue my outreach. I know that we all will. I think it's important to bring the community into this conversation as much as possible. And it's going to have to be before that hearing next week. I think we all know that that's going to be too late. Thank you. Sorry, I did you want to. Councilmember Jawanda, I councilmember Jawanda. Thank you. I really appreciate hearing from all of my colleagues. something I wanted to wanted to bring up that I didn't but I will do it now. Really important context here because we've talked a lot about the context and the instability and the volatility. We're all trying to do efforts around federal workers. And I'm really appreciative of that that we care so much. You have to also take in the context of the tax bills that are moving their way through the Congress. We cannot talk, it wasn't, hasn't been mentioned yet. The pain of this administration and these illegal firings in the harm in the cuts that are going to be necessitated to Medicaid, to school meals, to all the many things that our residents benefit have been kind of alluded to, the chaos. But what hasn't been mentioned is the financial impact of this to our residents and what it's going to mean at the same time. This is a time we are in an A historical time, like I've never seen this confluence of events in this way. The bills that have made it through, and as of three days ago, they continue to make their way through the House in the Senate, that will pass. We'll give millionaires in Montgomery County and across the country a tax cut of $36,000 in tax year 2026. $36,000. The only question is, is it higher or a little lower? The bills are on track for that. And I'll send all my colleagues the data to so they can see where it's going. The increase for millionaires here, for the 10th of a percent change that we're talking about to backfill some of these horrible cuts because where's that $36,000 coming from? They're going to cut Medicaid, they're going to cut school meals, they're going to cut things that our residents need right now. The tax the increase that we're discussing Pales and comparison for a millionaire would be $2,200. Based on the chart, $2,260. That same millionaire would get a $36,000 tax cut. That's a net of $34,000. The same 50 people that Councilman Rukhats is talking about are going to net money. We just have to talk about that. And they're getting not only are they going to get it, it's whether it's fair or not, it's unfair in my view, probably fair in everyone's view. They're getting the money from cutting services our residents need. So why would we then put ourselves in the situation to say, well, let's further cut the services residents need to be fiscally prudent when they're being the most fiscally not prudent as possible and we still need the services. So I just think we have to take that into effect and that's not something we've had to look at in this way. When you look at the modest increases here to the families that Councilman McWinney was talking about. To the teacher who makes $100,000 who said to me, and I've seen this, I'll pay $100 more next year to hire those 600 special educators that we need so my job can be better. Like I think, and when we're worried about the context, the income tax is always volatile. It just always is. And we're going into uncharted waters for sure. But I just think we have to understand that the money, the what's happening at the federal level is horrible. And that unfortunately, there will be massive tax changes in year 26 that are going to disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans. On the backs of the cuts to services that our community relies on So I just think we have to remember that the last thing. I'll just say real quick Fairfax County Is looking at increasing both their property tax and their meal of a meals tax to fund their deficit and fund their schools We often hear that, you know, they're better than us. I don't think so. I love them, but I think we're pretty great. We're not the only ones that are in these tough situations. And the state did this. They made a tough choice and gave us this authority because they realized that we were in a tough situation. So thank you, Madam President. Thank you very much. Thank you to my colleagues for that robust conversation that we will obviously continue over the next week. The only thing I wanted to add, and thank you all, is as we are thinking about the numbers, the volatility, is to also keep in mind our reserve levels and what we do need in reserves. I think just want to underscore whether or not you've voiced an opinion four or against an income tax increase, whether or not it's the 3.3 retroactive or looking at a non-rotroactive increase. We need to really listen to what finance said and what Mr. Smith said about when we are going to get more information about the impacts we're seeing. And that is in a few months. And as council member Alba Dawah said, there are things we can do and have in place to react to more bad news that's coming. And having reserves that are robust is one of the ways that we can ensure that we have that safety net so that mid-year, if we are facing savings plans, if we are working with our nonprofits who are being cut more or something else. That is the place where we can take a look at where we are now and what the need is. If we do not have healthier reserves, that is going to tie our hands even more to hamper us in reacting to what is taking place and what is happening to our residents. So I just, that piece of it, I think is the only piece that wasn't mentioned as we went through this this morning. And I did want to just interject that into it. But this took a little longer than I thought this morning. But that's good because I think it was a very important information for us to dig down as we're going through the different budgets. So I want to very much thank finance, thank Mr. Smith. I want to move on to just kind of quickly review the working family's income income supplement. So I have Ms. Gosalia. Gosalia. Gosalia. Thank you. Ms. Gosalia, no you didn't, because I forgot. Gosalia, Gosalia. Ms. Gosalia, to kind of review this because this was something to kind of think about some of what Mr. Smith said as we're going through this. So for the working Families Income Supplement, on May 1st, the government operations and fiscal policy committee convened and unanimously approved an increase to the Working Families Income Supplement NDA. That was in the amount of $3,179,321 for actual state billing. However, on April 24th, 2025, the county executive transmitted amendments to the FY26 operating budget, which recommended increasing the county's match of the state's EITC from 56% to 65%. A proposal that would add $5,000,000,000 to the FY26 cost for an earned income tax credit adjustment. The GO Committee deferred this item for discussion at full council, which is why we are here today. For some background on the Working Families Income Supplement NDA, the Working Families Income Supplement provides funds to supplement the states for fundable earned income tax credit and is intended to benefit low income working families in the county. The federal government authorizes the federal EITC for working people with low to moderate income. Eligibility to qualify for the county WFIS is based on the ability to qualify for the federal EITC and for reference in tax year 2024, the maximum adjusted gross income that a filer had. In order to be eligible for the federal EITC was $18,591. This was for a single individual with no children. Several states, including Maryland, provide state tax credits to residents who receive the federal EITC. Maryland also provides refunds to eligible residents if their EITC exceeds their state tax liability. The state administers the county refund, so the county provides funding to the state for any county-related refunds and related administrative expenses. In FY22, the county increased the WFIS appropriation to account for changes made by the state during the 2021 General Assembly. Those changes included expanding the eligibility of the program through SB218, which provided the refund to taxpayers that file with an individual taxpayer identification number or an ITIN. The Council amended county law, however, in 2021 to ensure that all residents would receive the benefit of the state's expansion of this program. And county law currently outlines a 100% match of the state EITC refund. It also allows for the county councils who establish a different amount as part of the annual appropriation. Montgomery County is one of the few local jurisdictions in the county that offers a supplement to the state EITC and for reference the county, the current counties WFIS is a 56% match of the state EITC for eligible county residents and it has been at this level since FY24. The state match is currently 50% of the EITC or 45% if the resident receives a refund and And the total combined county and state matches about 78% of the federal EITC. The increased funds are an adjustment to the amount the county matches of the state refundable EITC and the adjustment increases the tax credit for qualified families and provides additional progressivity to the county tax structure. Table three within your packet also details the funding history for the working families income supplement. With the county executives original recommended match of 56%. The average EITC for an eligible filer that they would receive is $567.42. And then with the proposed April 24th amendment to increase the match to 65%, the average EITC would then be $658.88 with a resulting $191.00. Sorry, with the resulting increase then being $91.46 per recipient on average. Just as a consideration, the council could also choose to set the county match for the WFIS at a different percentage than recommended by the county executive and for each 1% change whether up or down for the match that would be an equivalent of $559,000. Thank you. All right, thank you very much for that presentation. I'm not seeing any questions at this time. So we really appreciate the work you've done and to have this as we're continuing our discussion on the budget's moving forward. So thank you very much. And now we will move on to the Maryland National Park and Planning Commission. And I know we have folks waiting here. I just very much appreciate folks from our planning and parks department for waiting and listening through that conversation on our income tax. And I will turn it over to Chair of PHP to give an overview. Thank you, Madam President. Thank you to Chair Harris and Director Sartorio, Director Figueroito, and the Central Administrative Services for joining us and for patiently waiting this morning. Just wanna remind colleagues of the unique nature of the MNCPPC budget. It is an outside by county agency, as we know, but it is critically important to quality of life of our residents. We have come back every year. It's chronically underfunded, particularly within the Parks Department in county executive recommended budgets in years past, the council has historically restored as much of the critical services as we can. Services and amenities are residents have relied on and have particularly demonstrated their value and their importance to mental health, to camps, to community events, to family gatherings, to all of the efforts that we are undertaking in the county. This year was no different. In fact, this year might have been one of the more challenging budgets that was proposed with respect to the Park and Planning Commission, the County Executive recommended funding, significantly below the commission's request, leaving many even nondiscretionary items unfunded including compensation. 5.675, 521, the park fund budget request was not covered by the executive's budget so over 5.6 million, 3.171 million of that was comprised of non-descrashary funds. We talked about in committee compensation increases, utility increases, contractual obligations, inflationary increases, debt service. Things that the commission does not have a choice whether or not to fund not new programs, not enhancements or expansions of programs, but effectively keeping the lights on where there are lights, although many of our parks are closed after dusk. The PHP Committee reviewed the recommended budget on April 23rd, on April 24th, the CE, Sennaver budget amendments that included 1.07, just under 1.073 million for the compensation increases, noting that that was a mistake, that that was not included, but did not include nearly 2.1 million in non-discretionary funds that still remain unfunded, and even in the recommended budget amendments, we still have to take those up. The committee's recommended these funds be restored to the base budget. You can see in the chart in your packet. And then we looked separately at restorations of requests that we thought were particularly important, but are admittedly and notably enhancements. We really passed through and reached a consensus on the committee, which I very much appreciated colleagues for working together and navigating through. We tried to ensure that everybody got most of what they hoped were the biggest priorities, but we were very judicious in what we chose to actually put forward, hoping that we could fight very hard to include these in the final budget. We predominantly focus on items that are public facing, park refreshes that really demonstrate significant value and benefit for limited dollars, position to leverage the vast amount of volunteer cleanup hours, contributed by residents and community groups that we can ensure that we are continuing to leverage those help and then support for our older adult population, which is a real area of need. We also went through the administrative administration fund. It was $2,143,604 not covered in the executive's budget. I will have Miss Dunn walk us through the differences between the agency requests, the county executive's recommendation and the non-recommended cuts put forward by the departments to close the gap. Before she does it, I did just want to remind the body of the by county nature of the Central Administrative Services piece of this budget. We will approve the parks department and the planning department that is entirely within our discretion. But for the Central Administrative Services, that's a shared obligation of Montgomery County and Prince George's County. So we will have to reconcile and come to agreement at our meeting on Thursday. This will be to serve as a signal of where the council is to allow for our council president and staff to work together to negotiate that and come back to us with a final resolution. And we also spend a considerable amount of time discussing the great work of our state delegation who secured quite a bit of critical state funding for a number of our priorities during the legislative session, particularly on the Capitol side, which helped to alleviate some of the dynamics, but not all of the dynamics that we face with some of the delays and reductions, particularly related to Wheaton Regional Park, among others. So I wanted to note the work of Senator Zucker and our delegation on their work on the capital budget, very challenging operating budget, but we had got a lot of success and the capital budget in parks was a significant beneficiary of that. So with that, let me see if colleagues, Vice President Chawondo or Councilmember Fondaganzales have anything to add that I've missed and would turn it back to you to chair Harris to see if he has any comments and to council staff. Great. And just to clarify for council, we will be taking a hand vote on those, the, excuse me that are the by county ones that we need to Have the meeting on on Thursday, but all other things since there are Editions on our reconciliation list. We will not be voting on those today And if colleagues wanted to add anything for this budget either to the reduction side of the reconciliation list or the additional side since this is outside of the committee recommendations that would require someone to move it seconded it and then a majority of the council to add to the reconciliation just to clarify our process chair Harris if you'd like to speak. No I'll be brief we're delighted to be here with you today and we are so grateful for your support. You know as we've always mentioned that the county exec definitely undercuts our budget every year and so we're really delighted and Really thankful for how you're fighting for us as I mentioned when I spoke with all of you last summer when we were about to prepare our budget We knew it was going to be a very tough tough budget year and so we went in and really sharpened our pencils at that time. And so we were very, very surprised that we have to sharpen again. But we know it's a tough budget year. And we're willing to work with you to keep up our park system and our planning system. Thank you so much, you. Thank you so much. Miss Dunn, I'll turn it over you. And let's deal with the Central Administrative Services first do the hand vote on that and then move on to the other budget items. Great, thank you. Council President, and that's exactly how the Central Administrative Services first, do the hand vote on that and then move on to the other budget items. Great, thank you. Council President, and that's exactly how the staff report has been organized today. We want to take the Central Administrative Services out of the way because it is something that you won't come back and revisit once you take that hand vote. You'll see that that starts on the first page of the staff report. For FY26, Montgomery County portion of the CAS budget is approximately $13.6 million, and they asked for an increase of about 700,000. The CE was recommended budget, the CEAS reduction would be almost $400,000. In committee, there was discussion, and also just for Council members to understand, when the commission receives what the county executive is recommended, the commission comes together, they meet, they go to the board, and the board sends over to the council a letter that says, okay, here's, here are reductions we would take to meet that CE level of funding. They almost always find savings in each of the different departments. They find savings in CIS, in the parks department, in the planning department, and in the commissioners office. So that's great. We take those savings. That's basically an issue related to the fact that they're creating these budgets in the fall. And so by the time we get to April and May, they have a much better idea of the hiring that can occur by the end of the year, places where they have some extra funding, and they can pre-fund some things that they need for the next fiscal year. So that's when we say savings, that's kind of where it comes from. It's really about a logistical thing when the budget gets prepared versus when they come to you. That all said to cover the CAS portion of what the executive's budget would not fund. They brought forward again some savings and then they have their itemized are called non-recommended reductions. They bring them in two tiers. And so where the committee landed was to restore $65,358 to the administration fund for CIS. And what this would do, it would prevent the delay in hiring of three positions. It was part of the way they were going to meet that savings. And the CIS staff spoke very well about the need for the finance payroll manager and the senior auditor to continue to get the work done that needs done at CAS. They are also in the process of hiring an executive director permanently, but they're in a elaborate process for that, and they do anticipate that could take up to six months, so that wasn't one of the offered savings that the committee felt they needed to retain. And again, as the Chair of the PHP committee has mentioned, you will take this hand vote today because you will be talking to the Prince George's County Council and coming to agreement on what level of funding CIS will receive. Because anything that's decided here has an implication for Prince George's County and vice versa because you, the two counties fund together their budget. If you have any questions on that? Does anyone have any questions on that? Because then we'll do a hand vote on the recommendation from the PHP committee for the Central Administrative Services. All right, not seeing all those in favor of the recommendation from the PHP committee, please raise your hand. And that is unanimous. All right, Ms. Dunne, you can continue with the rest of the packet. Great, thank you. We're going to now move to the Commissioner's Office and what's the non-departmental account that is under the Administration Fund. The Commissioner's Office says you know consists of one full-time chair and four commissioners who meet weekly. Their requested budget for FY 26, so it was approximately $1.4 million. This was an increase of one full-time chair and four commissioners who meet weekly. Their requested budget for FY26 was approximately $1.4 million. This was an increase of about $166,000 from their FY25 approved budget, and mainly in the form of personnel services. Again, the committee had a discussion. The commissioners office share of a reduction to take to meet the CE budget was around $97, $98,000, which really was the amount of funding request to convert a part-time position to a full-time administrative assistant three position and the committee at this time supported deferring the hiring of that position to take that savings. The piece of the non-departmental is important to note here because this was a $315,000 reduction that they could take to meet the CE budget. But it really is in the form of compensation and compensation increases that are similar to what we'll be talking about for the parks department soon. And so the committee felt strongly that those should be restored as they do support the base budget mission of the planning department through its administrative fund. And I'll pause there. Does any questions? Councillor Mevers, does your question go? Did we skip something? The reduction from the commissioners office? I mentioned it being that the committee supported taking the reduction for the administrative three position yes. Okay so we're voting on both of those the compensation increase and the reduction. From what I think is you are asking questions on it but I don't think that the council's taking straw votes on this piece from here on out it's just about discussion because everything here will go on the reconciliation list Okay. Thank you. All right. So this piece of it, we don't have to vote on for Thursday. Correct. Correct. So any other clarifications for this piece? Not seeing any, you can continue. Great. Thank you. With that, we'll move to the planning department. The planning department's FY26 operating budget request was approximately $28 million, which is about a $1.5 million increase over the FY25 adopted budget. And these came in a few different categories. One that we think of as base budget items, they include salary and benefit increases, inflationary and chargeback adjustments, and other major known commitments. They told just over $600,000. They had one new time funding initiatives that would support four studies totaling just over $600,000. And this would replace current FY25 one time funding of just over $418,000 for a net increase of $200,000. And the board is also requesting new ongoing funding of around $415,000, which includes three new positions to the planning department. One of these changes was to approve ongoing funding of $16,000 for the planning academy, calling this one out because last year, if you recall, the council approved $199,700 for the planning academy. And it was planning's intention at that time to clarify that a portion of that, the $16,000 would be an ongoing need so that every year they could continue working on and providing the planning academy for the residents of the county. And so we're just noting that this is an ongoing portion of that. It was included in the accounting that came over. So this is an additional amount we're asking, but we're just clarifying that the council's on board with an ongoing funding amount of $16,000 for this. No questions? There was also the committee approved an additional increase to ongoing contracts. This was a $46,700 increase for place making efforts and a $20,000 increase to support historic designations that the committee supported. In addition, the committee supports ongoing funding of $200,617 for master plan support. And what we'll note here is that current master plan funding has been characterized as one time funding an allocated per plan when the work program is approved at the annual budget. But this new approach would change the master plan funding to an ongoing expense not broken down my master plan, which provides flexibility to the department to address professional service needs across master plans as they're being developed. Okay. And the next is to place almost $28,000 on the reconciliation list and this would restore funding that had been proposed for reduction to the housing needs assessment and preference study of $50,000 and a slight increase in delayed hiring for a new placemaker coordinator position that they requested. There's any questions there? No, but I'd like to just stop since this is an item on the reconciliation list if the chair or director wanted to speak to it for a moment to give you a chance. So. Sure, thank you. So the funding for the hazard, the record Jason Sartori Planning Director. The funding for the housing needs assessment and preferences study what we've requested was $200,000. So we believe that we can do a portion of that the housing needs assessment which gives us a sense of how what our needs are for housing for people at different stages of life, for different types of housing, for housing at different price points, and how that compares to what our supply is. We believe we could do a good portion of that in house, it's just going to take us a lot longer. The part that we can't do in house is the preferences survey, which is a countywide, statistically significant survey to get a good understanding of people's desires from a housing perspective. I believe that the committee was interested in trying to supplement that effort and restoring some of that funding so that we didn't have to take a delay because it is really important for us to be able to do this housing work and have a good understanding of our housing needs as soon as we possibly can. The other thing, I'm kind of in a weird position to be advocating almost against something that's on the reconciliation list here in that, you know, to offset that additional cost of $50,000 on the reconciliation list. My understanding was that the committee recommended an additional two-month delay in hiring the the one position that the committee recommended we receive, which is a place making position. And so, you know, I'd yield a world we wouldn't delay that more than four months that we've already included, but this on the reconciliation list is an additional two month delay that would bring it to a six month delay. Just would underscore again, the huge importance for the department and being able to restore some of the staffing that we have. And I said, I listened to everything that you guys talked about in this last session. And I completely understand the difficult situation that you all are in and appreciate that. I just, part of, you know, the last time we went through of reduction in force with the great recession, we are still today at about, at 84% of our staffing levels of that pre-recession, whereas county government is at about 112% of that pre-recession staffing levels. this is just what we've been dealing with and so we are trying You know, we have a lot more that we need to do so any opportunity that we can to try to get more staff to be able to fulfill the services that were expected to fulfill For the county we certainly appreciate that that that council's consideration of those. Thank you Thank you, Director story Not seeing any other questions or comments. We can continue. It's done. Great. Thank you With that we're going to move to the park fund The parks department has requested FY26 tax-supported funding of Around $142 million this excludes grants, and reserves. And it represents a 9.9 million or 7.5% increase over their FY25 approved budget. As already had been noted this morning, the executive recommends a 3.2% increase over the FY25 budget for parks. The first recommendation from the committee was to restore the just over $1 million compensation increases amount that had not been covered. And as you also heard on April 24th, the county executive did send an amendment that would request adding that funding back in. So it would be treated as an amendment, but it is the first recommendation by the committee and then supported by the CE. The second is to restore just over $2 million to the park fund, which would support FY 26 base budget needs, such as contractual inflationary increases, utility cost increases, and other operating budget impacts of our CIP improvements. Those are things that the council has already signaled their commitment to, and need staffing and they need a certain amount of operating budget to make them successful. The third piece here will be to restore funding for a fire alarm inspections under contractual increases. This is for $10,000. This was discussed by the joint committee just before the PHP had its work session last week. and the committee, it's joint committee recommended that that 10,000 get. Again. committee just before the PHP had its work session last week in the committee. It's joint committee recommended that that 10,000 get. Again, also put back in. It was under a contractual increases that was decreased from the recommendation by parks to meet their CE budget, which was difficult. Is there any questions there? The next one at the top of the next page is to place two new positions on the reconciliation list. This was the Parts Department's first tier of things to restore all-based budget items. Again, we just covered that at equaled almost $3 million. The second tier they had really were the new enhancements, the program, changes that would really benefit improvements to the park departments that they've been working on. And they placed the committee has recommended placing two new positions on the reconciliation list. One is a parks cleanup program assistant for $84,000. The second is a nature and outdoor programming for 55 plus community position for just over $123,000. The next item also placed on the reconciliation list recommended by the committee is to fund park facelifts on the reconciliation list in two tranches of $100,000 each. The director can speak to this, but the facelifts really are a way to do very quick, easy fixes to parks that make them more inviting to the public. They aren't renovations, they aren't huge changes, but they are quick things that the parks department can do that. They don't have another funding source to to provide these things with them. I can turn it to her. Sorry, yeah, let's get ahead. Thank you so much, Midi Figueroa, parks director. Yeah, and I was very grateful to the committee for them to add these two positions and then this additional source of funding for us to the reconciliation list. The two positions, one of them and the committee chair kind of addressed this is for the park's cleanup assistant. This is a position that we funded last year for the first time with a parks foundation grant. And we did this as a pilot because we wanted to see how much more, how many more cleanups we could do in our parks with one additional position to supplement what we already have, which is one person. And with this position, we were able to increase the number of cleanups in parks by 50%. I will add that the position is focused on doing cleanups in equity areas where sometimes we might not get as many complaints, but we know these places also need quite a bit of attention. So we felt that with this pilot for a year we were really able to demonstrate a big impact. So we were grateful to see that that was added to the reconciliation list and then also the other position was for someone to add programming in our nature centers for our 55 and over community. We know that there is a big demand for programs for seniors also teens, but seniors you all you all know, that's a growing segment of our population. And we want to get them outside in nature, interacting with each other and getting some fresh air and exercise. And so we'll be able to do much more of that with this position if in fact it's funded off the reconciliation list. And then the parks faceless program. That's another one where we found some year and money last year to do this program. I think it was about $100,000. And with that little bit of money, we were able to replace over 30 signs. We did small faceless projects in over 10 parks. You know, kind of the way that we operate is we, we have a maintenance schedule, we mo-grass, we pick up trash, and then we renovate parks and we refresh parks and sometimes some of those things in between might fall through the cracks and this additional source of funding allows us to direct some resources to some of these smaller items that have a big impact in the community and help the community realize that their park is loved and that we are paying attention to it for them. So thank you. Thank you very much for that. Councilmember Mink has a question. I just wanted to go back to the tier one components briefly. As you just heard in our in our previous conversation we've a really tough decision ahead of us, and the only option that wouldn't have us cutting everything on the reconciliation list, which of course includes these three Tier 1 items, as well as additional cuts that were already had been previously recommended for approval by committees. The only option that allows for that to not happen is if we do a retroactive tax increase, which there's a lot of discomfort with, understandably. It's a different, difficult question to wrestle with, but given that that's what's in front of us and that we have, let's just look at these two, the two larger ticket items, the one million for the FY26 compensation increases and the two million supporting the base budget needs. If we look at a situation in which we have to make cuts to that could impact those. Can you talk about how that would impact on your end or how you're kind of thinking about that possibility? Well, we were very grateful that the county executive sent over our amendment for the million dollars for compensation, noting that it, I guess, had been a mistake not to include that in our budget. Obviously, if we can't, we don't have the additional funding for the expected compensation increases, then we can't we can't we can't fund them. And then as far as the other two million that was left to get us to a same services budget, which was already after we had found as as council staff pointed out, one and a half million dollars worth of savings, things that we could prepay this year and that brought that gap to about two million dollars to get us the same services. That's things like operating budget impacts, which really just means positions for our new and renovated parks. If we don't have OBI for our parks, that means we can't cut the grass and we can't keep them clean. And people will immediately see that these new parks are not being taken care of. Our utility increases. If we can't cover lights and water, then that means that there are fields that we cannot turn the lights on at night. People pay to rent our fields, particularly game fields for night play, but their permit fees don't cover the cost of lighting the field. So we would have to stop doing quite a bit of that and irrigating our fields. We invest a lot in our natural grass fields and they require a lot of care and among the care that they require is irrigation. And we would have to stop irrigating some of those fields because we wouldn't be able to pair water bills. Our capital equipment debt service if we can't pay the debt service in our capital equipment we can't keep buying capital equipment because we're not we're not meeting our obligations there. Contractual increases those are things that are in our contracts to reflect increasing costs to the people we contract with to provide services. So we would have to cut back. And a big example and the one that we always, you know, want to use because it's something that's very real to people and that they feel and that they have strong feelings about. And that's bathrooms. If we can't cover those contractual increases, I believe we calculated we'd be removing something like 10 toilets from parks, for example. And then inflationary increases, those are our costs. That's just the cost of things going up in price so that there are things I fertilizer for our field seeds, replacement equipment for playgrounds. We can't buy as many of those things so we can't maintain what we have. And these are, we believe, real impacts that county residents would begin to feel. Thank you appreciate that. And again, we have heard from a lot of residents that they want us to restore this funding. But also we have tough decisions to make and And so I think important for us as we keep in mind that we, you know, nobody enjoys increasing taxes. But also if we do not do that, that that is going to require cuts across departments and, you know, including looking at cuts that could impact, you know, the ability to maintain services. And I see that it looks like we're here. Yes, I just want to get, thank you for your question. When I just want to say, parks department started in such a big hole, like a huge hole. So these are the normal things that parks would have to do just in normal services. So when you start in a huge hole, it is, you know, the county's, you know, the Mideast Group only got a 3.2% increase, right? If you look at some of the other agencies, we didn't get enough to maintain services. And so I know it's a large amount, but we started in such a big hole. I hope that the council can look at that as you're making your decisions. And can'm not sure if you're planning to do that. I'm not sure if you're planning to do that. I'm not sure if you're planning to do that. I'm not sure if you're planning to do that. I'm not sure if you're planning to do that. I'm not sure if you're planning to do that. I'm not sure if you're planning to do maintain same services and have us moving in the right direction and not the wrong direction, that would mean for accepting a little over of $3 million of those increases just for the tier one off the reconciliation list, then that would then have us going back into other pieces that committees have recommended that we fund and cutting 3 million plus from there. So just to make sure we're laying that on. Thank you. Councilmember Balfon. Thank you. So I think we, the major agreement that we all have is that it's gonna be tough to do this. But I just wanted to highlight the difference between the parks budget and pretty much all the other departments that we've looked at. The one million was a mistake. That in my opinion, shouldn't even be on the rec list. We all approved unanimously the compensation, and this was a mistake. It shouldn't have been, in my opinion, on the reckless. The other piece is the same service budget, which Chair Harris mentioned. We haven't seen this level of cut anywhere else in the budget. And so I just wanted to lift that up. Thank you. Council Member of the Free Senate, did you run? Yeah. Thank you, Councillor Bocca for knowing that. That is very much how the committee took this. We very much separated out what we saw as the 3.1 million dollars which was a combination of the compensation which we knew the county executive was he had signaled that he was moving forward with an amendment we hadn't received it yet we ended up receiving it on the next day and the same services non discretionarydiscretionary decisions that are just maintenance level to literally cut the grass in the new park that we had already made a decision to open. The implementation of previous decisions that we have already made, inflationary increases just to keep the same things in our parks going moving forward. We then added on a few and we went on it down dramatically. Some enhancements. That's different. Those are very much discretionary. Those are very similar to the other budget decisions that are being made in other departments. We viewed those quite differently and we took them up as such in committee. So I appreciate you noting that that was very much in the spirit of how we viewed it as the nondiscretionary items for same services level to meet the contractual obligations to meet the compensation agreements and to maintain the same service level and then enhancements and expansions that we think are really worthwhile and that would be front facing and you know very helpful but our new or ads or additions and not necessarily same service level. Councilmember Almond us. Thank you. So I appreciate Councilmember Balkham's point. I agree. The one million should not be on the reconciliation list. That's pretty straightforward. And filling the two million hold from last year. This is a taste of what's to come in all departments. Reductions that are going to have to likely be made based on the volatility that we just had a conversation about and the very strong likelihood that income tax receipts are actually going to go down because of the amount of people that are going to be losing their jobs. So it is painful isn't the right word, it's reality. But I also just want to acknowledge that the usage rates have also gone up among all parks facilities and that's a good thing. And as we noted through the public testimony once again, some of the most passionate advocates that came out and spoke on behalf of the services that they wanted to see supported was for our incredible park system and recreation too. But I just wanted to note both those things. Councilor Mojirano. Yeah, I appreciate that. I agree on the one million which we got, which you have to fund your contracts. I will say that there are many things on this list, even outside of parks that are same service related, you know, to the point that was made, not just in parks, I mean, in this list specifically, but also in the larger reconciliation list, there are things that are same service related. And so I think that's something we're just going to have to grapple with, which is why our previous conversation is so important. But we did have strong agreement that certainly the contracts have to be honored. There is high utilization. I think if we heard about two things in the budget, the most, it was probably parks always wins, and then probably schools. And so I just really want to emphasize that the revenue we have is going to really depend on whether we can maintain same services for highly utilized, highly needed entities like schools and parks. So thank you. That's all our fanning and Zalas. I wasn't going to say anything, but the thing that really bothered me about this report is it was been touched by everybody. We in committee, we did not say that this was tier one. We say that this is saying service level and that's the confusion here is you had have not been posted this way because it's not true. Compensation increases the spark of same service level. We're not so that that bothered me and so when you're voting remember that and I will end by saying that Slagel Creek Festival was amazing. Thank you so much for your work, that's it. Thank you. And I'll just also add thank you to your work. I know this has been really stressful time since the time that the County Executive's budget came out for you all, for the staff at the parks and really appreciate all the work that you're doing. And as we go through the budget, I think we are looking carefully at what we can do within the revenue sources we have. And as I said before, we need to look at those things that we know our community needs during times of great stress and upheaval. And the parks have been there before, because they're free. And you can go out and you can enjoy them. And so for me, looking at what we can do, I mean, compensation absolutely. And then what we can do to make sure that you are made hold in the same service, I think is really important as we're just looking at the times we're living in right now. So thank you very much for that. Ms. Dunn, I think we're done with the operating. If you wanted to talk about some of the CIP amendments or do we have any questions? I'll just want to note for you are that as a body you do look at the appropriations needed for other funds that are within the Park of Planning Department. So those are summarized for you on the fourth page of the staff report. There was a request to transfer 1.5 million from the Administration Fund to support the development review special revenue fund to keep its fund balanced up in the committee supported that transfer. But these are part of the budget, they're part of the budget resolution, so I just wanted to call your attention. They're in the middle of page four. There aren't questions about that. We can turn to the amendments to the FY25 through 30 capital improvements program. And the first has to do with a revised affordability reconciliation PDF that came over that would decrease government obligation bond funding by $2 million for parks, 1.5 million and FY26 and 500,000 and FY29. Some H5 in the staff report, giving some background to it. The planning board looked at this and sent over their response on April 11th requesting that the council reject this recommended revised affordability PDF. If in fact parks had to take the cut, they had put forward that the reduction would be taken in the Wheaton Regional Park PDF. And that would cut it by 1.5 million in FY26, again, and a half a million in FY29. As many of you are aware, there was state aid that was awarded recently, and the state did award $3 million grant to Wheaton Regional Park Improvements Project. The aid is specifically earmarked to a Wheaton Active Sports Park as part of the Wheaton Regional Park. And according to the park director, and she can also speak to this, the existing FY26 CIP funding for the park. Improvement's project is really needed to help prepare and to get things in place to receive that grant money and to continue the whole overall improvements to the park. And so while the state funding grant is amazing and super helpful to the parks department, it's not a perfect replacement for the money that would be lost. If they took the cut, the $1.5 million cut that the C.U. is recommending and so the The committee supported not not taking the affordability reconciliation PDF has revised Councilmember fanning and Salas just want to make it clear yes the parking scene we didn't but this is a regional park with people coming from across the area from even from Virginia they come here so that's one thing that I wanted to say so don't see it as a Wheaton thing to the General Assembly gave us three million dollars because we told them that the county council has made a commitment and gave us and we approved two million dollars last year. They knew that. This is following up of a commitment that we told them we had. Imagine if they find out that we're taking two million dollars back after they gave us three million. After all we did. It's so wrong and again I don't know what's wrong with the panic executive. Honestly, he has this, on this hate towards parking planning. It's awful. And this is another reflection of that. And it's so wrong. And just think about the impact of the general assembly. If we follow with this recommendation is not okay. Yeah, until elaborate on your remarks, just now Council Member Fanny Gonzalez. The last CIP cycle, the council approved adding $6 million in Geo-Bond funds to the Wheat and Regional Park PDF to move forward with the implementation of the recommendations in the Wheat and Regional Park Master Plan. That 1.5 million and FY 26, we were planning to spend that to begin some of the projects that we need to implement at the rubini area, including parking lot courts, things like that, that are preparatory to being able to implement the Wheat & Action Sports Park for which we received $3 million. Even after the Council generous addition to our CIP for Wheat & Regional Park last year, we still had a $5 to $6 million Delta that was unfunded. So that $3 million was supposed to fill in that gap, not backfill for for another cut So just thank you when wanted to elaborate on that Thank you councilmember Friedson Well first of all somebody who doesn't live in Wheaton But since quite a little a bit of time in Wheaton Regional Park I will Testify to that and also will note that it's a Wheaton thing should be on a t-shirt and I will buy it So just a little note there. It's a Wheaton thing and I'm digging it I just want to highlight the point that was made about the state funding because I think this is really important We run the risk of the state not being as interested in funding capital projects. If they add funding based on our commitments and then we re-neg on those commitments based on their funding. Imagine if the roles were reversed and we did capital grants that were matching state grants and then the state saw that the following year and said, you know what, we're going to take out the 500,000 that the county council put in. We would no longer do state matching grants because it would be not additive. It would be our funding to offset their support and we'd end up in the same place where we started, but with a sacrifice on our end that could have otherwise gone to fund other priorities. So it's not just about a Wheaton thing. It's not just about a regional park that's one of the most utilized and will be even more utilized with a new carousel that many of us were at. with the action park is going to activate even more folks from a broader range of the region. It's a question of our partnership with the state and their willingness to invest in our capital projects, particularly our parks, but beyond that as well. If we start removing funding out of the capital budget to offset their support, it's not going to make them as enthusiastic in offering that support in the years moving forward. So I think we need to be very cautious with that as our rationale for budgetary decisions. Having said that, this will have to be dealt with in reconciliation in the CIP. We always have to make tough choices, but we shouldn't be doing this to offset the state adding funding that was supposed to offset the gap that our funding didn't fully fill. That's, it's disingenuous at best for that to be the rationale. Council member Sal. Thank you. Just wanted to clarify that this funding isn't contingent on the state funding isn't contingent upon the $2 million. The funding itself is not contingent. There isn't a provision in the capital grant that it be contingent. However, without that 1.5 million in FY26, we can't actually spend the 3 million that we got for the Wheaton Action Sports Park. Because the 1.5 million in FY26 gets us to other projects that we need to do in order to prepare for the Wheaton Action Sports Park. Do you have a, can you summarize or us a understanding of what those pre-projects are that total the 1.5? So some of those projects include courts improved. So the the Wheaton Action Sports Park is in kind of the rubiny complex what we call the rubiny complex it's an area and Wheaton Regional Park And some of the projects to prepare for that include some sport court renovations that are in the area, improvement to the maintenance yard that will be serving the action sports park because we're going to have more maintenance needs for the action sports park. Some parking lot and driveway improvements that have to happen before we can move to construction on the sports park. We're also moving forward with some of the state, safe streets for all funded projects that will allow us to create safer pathways into Wheaton Regional Park toward the Rebellion Complex. Those are all things that need to be done before we can move to construction of the action sports park. And how many parks do we have in our park system in the county? Uh, 415. Okay. And do we have a, um, a schedule of all the parks and all of the capital improvements they've had over the last five years? I'm of since the pandemic how we've managed to include our 400 parks throughout the CIP. We at the top of my head I can't get you the list of every park we've had a project in but I will tell you that at any given time we have over 300 to 350 projects that our park development division is moving through some like phase of planning, design, work, construction. Those parks are all over the county. We focus very much on moving forward projects that are in equity areas. We look at we look at equity considerations with the equity focus areas in the community equity index that the planning department developed. We also look at parks condition master plan recommendation and all of those things help us formulate what our priority list is for which park projects we're moving forward with. with. And then of course that's also contingent on the funding that we receive in the CIP through different funding sources, primarily geo bonds, but also our own park bonds. We look to grants to try to supplement what we're getting from the county and all of that kind of comes together in forming our sort of our park development priorities, if you will. Okay. Just thinking about, I believe last cycle, we approved six million in restoration to wheat and parks. And so just thinking about the new CIP that's about to restart, it would be helpful. I don't know how quickly you can provide that list of where investments have been made in the last, well, the current CIP across our park system. It would be helpful as we reflect on the needs for this budget. It's no surprise in the limited funds that we do have and the gap that needs to be filled. So I just want to make sure we have as much information as possible going into this. Absolutely. Yes, we're happy to share that information. Thank you. Council Member Stales, it might be helpful. You could also look in the committee staff report where we covered this for the committee. I did include a table that provided at least all the places where there was significant government obligation bond funding for the parks department just to illustrate how difficult it would be for any one of the places where they received to the bond funding to be reduced by 1.5 million. There are about eight on that page. It is the ADA compliance, ball field initiatives, legacy open spaces only. Sorry, what page are you on in the packet? So it's on the, so it's page 24 of the staff report that's attached, the PHP committee staff report attached, page 24. The big ones that have any significant funding where you could see a reduction are ball field initiatives Pilar which stands for Plan lifecycle asset replacement. It's really about maintaining the safety and the use of the parks The other is trails hard surface renovations already at 1.5 million who reduced it by its full budget and 26 or 25 that would be Difficult and then the other the last one is the Wheaton Regional Park Improvement. So it's just to give the committee an idea of, they're being asked to address an affordability PDF that would take 1.5 million in Geobonds away. Where could that occur? What does this look like? And so providing the table where, what are the other options? And the other options aren't great either, right? They're either not sufficient funding. Or they're the projects that really maintain the parks at the level of safety and usage that we expect. OK. Ms. Dunn, is there anything else on the CIP? Let's see, well we have some more, yes. Okay. As also the Council received another amendment to the CIP, which was to revise the tax for the Ballfield initiatives PDF, which would insert language that would prohibit the use of funds to install or make improvements to artificial turf fields. Didn't come with a dollar amount attached to it. It was just to change the funding, but it would definitely have an impact. Certainly for the parks, ball field initiative PDF, but it could have an impact for other places in the county as well. And the committee was supportive of deferring any conversation of this at this time. This budget process has been difficult and hard enough. That amendment came approximately a week or two ago, so very recently, and it really just deserves a lot more time and attention to the impacts that it might produce, and so to not make the change at this time. Okay, that's good. And the last recommendation related to the CIP, well, a couple of things. Again, for the body, just to know that the appropriation needed to accept the state aid. So there will be attached PDFs for all the places to accept the state aid. There was also some additional revenue received from the land sale proceeds related to Warner Circle. And all of that is on page five of the staff report, the amounts and to the project description forms those would be attributed to. And the committee supported that. And the next day, Parks is requesting to make some revisions to the program open space allocations. This is due to the state revising every year their program, Open Space allocation to Montgomery County, based on their budget concerns and challenges. This year, that amount has decreased. And so for parks to address that, they needed to reallocate their program, Open Space funding in such a way that they either reduced or shifted funding. And that's shown to you at the top of page 6. We was reviewed with the committee who supported Parks's allocation of that reduced program open space funding. And then lastly, Parks is requesting there was a very small appropriation of $25,000 that they want to be able to place into the Dalewood playgrounds PDF. There were some other minor text changes. Those are all attached in PDF form, but they're really just to get them out there for public view, but they're very minor. And so the committee, we recommend supporting that. Okay. Thank you. I'm not seeing any other questions or comments on this. Since these are amendments, the to 30 capital improvement programs As we've been doing with when we get into other amendments a hand vote would it be appropriate at this time so we can staff can move forward on the Reconciliation of that all right not seeing any questions all those in favor of the committee's recommendation on the CIP amendments And I I did unanimous great Thank you. There is one last thing. We have a summary of key issue section and with this again because the part of what the body does when you approve the budget for the planning department is you're approving their work program and there's two things the planning department has recently reorganized their divisions and so you will see when they produce this budget in the fall, they also provide to the council and it's also in their budget resolution how their money is distributed across those ten divisions. At the bottom of page 6, you'll see what's currently and came to the body to approve. But since the time of that budget preparation, they have the board has approved a reorganization, so they've had to readjust how that budgeting gets distributed amongst the divisions, and that redistribution same amount of money is at the top of page seven of the staff report. This was also, again, reviewed by the committee to get their nod of approval, which they support. And then lastly is the Plan Department's work program. They are proposing two master plans to be coming forward in the next year at some point. The start, one is a Burton'sville employment area, a minor master plan amendment. And the second is a Kensington sector plan amendment. And then of course the studies are also listed for you on page seven. And the committee unanimously supported the proposed work program. Sure. That's it. Thank you. Thank you very much for being here as we continue to go through our budget process. I appreciate all that. Thank you, Ms. Dunn. Next, before we recess, we will take up the WSSE Water and the WSSE Water FY26 system development charge as folks come up to the table. Again, want to express my appreciation to everyone from WSSC who's been with us this morning, waiting for us to take up this item. Before we turn it over to staff, I'll turn it over to the chair of the Transportation Environment Committee, Chair Glass. Thank you very much, Madam President. Thank you to you and Council Member Balkham on the T&E Committee. Thank you for WSSC's patience during a full council schedule and important discussion this morning. On April 24th, the T&E Committee voted 3-0 to support WSSC's proposed budget, which assumes a 9.8% increase in FY26. And important background as we engage in this conversation. Last fall, the Montgomery County Council approved a spending control limit cap of 10.2%. And the Prince George's Council approved a 9% spending cap, and this proposal helps us meet in the middle. With that, I'll turn it back to you, Madam Chair. Madam President. Myself off, Mr. LeChenko. You want to walk through the packet? Sure. And the packet itself was quite lengthy. So I have the cover sheet, which hits the highlights. And unlike the park and planning budget, we don't have reconciliation list issues with regard to the WSSE Water Budget, because it is separately funded. So what we deal with, as Chair Glass mentioned, is we have a spending control limits process that establishes a rate ceiling that both councils vote on in the fall. And that provides the guidance to WSSE water as they develop their operating budget. And of course, there's a very direct relationship with the CIP as well since debt services is a significant part of the operating budget expenditures. So just keep that in mind as we go through this. The FY26 proposed operating budget is 1.14 billion dollars which is an increase of about 116 million or about 11.4% from the approved FY25 operating budget. Now you may immediately note that's slightly higher than the rate increase and that's because they did have a slight increase in their revenue projections which offsets a little bit of that rate increase requirement. The largest increase is in what's called the all other category. It includes a lot of different items, including a lot of contractual services, employee benefits, but also importantly, Pego. And Pego is one of the major drivers of the operating budget this year, and actually the last couple of years. WSSC water is recommending a significant increase in Pego of $42.4 million. And this is consistent with the discussions we had last fall and over the past several years where they have been trying to ramp up the Pego to get to approximately 25% of debt issued. So this would actually, if this were approved at this level, this would be the first year that they achieve that metric. So, and the long range financial plan, which is included in the packet, also assumes that Pego would be going up over time to continue those positive, you know, financial metrics with regard to debt service. So that's one significant increase in the operating budget. Without that increase, the rest of the operating budget would be going up about 7.6%. So just for context there. The other large increase is in the sour and wages category. WCC Water is recommending 77 new positions. Also within that category includes their compensation assumptions for FY26, as well as annualizations of costs from FY25, similar to what you would see in other departmental budgets, basically creating the resources needed for the same services of effort from the prior year. Of those 77 new positions, 20 of them would be for newer enhanced services. I think about 28 of them were conversions from contractual services, so they're cost neutral. And then the balance in another 29 positions were to deal with a lot of regulatory impacts that they're seeing. We had a discussion last fall, coincidentally at the same time as the spending control limits process of their, of the lead and copper rule, which is moving forward quite substantially over the next several years, as well as the PFAS issue, which is an emerging issue, which is also leading to some significant planning efforts and likely expenditures both in the operating and the CIP going forward. So that is one of the larger areas. Another area of increase is in the regional sewage disposal. These are costs that DC water charges to WSSE water based on actual flows going to the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant. And in fact, in recent years, those flows have actually been higher than projected. and WCC Water has seen some adjustment bills. And in fact, WCC Water got another adjustment bill this year, so they will be having to absorb about 6.5 million more based on actual FY24. And then that's also led to a higher projection for FY26 going forward of about 1.7 million, which is not accounted for in the proposed budget. So that is something they would have to find within existing resources, either through higher revenue, revenues then projected or from reducing some expenditures in their proposed budget. So that sort of summarizes the expenditure side. the revenue side, as mentioned, the 9.8% rate increase would also be followed by the similar increase in their fixed fees, which are the account maintenance fee and the infrastructure investment fee. That 9.8% would allow the budget to balance based on the expenditure assumptions I just mentioned. The other element here is the system development charge, which both councils also approve going forward. This is approved by resolution. For the first time in, would be the lifetime of this charge, WSU water is proposing an increase in the charge of 2.5%. This will be in order to ensure that over the six-year period going forward, if these increases were to continue, they could avoid a potential projected gap in their fund or a negative fund balance at the end of the six-year period. Now the councils, both Montgomery and Prince George's, do not approve multi-year rate increases for the charge, but the 2.5% would be for FY26, and then the councils could revisit that, going forward, FY27 and beyond. But what this rate increase would do is it would avoid the need for WSSC water to issue SDC fund supported debt, which it has done in the past where it's had gaps to fill. And I think given that the increases have not been done for decades, I think from staff's perspective, a CPI type of increase in the charge does make more sense to assume over time than having to go to debt to a more expensive debt assumption going forward. So the and the committee concurred with council staff on that for the system development charge increase. So if all of those are taken in total, then we would have a balanced budget going forward in FY26 apart from those regional sewage disposal charges that I mentioned earlier that would have to be accounted for. With that I think I'll stop and see if there's more specific questions in any particular expenditure category or revenue category that I or our fellow WCC staff folks here today can answer. Great. Thank you, Mr. LeChengor. And I just want to have folks look at page two of the packet today under the committee recommendations because we will be taking a vote on this today as was stated because we have our by-counting meeting on Thursday and particularly need to set the rate that we need to do with our colleagues in Prince George's County. So I see we have Council Member Freetzen. Thank you thank you the committee for their work thank you to their commission and staff for years has Prince George's County weighed in at all on the WSSE budget up to this point. They're meeting tomorrow, I believe, for their full council. They've had a briefing and a, their equivalent of our T&E committee, their TIE committee review. My understanding is they are still working, looking at their 9% base, just as we looked at our 10.2% and WSAC is below ours. They're experiencing the opposite issue where WSAC waters budget is above their base. So that's an issue they're wrestling with. I don't know if WSAC water has any further comments on where they may stand at the committee level versus where they may land tomorrow. Morning, my name is Tim Thiemessarchi, financial officer. We presented to the TIE committee at Prince George's County with the 9.8% enhancement. And during the meeting we justified and provided justification for what we had. And then the budget staff, again as Mr. Liffchenko said, presented the 9%, but also explained why we were at 9.8%. And we haven't received any feedback or any additional commentary from the Chair of the Committee, but again, when we presented the 9.8%, they were receptive and understood why we were presenting at that level to support the needs of the operation. In terms of process going forward, as was mentioned earlier, the By County meetings on Thursday, this is always a quick turnaround. We recognize that. Based on the council's actions this morning, or preliminary actions this morning, we'll send a letter to WSSC water and to the Prince George's or Prince George's counterparts with the council's's recommendations today. We'll get a similar letter from them based on their recommendations tomorrow morning. And between then and Thursday, we will work at the staff level to create a joint staff recommendation for the Council's to review and approve on Thursday. Appreciate it. 9.8 is better than 10.2. I will admit that. I was more inclined to be more along the lines of where Prince George was when we originally took this up. I still find myself in that position. I think that we should be closer to at least the middle of that. I think we could have then arrived at a compromise at 9.5. I'm not sure that would still be possible at this point, but I think we've got to find a place where we can agree with our colleagues in print shorties. So I'm not supportive of the 9.8 personally for the same reasons I noted previously. We've gone from 10.2 to 9.8, not by any expenditure changes, as I can see, but based on revenue changes, but perhaps that was not mentioned properly earlier. What we did, we found non-rate revenue savings. So our historical interest income, we were able to increase that based on the trends that we're receiving and then within our long-term plan, what we did beginning with the COVID period, we had an allowable adjustment for uncollectable accounts and because our revenue trends were increasing we were able to accelerate the removal of that by 0.5% so that provided non-revenue that reduced revenue enhancement request. The other, there was one expenditure or significant expenditure. Because that's more on the revenue side. On the expenditure side, Pego was soon to be slightly higher last fall. So what we're seeing is about a $5 million reduction from the Pego level, from the fall that we saw in the base case versus what we're seeing today. That's that's that would account for about half of a percent of increased difference. So from the 10.2 that might get you you know pretty close to the 9.8 there. But then they as as mentioned they've had a number of revenue swings up and down. So it's not a perfectly straight line from the fall to where we are today. But the major expenditure reduction that staff sees is in the pay go being slightly down. Still a very significant increase recommended. 9% increase is a large increase. Over 10% increase is a very large increase. I just think we got to find something that's closer to where they were. They went up from where they originally started. We've come down a little bit, but I think we need to come down more to be in line with where most residents would expect us to be. So I'm going to respectfully vote against a committee recommendation as I did in the fall. Council vice president, John. Thank you appreciate the background and the work that you've done to be lower than what I voted for before. So that's always nice. What would be the operational impacts? Could you just speak a little more about versus where? Prince George County versus nine and nine point eight. So if we were to go down to nine point eight, the main area that would be impacted would be Pego. And that would have the long term impact of having us defer some of our capital projects. Like maintenance, we can be more specific because I think what you said is very jargonny and I know that, but I just want people to understand. And you said it was a perfectly correct answer. I understand it's interesting, but I just think people need to understand it. It is a big increase. But they need to know that we're paying now, we're paying later what this impact, what this means we would be delaying. Yes, so again, we have reset our replacement targets. And so by reducing pay go, it'll impact the plan that we have in place on certain projects which have historically been underfunded. We've realized historic breaks this winter. And that's just the sign you heard about of what was going on. And so if we don't, if we have to change our current plan, it really relates to the projects and I think Chief Engineer is here just to discuss some of that further. Good afternoon. Kavil, Stenberg, Wilery, Acting Chief Engineer, WCC Water. Thank you for your time this afternoon. So as our CFO mentioned, a lot of or infrastructure is in dire need of repair. And so when we don't get to them or don't attend to them in a timely manner, you do see what we experienced this past winter with the significant breaks. They're also on our sewer side. We have significant sewer backups and the residents do feel that directly. What they may not see is some of our internal operational needs or facilities or depots, they have maintenance needs that we have historically deferred. And with the not getting the rate that we've requested, we will have to defer those even longer. There are equipment that our team needs in order to operate effectively and efficiently. Those have been deferred and we have to also defer some of those to subsequent years. So the impact will be directly noticed by the communities but also internally with our workforce and how we're able to accomplish our work. So it's slowed down the pace which you're able to address things that need to be repaired. Absolutely. And obviously when it breaks it costs more to deal with it then. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. I'll support the 9.8. Thank you. Councillor. I appreciate those questions and I think we need to drill down a little bit more, especially over what we know happened over this winter. How many water main breaks were there within the system over the last 12 months? There were approximately over the winter season as well. We really track it. I think there were approximately, it was about 1700. So about 1700 breaks. And how do we repair those breaks? Those were done by emergency. And how do we fund those emergencies? We funded that through. We have a part of money where we plan for emergencies. But again, since the rate of breaks was higher than anticipated, we had to pull from other sources. So the rate is directly tied to our ability to fix water main breaks? Yes. Yes. We should not be playing politics with clean and safe drinking water. Nobody likes rate increases, but the rate increase here is the result of a number of different issues. First and foremost, it's aging infrastructure that has to be fixed, full stop. Secondly, it's because there's greater water efficiency in our community as we build new buildings, as we get new taps, and you get new appliances. There's greater savings, which means that there is less money actually going to WSSC on a per capita basis. And the confluence of that drives up this rate. And it is something that I know not only WSSC is dealing with, but water utilities across the country. There are conversations in the NAPLIS about rethinking WSSC as I bought by county 100-year-old agency. There might be ways to rethink this. But at the end of the day, this is needed to have safe and clean drinking water, and unless there's another way to come up with the funding for it, I'm all ears. Thank you. Thank you. I, Council Member Nailie Fangazas. Thank you so much. This winter was horrible. I got so many phone calls from so many different people without water for days, not an hour, not two hours, days. And it's because we are living through an agent infrastructure that needs attention. This is not I may want to increase the fee. This is we have to increase the fee. These I see clearly based on what I'm hearing, based was happened based on what's happening in my own neighborhood. Glenmont, Asping Hill, Virsmill, Corridor, it's it was chaos. And I know that it's a sea my snot must not love me because I know I call you guys so often in a desperate mode and you don't want to hear me in a desperate mode. And you guys were there for me. But the struggle is real. I also represent the county council in Cox, Water Quality and Policy Committee and Miss Kisha Powell, she's always there in every single meeting and we talked about this regionally. So it's happening here, but it's also happening in DC, it's happening in Virginia, it's happening everywhere. So I am in support of the committee recommendation because I have no other choice. This is it. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Brownman. Thank you. Appreciate all the comments from colleagues. I was on the record supporting the committee recommendation before that hasn't changed. I guess I'll just note a couple of things. One is all of these fees obviously can't be looked at in isolation, which is at a long conversation this morning about a potentially proposed increase in our income taxes. And so our county residents are feeling increases both proposed by government entities and sister agencies, as well as the stress that they're feeling with the cost of inflation and everything else that everybody's having to go through. So I just wanted to put this particular increase in context. It is painful, but I do think it is necessary for all of the reasons that were discussed last time and again briefly this morning. But I do think that just as we have requested transparency within our Montgomery County public school system I appreciate the great work that WSSC has done to increase its transparency, but I would just urge you to increase the usability so that when our residents feel the pain of this increase, they can at least see very clearly and plainly what this increase is going to pay for. And that will help soften at least some, not all, but some of that blow. And to know that it's also part of a broader strategic plan to increase capacity and infrastructure to keep pace as a region, I think will be important. I did have one question. And this is a similar question I've asked of executive branch agencies across the board, but since you're here, do you anticipate any cuts to our federal government funds impacting WSSC at this point? I know it's a moving target, but are you concerned about any of those projected reductions to capital projects at the federal level? So we don't receive a significant amount of direct federal grants for our projects, our capital projects at the federal level. So we don't receive a significant amount of direct federal grants for our projects, our capital projects. What we do and what we're looking at is our state-revolved funds, because Maryland Department of Environment gets that from the federal government, so keeping an eye and monitoring that situation, because we have approximately 250 to 300 million in the war, and so we're looking're looking to see whether there's gonna be an impact in the new loan applications that we go into in FY26. So we're in discussion with them and monitoring that situation. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Mink. Nobody wants to do increases when people are struggling right now as alluded to. At the same time, we do have a responsibility to ensure that critical services are able to move forward and our residents expect that of us. And so we have to be willing to make some of these difficult decisions. So, you know, that's true in the rest of the budget and that is true here. And, you know, appreciate that we're coming in a little bit lower than last time. We have this conversation, but noting that it's not going to be much easier for residents. But this is a responsibility that we have, and this is also one of those investments where if we don't make the investments now now it's going to be more expensive very quickly down the road so I'll be supporting the recommendation. Thank you council member Katz. Oh, sorry council member Leakey. Thank you. I like council member Freedzen did not support the higher rate last time because it seemed quite drastic and I thought we could Find a more a more middle ground closer to where our colleagues in print shortages were I also agree with what Councilmember Fanny Gonzalez said right we don't really have a choice and I think that's what's hard in all of this for the residents too. Obviously, everybody wants clean drinking water. Everyone wants to make sure the infrastructure is safe. But when you have an overwhelming amount of things going wrong and then they say, it's like, okay, yes, but now you're going to pay more to fix what you should have been getting already. If that makes sense, understanding that, of course, all these repairs cost a lot of money, right? But to the customer, to our customers, they're going, well, why is it then now that we endured what we did in the winter, but now we have to pay more to get what we should have had. And that's the pain point, right? And also, and to council member Glosses Point, who chairs the T&E committee, this is happening in other jurisdictions too, where the infrastructure, because it's all around the same age, is starting to fail at higher rates. You know, what plans does WSSC have to convey this in very straightforward plain language so that, like, folks can understand. And to what extent have extreme temperatures of the more recent years contributed to the structural problems that our water and sewer systems are having. So I'll take the first part about the communication with our customers. What we have started to do is specifically with the CIP. We have, I think right now we've scheduled about six outreach programs just to discuss with the community what our CIP is and what we're doing and some of it will be directly linked to that community. We've had several projects which have been ongoing and because of some difficulties we realize that we can't just go to the community and say that look this project has been ongoing and it's been delayed for a couple of years We realize that we have to tell them what's going on and why it's happening And that way there's a linkage to what we're spending and what they see in right because not every community sees a broken pipe or has an impact from a broken pipe and so those customers also need, they'll have newer infrastructure or more reliable infrastructure. So we need to let them know that it's a system-wide event. It's not just community-backed community, because we don't receive revenue by community, we receive it as a system. So we're doing a better job in really letting them know what our plans are and what we'll be doing. So those community outreach programs are really important. and then I'll turn it over to Kaville for the question about the age of the structure. Sure, and I'll add to the communication. With each project that we are putting forward, we've also implemented a new process where we're trying to get to the community earlier in the design process. So one that they are aware that the project is coming and how it benefits them. And then if there's an input that they want to provide in terms of how we're executing the project, they can provide that. We can also build on or listen's learned. So if they experienced another project and there was some negative impact to them, and they'd like to raise those concerns with us again, we can have that documented and ensure that that gets considered into how we're executing the project. So in terms of communication, we're doing a lot to try and make sure there's visibility on what we're doing and how we're doing it and how it benefits the communities. We're also working on improving or in your neighborhood website that shows all of our projects. It shows the location and the scope and it provides information on timeline. So that's a useful tool that the community can also utilize to know what projects are in their area and how it will be impacting them. In terms of how we are looking at just reducing, the impact of the agent infrastructure. We do have a department within WCC that is looking at or infrastructure and resilience and climate change. And so we're not just trying to be reactive with the water membranes, but we're looking at how we can optimize or infrastructure, how we can monitor and track any potential deficiencies and be more proactive in how we address those. So we are looking at those aspects as well. There is a team where just, you know, not quite there as yet. And thank you both for your responses and I know they were tied to the projects, like projects themselves and thank you for that. I think one of the things that I'm trying to get at here is my ask because we'll all get calls and comments from our constituents about the increases, right? So what I'm trying to get at is sitting here today, recognizing that hindsight is always perfect. Can, you know, does WSS say, hey, you know what, maybe we should have increased the pace of certain maintenance or refurbishment of things previously that would have mitigated potentially, maybe not. Some of the more increased emergency things that are going on now, and this is our strategy for the future, like those three things, owning kind of what had been acknowledging what was this past winter, because everybody was pretty familiar with that, and it was on the news every day, and most, if not all of us, were impacted by it. And then this is how we have been strategically adjusting for the future to take us in a new direction. So I'll start in there tonight if Tim wants to chime in. We have a very robust asset management program that we are also expanding and they will be looking at some of the questions that you've just raised. One of the things that we've had to do historically with, of course, limited funds is target the worst of our assets, right? So those that are in the worst condition. And so that's been our approach. You know, unfortunately, we we try to address the worst and then, you know, right behind are others. With limited funds, we just couldn't do everything within the pot. Previously, one approach that there is is to look at the worst assets and then the surrounding assets. We're also trying to balance that with the impact to the community. So, a there already one thought is to just go ahead and do the surrounding assets that might be maybe not as critical condition but right behind that. And it's cost effective. It's cost effective or do just target the worst assets and then you may have to come back in a year for the others right behind it. So it's an assessment that we're looking at internally through asset management and as I mentioned they've been recently expanded so we are looking at those questions. Thank you. And one thing that we're doing is that in FY26 we're going to have a master facilities and master planning contract. So we're going to have a vendor really go out and make an assessment in conjunction with our engineering department and then make the recommendation of how we address some of the other plans. Because historically it's a 1% per year replacement target so that every 100 years you refresh. Right. And that's what all utilities try to do. But then there are times where it's difficult to reach that target because you have areas that you don't control, such as permitting and various other requirements. And so by having this formal plan developed in a place, we'll be able to adhere and then really communicate to everyone what the targets are and keep ourselves honest by broadcasting that information. Great. Thank you. All right. Councilmember Katz. Thank you, and I'll try my best to be brief. This is not cosmetic choices. We need to do this and that's what is very necessary. For the new materials that you'll be putting in for the infrastructure itself, have they improved over the years? I mean some of this infrastructure that's there is at 50 years old, how old are some of the pipes that you have to replace? So the ones that we're replacing a lot more now were in the 60s. A lot of our recent projects were installed like in the 1960s and we're replacing those the 1950s. So yeah. Are the materials were the materials better than were the materials better now? They're better now. So we are we're using updated materials, different coatings to help reduce the rate at which they deteriorate. So there have been improvements. So that's one thing too that we're doing differently. And you know, every day something is being, there's a new technology that we're assessing to see if it will be beneficial for our use in our infrastructure as well. And for the seventh, I think you said 1700 breaks that you in an average Winter how many how many breaks do we normally have? And I you don't have to be exact I think it is around the 800 mark So this was so this was twice as twice as bad. Yeah No, there's no choice. We have to do it. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I will say living in the Tacoma Park Silver Spring area, I get, and I know you all are very responsive to it, but just got another alert right now about a break. And I know I will say having worked with WSSC almost probably going over 10 years now, I just, improvements have been made in terms of responsiveness informing the community. And I know as Council Member Luke, he says we can always do better, but I will say that, especially under General Manager Powell and all of you over the last few years, there, I have seen a market difference in the communication, the responsiveness to residents. And so I just, and so I just wanted to say thank you very much. I know you're, you're dealing with a lot. So I think since we have some council members who may not agree with the committee recommendation, why don't we split these three items? Ms. LeChanko, let me know if I do this correctly. The first one is committee recommendation was to concur with WSSE Waters proposed 2.5% increase in the system development charge for FY26. This, we will take another action on this later in mid-May, but all those in favor of the committee recommendation on this item, Please raise your hand. And that is unanimous. Then we'll take a straw vote on the next two. And these are the ones that we will go to our counterparts in Prince George's with. The first is concurring with WSSC's proposed FY26 operating budget expenditure and also the proposed 9.8% rate and fixed fee increase for FY26. All those in favor with the committee recommendations on those points, please raise your hand. And I have one, two, three, four. So it's one to ten. Ten to one, sorry. On that. All right. And thank you so much for your patience today. I know you've come back to us a great deal and we really appreciate the ongoing collaboration. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. All right. We have one other item and then we're going to break in our afternoon session. We've bumped to 130 to give us a bit of time. The last item we have is the Washington Suburbit Transit Commission. I think Mr. Kenney is coming down. I don't know if Chair Glass, if you have anything to speak to this, so should we just turn it over to Mr. Kenney? This is pretty quick. The T&E Committee sent it to full council with our own deliberations because it is a relatively small, regional item. So I'll let Mr. Kenney explain. Thank you. So this the Washington, this is another one of those by county items that you all will review with the Prince George's County Council on Thursday. So this is your opportunity to look at it prior. This, the Washington's Wurper Transit Commission sent us over their approved administrative expense budget to the amount of 536,923 of which 167,845 is the Montgomery County's share. This represents actually a decrease of of about $6,000 in the total administrative expense budget and an $816 decrease in Montgomery County's share from FY25. Any questions on this? No? All those in favor? The recommendation, please raise your hand. And that is unanimous. So we will take this to our bio-comedy meeting on Thursday. As the clerk previously noted, item eight, Office of Emergency Management, Homeland Security, and item nine, Fire and Rescue Service, have been rescheduled for Thursday, May 7th. We will now be in recess until 130. Thank you, everyone. That So a lot of people we had 15 employers and over 700 registrants and that expo went way past four with our work sessions on the FY26 operating budget amendments and amendments to the FY25 to 30 capital improvements program. First up, we have our technology and enterprise business solutions. Thank you all for your patience in waiting. And we're going to take up agenda item 10 through 13. So this includes the Tabs budget, the device client management, non-departmental account, the telecommunications, NDA and the Cable TV and Communications Plan. The Government Operations and Fiscal Policy Committee had a very good work session with TEBs, and I just, I do want to thank Director Roper, Ms. Randolph, and the whole team. We raised a number of questions that were responded to and asked the team to go back and look at where their ways to reduce some of the line items in thinking about how tight our budget is. And colleagues, you'll see on page two of the packet, the decrease that Tebs came back with. It's a $784,000 decrease in the original budget that was sent over to us from the county executive. And I just want to say thank you so much for taking a look at these numbers again. In addition to that, another item we had questions on was the laptop replacement and folks can look at the information we received back from Tebs on that and appreciate the deep dive and explanation of why we do our laptop replacement on the timeline that we do. In addition to that, we had a pretty robust discussion about the cable fund and how that was displayed in the packet. We are still waiting on information regarding that from Finance and the County Attorney's Office. That has no budgetary implications. So today we can take a look at the committee recommendation to accept the reductions that tabs had put forward and to accept the tabs budget. So I don't know, Dr. Turegas, if I missed anything or that's good. All right, Director Roper, did you have anything to add? All right, colleagues, any questions or anything? All Well, all those in favor of accepting the committee's recommendation on this and the tab's budget, please raise your hand. And that is unanimous. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you. I know we did. We worked hard. The next budget we have is the Department of General Services FY 26 operating budget. And Mr. Mia is coming down. And director Dice it's good to see you back. Congratulations for the graduation. One down. I feel good. So in general, the budget for general services, the Department of General Services was pretty straightforward. The one question we did have that was outstanding on this budget was the request for an FTE to move from doing some contract services. And to look at that some more and think about whether or not that was appropriate to move to the FTE given the budget constraints we've been talking about or leave this under contract services and possibly to come back to us at another point since you can extend this contract and it runs through February of 2026. And Director Dyson, I don't know if I, oh Mr. Mia, did you have anything to add? Or just, all right, turn it over to Director Dyson. What you considered at the request of the committee. We'll continue with the contractual services recognizing the fiscal constraints everyone's facing at this time. Okay, well we appreciate that. And so with that, the committee recommends the Department of General Services budget. Any questions? Council Member Lutgey. Just wanted to thank you. Had a bold reminder this weekend is only community celebrated its annual only days events and just wanted to thank you all for your commitment to the civic space, the community building there and for being good partners in that work along with our state delegation. Thank you. Terrific. All right. Well, with that, all those in favor of the committee recommendation for the general services budget, please raise your hand. And that is unanimous. You all are done. All right. You're going to graduate soon, all right? Leave Greg in charge. Yeah. The next we have is our Fleet management services FY 26 operating budget and the FY 25 to 30 capital improvements County vehicle County fleet electric vehicle charger station CIP and I will turn this over to the T&E committee chair council member glass. Thank you. The T&E committee voted to approve the operating budget as recommended by the executive there are No other additions reductions or changes made by the committee Terrific misdemeaniel anything else all right director dice or anything all right all those in favor of the T&E committee recommendation, please raise your hand and And that is unanimous. All right, thank you all. Thanks. As noted, we did move the least NDA to Friday, May 9th. So that brings us up to the Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation, MCEDC's NDA. And I will turn it over to the chair of the Economic Development Committee. Thank you so much, Madam President. I am so happy to see the evolution of MCEDC. I think the entire Economic Development Committee can say that we have seen how, especially the board of MCEDC has truly stepped it up and has also recognized that there were challenges happening and they're doing everything in their power to amend those challenges. As everyone knows, MCEDC is looking for a new executive director. And it is very important, especially today, when we want to do everything or power to attract more jobs and retain the talent that we have in Montgomery County. It's very important to have a strong Montgomery County economic development corporation. And for that to happen, we need to attract an amazing visionary to head that organization and for that to happen They do need to have a I'm not gonna say strong because here we're just meeting your your needs right now I'm gonna say a workable budget so you guys can do what you're supposed to be doing So the economic talent committee agreed with the proposed enhancement that brings MCDC closer in line with their actual spent in recent fiscal years. They did request an additional $450,000 as the committee said, no, because we just can't afford that right now. And with that, I'm going to pass the mic to the Council staff if they have anything else to add. OK, no. Yeah. Great. Any comments from folks at MCEDC? Are you all good? All right. Any other comments? Seeing none, we have a committee recommendation for MCEDC's NDA for their FY26 operating budget. All those in favor, please raise your hand. And that is unanimous. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming. All right. Well, next up, we have department environmental protection, recycling and resource management. And I think they're coming in right now. All right. It compared to this morning. Sometimes it's hard to tell. Director Manger, you guys can come up. We're just waiting for Miss Sola-Chango. Okay, we'll just take a breath. It's always good to do. I'm going to put it on the top. you you you I'm sorry. you you Okay. We are ready to rock and roll and to spend the afternoon with the Department of Environmental Protection talking about recycling and resource management and we will also take up the FY 26 solid waste service charges. So thank you for being here today, and I will first turn it over to Chair of the Transparency Environment Committee, Chair of the last. Thank you, Madam President. Appreciate your work and that of Councilmember Rebalcom over the last few weeks, sorting through the various items at the committee. and this was certainly a large item that for everyone's situational awareness, we had a very in-depth conversation, but recognize there were so many different moving pieces and so many budgetary implications. committee decided that it was most important for all 11 members of the council to engage in this conversation with DEP and staff so that we can all have a full understanding and the exact same briefing about what this budget means and what it does. And the budget does contain sharp increases in DEP solid waste budget. And as the department will tell us, those rate increases are largely driven by short-term maintenance costs at the resource recovery facility, otherwise known as the incinerator. And early investments in a long-term waste facility, which is post incinerator. And the fees that have been proposed by the county executive are not small. These would increase from $631 to $1,400 for small businesses and $310 to $419 for single-family homes. And as the theme of today has been, all of these things are not in a vacuum. They're all in this budget, all the different pieces that we've discussed today, and that's why it's important we talk about this. The committee, I'm not gonna speak for the department, but the committee spent some time sorting through what the fee increases mean, where the different funding will go to, and the answer is it goes to different things. And we'll have that conversation in a few moments. But ultimately the discussion we're having today has implications for how we collect our trash today, how it gets picked up, sorted, and disposed of. And it has implications for how that is done years into the future. This is not an insignificant conversation. There, as I noted, there are a lot of moving parts, and I appreciate all of our colleagues being here. I hope everybody engages and has a thoughtful conversation because this is complex. And I appreciate DEP and OMB and Council staff for working with all of us, getting us up to speed on what this discussion means. And I will turn it back to you, Madam President, to kick us off. Great, thank you so much. And I will turn it over to Ms. LeChenko. First up, I think it might be helpful to, as noted in the packet, there were some areas where the committee did conclude its work and make recommendations on certain areas of the budget. So it might be helpful to dispose of those first, literally, before we get to the main issues that Chair Glass mentioned. First, of course, to highlight this budget is a part of two enterprise funds, a solid waste collection fund and the solid waste disposal fund. So the impacts from decisions made in these do not impact general fund discussions of affordability or the reconciliation list or things like that. So it's important to keep that in mind. However, as noted, there are significant solid waste service charge implications from this budget. But just as I note on page two of the cover sheet in the staff packet, first with regard to the solid waste collection fund budget, the county executive had recommended a 5.3% increase. And that entire increase was really based on increases in the residential refuse collection contracts, which are increasing basically because of some inflators that staff can talk about if interested. But otherwise, there was actually a slight decrease for technical adjustments and there were no ads or enhancements in the Solid Waste Collection Fund recommended. So it is truly a same service's collection fund budget. Now this budget is much smaller than the disposal fund side of things which we'll talk about later. But I did want to note there that the committee did concur with the county executive's recommendations with regard to the Solid Waste Collection Fund budget. Regarding the Solid Waste Disposal Fund budget, here we do have that big increase that chair glass alluded to, a 30.6 percent increase. Now interestingly here, we also don't have what we're calling service enhancements per se. It's providing a same level of service as assumed in FY 25 to continue in FY 26. But you do have several large increases noted. Most notably the one that Chair Glass referenced, the short term, capital maintenance and repair work for the resource recovery facility. That originally came over in March as a $35.5 million line item. And it's important to note that is current revenue within the Solid Waste disposal fund. So, although we use the term capital work, it is not assumed to be funded with bonds. So that 35.5 million is the FY 26 recommended amount. And so that does have, that 35.5 million has an impact on the associated charges that cover that. And as we can talk about in a minute, DEP has noted that this work represents the work needed to allow for the safe and reliable operation of the RF through the contract extension period of April 2031. The rest of the Solid Waste Supposedly Fund Budget, if you were to remove that piece, that $35.5 million, and set it aside for now, the rest of the solid waste disposal fund budget is increasing by 5.7%. And apart from the RF short-term capital work that the committee felt did require further discussion, the committee did not raise any other issues regarding the other changes in the disposal fund as part of the FY26 budget. Now the other important thing to note is there is a CIP amendment that the executive transmitted back in March. This gets to the future discussion that Chair Glass is referencing. The executive transmitted an amendment for a new material recycling and biological treatment facility, our MRBT facility. And this amendment would initiate the planning and design work for that facility. And it included $12 million a year in FY 25, 26, I'm sorry, 26, 27, and FY 28.. Now once again this money is assumed to be disposal fund current revenue. So once again the current revenue will hit charges immediately. Unlike bonds which would be spread out over many years and the debt service would hit the charges. In this case you have the full impact of that. So the $12 million in FY26 would add on to the $35.5 million that you heard earlier regarding the RRF. So as Chair Glass mentioned, you really do have three things that are impacting the charges this year. You have the, what we may call the sort of the more normal or routine increases that are experienced in the Solid Waste disposal fund, but then you also have this big bump in maintenance and repair costs for the RRF that begin in FY26, but then there's also some noted by the executive needed in 27 as well. And then you also have this, the initiation of this CIP amendment going forward as well. So those three elements combine to generate the large increase in the charges that we mentioned earlier. The other thing I will note is DEP has is in the process of working with a consultant and a report is expected to be issued soon that looked at the long-term alternatives for waste disposal. So in terms of the big picture going forward, the council will be getting that report soon. And staff does suggest that the T&E committee and the council take that issue up in terms of the long-term disposal issues at the council as soon as possible after budget. And the sooner we can get through that, I think the sooner we can then also deal with the capital amendment projects. Staff had suggested that the committee defer consideration of the CIP amendment because it is focusing on the future disposal alternative. But the council has not had the benefit yet to debate those different issues or discuss or receive a briefing even on those issues. So staff had suggested that the CIP amendment itself be deferred. The committee seemed amenable to that of the 24th session, but of course we're meeting today and can talk about that further. I think with that I'll stop for the moment to see if Chair Glass wants to move on to some more specifically to the charges or further discussion of where we some of the issues I just brought up. Councillor Pregnancy. Thank you, Mr. Lentchenko. First I just didn't know if director of DEP wanted to have any opening remarks or anything or should we, I can turn back to Chair Glass and we can start with questions. Happy to defer to the Chair. Chair glass, you're up. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Olvchenko and again, thank you, director Munger and DEP. So complex discussion, and I think it's important to start with some of the baselines as to the fees that have been proposed, recognizing they go towards different goals. Director Munger, can you explain the differences where the fees are going towards and what those project goals are? Sure, thank you for the question and thanks to all the council members for your intention on this important issue. My name is John Monger and I have the privilege of being the director of the Department of Environmental Protection. Happy to join you today. Chair glass, it was summarized nicely by Mr. Leopcchenko in his summary, but in terms of what's driving the fee increases today, there's coping amounts of information in your packet, specifically on Circle 49, which is the last page of your packet. But Mr. Lovechenko correctly summarized the charge categories, and as they're laid out on Circle 49, they note that the vast majority of the increases in the fees are dedicated to maintaining the current collection systems. And that includes critical repairs of both the Transversation and doorwood as well as the waste energy facility in Dickerson. It also includes inflationary increases to contracts and labor. As you'll see on Circle 49, those are both noted in the blue columns. It also includes a much smaller amount for advanced waste processing technologies, planning and design, as was mentioned in the summary. So you're able to see there the breakdown of how much of the charges are attributable to maintaining current collections versus future facility planning and design. And you can see across all of the relevant categories, the amounts are the vast majority of the amounts are dedicated to maintaining our current collections. Thank you, sir. I forgot to mention earlier, the 35.5 million dollar RRF costs, which were originally transmitted in March, was amended by the executive in April and that number was reduced a bit in FY26 to 28.5 million. So that number went down a little bit. The overall amount that would be assumed for the RF projects did not change. DEP was able to find some savings in FY25 to help reduce some of the FY26 impact and also spread some of the cost which was only in FY26 and FY27 to FY28. So that also was able to reduce a little bit of the burden on FY26. So the numbers on circle 49 reflect the amended RF costs as transmitted by the executive the the 28.5, no, and not the 35.5. I appreciate Circle 49 being in the packet so that everybody can look at it, really important to look at it, but let's dive a little deeper into that. So according to that information, a single family home would have an $85 increase, a fee increase, if the county executives' budget were adopted. Of that $85, $35 would go towards inflationary increases. $42 would go towards repairs, or as it notes here, critical repairs for the incinerator, And $8 would go towards repairs or as it notes here, critical repairs for the incinerator and $8 would go towards future planning. Director Manger, can you break those down and speak more specifically about those different components? Absolutely. Thanks for the question, Chair Glass. So as you all well aware, we have an integrated waste system here in the county, which includes facilities in multiple locations, the transfer station in Derwood as well as the waste to energy facility in Dickerson. So I want to note that when we're talking about the column that's designated critical repairs to operational safety and reliability, we're actually referring to projects both at the transfer station in Derwood and at the Waste Energy Facility in Dickerson. So the $42 for example that you see designated for those repairs for single family properties is inclusive over repairs at both sites. So when we talk about the types of projects that's making up that particular column, I'll give you a few examples here. But I think the primary thing, which I've had the chance to talk with most members about to date, and I know is really important as we're thinking about the path forward here, is that the projects that we're talking about in that column are fundamentally necessary, simply to maintain a viable MSW system in the county in the short term and failing to approve funding for the projects that are listed here risk service disruption. So to give you just a few examples of what types of projects we're talking about we're talking about things like boiler water wall tube replacements cone replacements for scrubbers and And these are essentially projects that are both fundamentally dedicated to the reliability of the facility, the safety of the facility, and these projects are also designed to reduce environmental emissions coming from the facility. When we're talking about the transfer station, I want to note that again, for context, typically very high volumes of waste are processed through our transfer station up to 600,000 tons annually. So at the transfer station itself, there's very complex and large and also expensive equipment. That's dedicated to make sure those volumes continue moving. So for example, there's a series of compactors, which compact the MSW in order to to transit it and we've had a series of reliability issues with those. So again, the repairs that we're talking about, the transfer station are limited to those that would allow us to maintain a viable system in the short term. When we're talking about the inflationary increase to contracts and labor, I'm sure that's no surprise to you all, but we're seeing increase in our contracts across the board, including labor, including inflation adjustments. There's a series of contracts which underlie our MSW system, and we're seeing increases in them across the board. So those are reflected in the smaller amount you see in the blue column to the left. You also asked about the future facility planning and design facility. So as was mentioned in the summary, this would be as requested in the budget $12 million in FY26, FY27 and FY28. And this would be for planning a design of technologies, which would allow us to remove things from the waste stream that shouldn't be in the waste stream. That have value that the county can market and it would also allow us to extract organics from the waste stream in order to reduce the emissions that would come from the waste stream. We're going to keep diving deeper into these numbers here. So the $35 increase for single family homes. So I'm just going to keep it to single family homes. There's multi-family and businesses as well, but for continuity, keep it to single family homes. The $35 for contracts and labor, that's non-negotiable. That has to be done cost of doing business just like we supported labor contracts and we support other inflationary costs. It is what it is. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. I mean, as I noted, you'll note that that columns actually know which of the costs are dedicated to maintaining current collections. that's inclusive of but not limited to that column. So essentially what we're talking about in blue including that column is simply just to make sure the system keeps operating. Okay. Because there's staff, there's other things that we have to deal with. The second item is the what you've deemed critical repairs. You said that that fee is split between the transfer station and the incinerator. Can you break that down a little bit more? Sure, so to give you a sense of the breakdown and the projects there, and as Mr. Lipchenko was noted, in April, we did send an amendment over which was able to reduce the amount of FY26 dollars requested for these repairs by $7 million. The breakdown of the remaining total of $28 million is approximately $25.3 million for critical repairs to the waste to energy facility and just over $3 million for repairs to the transportation indoor wood. So it is overwhelmingly going to the incinerator. Like 85 90% yes 25 of the 28. Yes, okay. I'm a lawyer, so I won't do that in my career. Councilmember Cads had his, I hope I don't have to. He had his calculator out as he was following the map. Yeah, yeah. I'm already out, so it's okay. But so it's that time of day. So about 90% of that going towards the incinerator. Why would we invest that much money into a facility that we hope to close in the next few years? Sure, thank you for the question, Chair Glass. I'll probably start to sound like a broken record at some point, but I want to underscore that perhaps a little bit of context for how we got here. And, you know, essentially the county is at no point looking to pay for projects, which we do not need. And I think when we talk about the list of projects that we're talking about today, both in Derwood and in Dickerson, we're only talking about the projects that we do need. And so the answer to your question is, we need them to maintain a viable MSW system. And that is, despite the fact that we are in the process of transitioning away from that system, we still need a system in the meantime to work to process the significant volumes of MS. I'm still be you that the county has. It's been said to me that it's like investing in an old car that you know you're getting rid of, but you keep throwing money into it despite knowing a few years you're going to sell it or it's just going to fall apart. Is that a fair comparison? I'm hesitant to extend that analogy, understanding the source of that analogy. I think it's essentially to pull on the thread that you're getting at there is these are essentially repairs that are necessary to maintain the viability of the system. So I think whether you're talking about a car, whether you're talking about another piece of equipment, I think the important thing to layer onto any analogy that we would choose to make is that there's not an optionality here. So I guess if you were going to extend the car analogy, you would have, you would be in a situation where you would be needing that car and you would be needing that car until you could get another one. But in the meantime, you would have to repair the car you have. I hear you. And then last question before I really want colleagues to ask that last column, the future planning facility. The county executive has said that he wants the incinerator closed and that has been a pledge. And many of us have made for a number of years except it's waited until now to offer up a solution. And it's not even a solution. It is a funding method towards a solution that the council has not been briefed on. We don't know anything about what the facility would look like. We don't know the capacity or quite frankly the plan. But yet we're being asked to increase fees to support this. Can you explain that a little bit more? Sure. Thank you for the question, Chair Glass. As with any significant project that would be expected to take a number of years, this would be for initial planning and design funding. And when we're talking about these technologies, you know, a very simple way to think about them, it would essentially allows us to sort our trash dream and pull things out that shouldn't be in there in the first place. However, in order to start the process of planning and designing that, we would need funding to do that. And that's why you see a limited amount included in this budget, $12 million for FY26, with the same figure in FY27 and 28. So, from the initial analysis, which we've had a chance to share with TE members, and welcome the opportunity to discuss with the broader council, we understand there's significant emissions reductions that could be realized from adding these technologies on to our waste stream. And that's the genesis of the request before you. Thank you for all of your thoughtful responses. I have other questions, but want to open it up to colleagues. Thank you, Council Member Fanny Gonzalez. Thank you so much, Madam President. Thank you to the department. You guys will great work and I always love working in different projects with with all of you. I to me this is very simple at this point and I'm gonna just agree with the staff recommendation. I understand the need of the increases and for me actually my favorite page of this whole report is page five, even if anybody wants to follow. Now I lost my page. Page five, there you go. You see the beautiful chart right there with the Approve FY25, the Connect Executive recommendation, and then the County Executive amended recommendation. For me, There's no way I can approve any fee increases, not knowing the plan. Okay, so for me, the last column that you see in that chart, the very last one that says no MRBT, that's my option right there, which basically means if you go back to page number to not to the CIP amendment on the MRBT just because we're not ready. I need to be briefed, I need to understand the plan. I do not agree with trackings or sending or trash to another community, dumping trash to another community. That's something that I know has been discussed. At some point, I just can't tell you, yes, I agree with $12 million now and then $12 million for the future and so on without understanding what that means for us. I agree with you that they are certain fees that we need to keep the machine running because of certain critical aspects of it, right? But that doesn't mean that I had to say yes to the CIP amendment that you're proposing here. So which I think goes alongside with what Mr. Lanchenko from staff, Council staff was saying. So if again, If we look at page number 5, I will say no to the MRBT if at some point did I? I just if you'd like I could I could briefly explain the structure of the chart so that the rest of the council sort of understands what you're pointing to in the last column. So this chart is looking at the Solid-Waste Service Charges that the typical customer in a sector would pay. And you have the single family in sub-district A. So in sub-district A,, single family homes get their trash collected through county contracts. That's very different from sub district B where they're responsible for either contracting them through themselves or through an HOA but not through the county. So that's the distinction between the sub district A and B. Then you have the multi family and once again, they don't get the same level of services that the So that single family get and then you have the sub-district A and B. Then you have the multi-family, and once again, they don't get the same level of services that the sub-single family get, and then you have the non-residential. So those are the four main sectors shown here. The left column has the approved FY25 charges based on the services that those sectors get. Then the next set, or the next line over, is the CE recommended, this is the March recommendation. So this shows the equivalent charges if you were to approve the original March transmission by the executive, and then it has the percentage increase. Then the next line over, you start to get into what you called the CE amended. This is the April Transmittle that we got. And this has the reduction in the RRF costs basically in it. That the $7 million that Director Monger mentioned. So that plays out a little bit here. Then I have what I call the base. And I couldn't come up with a better number for it. This puts aside the MRBT and the RRF just to show if we weren't dealing with these short-term costs at the RRF right now, what would the typical increase be for all the other things that tend to happen from year to year in the fund? And so you still see a pretty significant increase just in the base alone. But then I have the one on the end, which is, as you noted, where Council staff was, which is, well, the RRF costs have been pretty well identified and gone through and now gone through again as part of the CE's April amendment. DEP has made a pretty good case for the work that is needed there to have the facility remain operational and within its permit guidelines and everything else over the next five years. But the MRBT project is new to the council. And we know we're going to be getting this alternatives analysis that will allow the council to look at some of the things that Director Manger mentioned, the emissions reductions, operational benefits, also the unit costs, the per-ton cost that we're going to experience, under any option going forward. We're going to have capital costs, we're going to have ongoing operating costs. Having a discussion of those and the major assumptions that the consultant had to choose from in order to make their analysis work. And where do we go from there? I think that's going to be critical for the council to hear. And maybe they will ultimately agree with the MRBT or maybe they'll want to go with another offer. Oh, maybe we don't. That's why I don't want to vote on it. So we don't know. The one caveat I will say, and this is the challenge with solid waste charges, is they appear on the property tax bill. So the council gets one crack at the end of the year, which is May. So whatever we do in May, we do have to live with for the full year. So to the degree year to reduce the charges based on not assuming the MRBT project, absent some found money elsewhere, then we would be returning to that project next year. It would not be something that we could approve to move forward during FY26. So that's the one caveat I wanted to note with this, that the charges can't be adjusted in November. That's why you're just probably my point. I feel some comfortable saying yes for now. I don't understand, if that's actually the plan that we are going to read on. Right. We don't know. We don't know. Thank you. Thank you. And Mr. LeCheng, just to clarify, thank you to Councilmember Panicazales for pointing out the chart on page five. And we were also looking at the chart on page 49, which is basically the same information just displayed. Yes, it's very similar information displayed differently. The $85 number you heard in Circle 49, that does appear in this chart if you were to do the subtraction of two relevant numbers. But there were intended to show slightly different things. I just want to make sure everybody is clear that those two charts are showing the same thing just in different ways. Right, and we'll say the solid waste disposal fund rate model is complex. There's a lot of puts and takes, not just expenditures and revenues, but they also have financial metrics they have to meet. There's rate smoothing over time and fund balance issues and all that. So whatever we do as part of this budget, we will then have to reset the rate model appropriately for that. And then if and when the council does come to a conclusion on long-term disposal options and perhaps future capital projects, that would then have to be inserted into the rate model to understand what the future impacts would be. Great. And if I can just jump ahead and follow up on it, Councilmember Fannie Gonzales at this point, if we didn't include, and I'm going to look on page 49, the column that have future facility planning and design for Director Monger, if you could speak to that so it's the light shaded green and it would reduce the fee for the single family home for eight dollars multi-family by four and the medium generator non-residential by 85. What would be the impact of not doing that? Sure, so yes, you did the math right, they're council president. You know, the impact of not doing that would essentially be we would be delayed and implementing that by, you know, as was noted based on the calendar at minimum a year. So I think that's just the way the calendar functions and as you all understand the implications of that, but it would also mean that we would be unable to implement those technologies in a timeline that as currently envisioned would allow us to do so and parallel with transitioning away from the current MSW system. Understanding that those technologies would allow us to do so in a way that would reduce our emissions significantly. I guess I'm trying to we don't really have a plan yet, right? We have the starts of a plan to move us. And so I get I'm trying to figure out the delay of a year if we haven't heard a plan yet, a fully formed plan from the full committee. And I know there are ongoing conversations. So I'm just trying to get my head around. Can you continue planning for the next year and solidify that, or does not doing this part of the fee kind of frees you all from even doing any planning moving forward? So that's, I guess it's because what I'm hearing from you is not that we're ready to implement anything. We're not ready to implement anything or get work under, you know, happening. It's we're still in this phase of figuring out what the plan is. And I guess that's what I was trying to figure out with this portion of the fee. Is that needed to continue to do the planning? Or can we based on your budgets and what you have? Can we continue to do the planning? And then come back to us when we have a solid, well, no pun intended, solid plan to then be able to figure out how much money. Because I just wanted to pull a little bit, I'm like, Councilmember Fannie Gonzalez was talking about because it, so that's the distinction for me. Like, what is this money really going to? Because if you're saying it's going to actually doing work and everything, well, we all just said we're not ready to do the work because we don't know what it is. But if it's to go to something else and if we don't have that, then none of the planning happens, that's what I kind of want to know. Sure. So thank you for the question. The figure that's represented in the budget is in fact to fund planning and design work. So, when you're talking about a system as large and complex as the one we have here in Montgomery County and you're talking about transitioning that system, funds are needed to plan and design alternative systems. And that's what the funding request for FY26 you're seeing is here. And just to dive a little bit deeper on what that looks like because I think it'd be helpful context. The way the work would be structured would be essentially we would be entering into a short term contract with a vendor to help us to plan and design the project moving forward but the contract we would be entering into it this juncture with this limited funding would be limited to planning and design what's called a what's called pre construction services. So it wouldn't quite be jumping in the pool as much as it would be getting in the water so we can get be getting ready to swim if that analogy works. Maybe it should go back to cars. Yeah, okay, back to cars. But the point being, the funding is needed given the complexity of the transition we're talking about. Funding is needed to actually plan and design the transition. So not having the funding to do so would effectively prohibit the ability to do so in any in-depth way. Thank you. Council Member Baltham. Thank you. I want to thank you and your team for these discussions. I know that it's been difficult and I appreciate you reaching out to colleagues. So when we were in the Teeny Committee, the Teeny Committee did not make a recommendation on this because we did not want to make a decision that the full body would rely on when we simply don't have all the information. So just as you have questions, we also had those questions. And so I think it's just important to know how we ended up having this discussion now. I feel very frustrated and I've shared this that we're having a discussion of this magnitude right in the middle of our budget deliberations. And the reason that that's happening is because of the timing of the decision to shut the incinerator. We had the county had to make a determination because of the contract. The contract is up April 2026. But we've known that for a very long time. And so to wait till the year before to request funding, I think is just terribly unfair to the body to make a decision, as I said, of this magnitude in the budget process. So I just wanted to share that with colleagues. I've said that a couple of times in the T&E committee, and I just wanted to reiterate that. So just a couple of questions, the repairs. So, and I accept that your assessment that the repairs are necessary for the functioning of the incinerator. So why weren't the repairs made all along? And why are we stuck with, and it's, is it 64 million, the total amount of the repair, 61 million? I've tried to just do the math. Thank you. So, thank you, Council Member, for the question. So working backwards from your multiple questions. So the total amount, and I just want to underscore again, these are for repairs both in Derwood at the Trans-Restation as well as in Dickerson, given that both are critical pieces to our MSW system. So the total over the FY25678 for repairs at both sites would be 66.4 million. And that information's in your packet. And then coming back to your previous question about the schedule of repairs. You know, I'll provide a bit of context here, but some of this and I'm sorry for those of you on Te. This may be a little bit repetitive, but as you know, in recent years, the county and its consultants have been evaluating alternatives to the system we have, including costs and timing to implement an alternative MSW management system for a system that manages nearly 600,000 tons of MSW per year. It's a complex multi-step project. And in other jurisdictions, transitions of the scale can take a decade or more. But as you know, we've also strived each and every year, including this year, and now including by virtue of the efforts we've made recently to reduce FY26 costs as much as possible through schedule adjustments and through funding repairs with FY25 funding. In previous years as well there's been efforts to make sure that costs have been kept as low as possible for rate payers and essentially by not making repairs and replacements necessary beyond what was critically necessary prior rates in previous years were able to stay at the levels that they were at but consequently at this point moving forward repairs are necessary to make sure the system continues functioning so I understand And that's, well, I guess I'll just take a step back and say, you know, it's, this is an issue that jurisdictions nationwide grapple with. And for those of you who have been reading up on it, there was a recent quite long article on the Washington Post about how Miami-Dade was assessing its options and having to move between waste systems. And, you know, at the end of the day, these are significant amounts of waste that are being generated in county and expenditures are necessary to make sure there's a system that can process it all. So, you know, I can't, I guess what I would say about the FY26 budget is that this is a representation of what it's gonna take to do so moving forward. To your question of could the expenditures have potentially been done sooner? Yes, they would have still had significant prices associated with them, just given the nature of the volumes that are in play here. Okay, thank you. And then from the perspective of the charts on 46, 47, 48, the rate increase that's being proposed right now, is that for all of the repair or just the repairs in FY26? So before us at the moment is FY26 repairs. Right. So if we look at 27 and 28, we're going to be faced with a similar rate increases in 27 and 28. Maybe not to the magnitude, but we still have another 21 million to go in 27 and 28. Well, actually more than that, probably 25, 24, 25 million. Yes, so the relevant six-year fiscal health projection was included in the March budget transmittal and includes the numbers you're referring to council member. But at this time rates are expected to continue to increase slightly not solely because of repairs needed but also because of as we've discussed before increased space and debt service costs are also factored into the rates. OK, thank you. And then last question, maybe not the last question. The transfer station. Are any of these related to the closure of the incinerator or is this basically what needs to happen at the transfer station? So I'm going to let my colleague, Willie Wainer, answer this question, who oversees the recycling and resource management division he can speak more in depth on the transfer station repairs. Thank you. Thank you, John. Thank you, Council Member, for a question. Yeah, the transfer station, these are not repairs per se. This is the, these are replacements of equipment that has reached the end of life. For example, compactor number three, we have four compactors that process trash at the transfer station. Each one of them costs about over $3 million. And this compactor, first of all, transfer station was inaugurated back in 1982. And these compactors are over four years old. And they really reach the end of life. One of those compactors was replaced a couple years ago and now we have three compactors that are about four years old with a lot of maintenance and a lot of downtime to the system. 3.5 million dollars out of the close to $9 million in replacement at the transfer station is due to this compactor. And the rest is either refurbishments of rolling equipment, like loaders, and that are also reaching the end of life. So those are all a piece of equipment that we're gonna be using no matter what type of equipment, no matter what type of system we get in the future, we will need these pieces of equipment at the transfer station. Okay, thank you. And then my real last question. The, I appreciate the comments from Council President Stewart. So the planning and design and the question of we haven't decided what design of what. So how much would the planning be versus actual design of a system that we haven't yet seen. I'm not sure I totally understand the question council member. So I understand that you need that in order to determine what or come up with a proposal for what we're gonna do with our solid waste for the foreseeable future. There is going to be planning dollars, design dollars, construction dollars, right? So in your, suggest your proposing 12 million for the next three years. So if we're just looking at planning and looking at what the system is going to be. That's different than design. I would assume that the planning costs are significantly less than the design cost. So according to the engineer estimates that we've received, the expected value of the work that would need to be done over the next three years in order to move as quickly as possible towards subsequent development of the project is $12 million. Planning would obviously come first. So you're right in assessing that these will be different phases of the projects. As I mentioned, it would be done through a cooperative reconstruction services agreement during which the county would be working very closely with the developer who was engaged for that process and it would initiate with planning but the $12 million would be the necessary funding to initiate that work this year. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Councilloron. Thank you. Thank you to the last two to Council President and to Council Member Bauchum. I've crossed a number of my questions off. I'm going to do a slightly different line of questioning here. The first just to play off of what was just shared, the issue with The pool analogy is that we don't even have a pool yet. So the idea that we're deciding just to jump in the water or testing out what the temperature is like or deciding what kind of water we want, salt or chlorine, cleaned or whatever, we don't have a pool. We don't even have an idea of the size of the pool. We don't know how much the pool is gonna cost We don't know where the pool is gonna go necessarily You know exactly on what parts of the land is it you know going to be built concurrently Next to and then phase out I mean we just we just don't know the answer to any of those Questions and you all are doing everything that you're being asked to do so So this is in no way a criticism of you. But I think what you're hearing is a frustration that the county executive has been railing against this and been talking about getting the county out of the incinerator a view that many people share if and when there is a viable, reasonable, equitable alternative, but has not done anything to move us in the direction of actually getting out of the incinerator up until this point where before there is a plan, before we know anything of what the intentions are, how much it's going to cost what we're committing ourselves to, and what the impacts are going to be, costs and social impacts. We're asking residents to pay huge fee increases. And that's just a real difficult thing for us to grapple with. And it is frustrating that we can't take a step back and just have outside of the butt. real difficult thing for us to grapple with. And it is frustrating that we can't take a step back and just have outside of the budget process a briefing on here are five options that different jurisdictions have done. Here's how they worked. Here's how much they cost. Here's how long they took to implement. Here's how they face from one way system to another way system. And then a plan over the next five years of how we're going to move forward with it. So that's just a lot of the frustration that you're hearing in terms of the, in terms of the repairs. How do we get there? I'm just a little bit concerned there's two elements of this essentially. There are the critical repairs piece of it and just the cost that all of a sudden snuck up on us somehow. And then we have the $36 million, $12 million over three years for you know a new plan that we're asked to go in blind essentially and just take it on trust that we're going to be moving in a direction that all of us would be comfortable with, and not really knowing what we're committing ourselves to beyond that, which is an open question in an area of concern that I have that I know is shared by others. How do we get to the critical repair point? Point, I you mentioned the 40-year-old compactors at the transfer station. We replaced one of those a few years ago. How do we pay for that? You know, didn't we know that some of these critical repairs were going to happen? And some of it is at the transfer station, but as you noted, the overwhelming majority of it is at the incinerator. Is this just, we didn't wanna take seriously, the needs at the incinerator because we were hoping that there would be a plan to get out of it, but no plan ever emerged, and now we're finally getting around to actually moving forward, and so we've neglected it for the last seven years. I mean, how did this happen? How do we get to the point where we have these massive increases? And now it's a no optionality here, regardless of what you would like to do, regardless of any choices you wanna make, we're asking residents to pay huge fee increases to cover these costs. How did that happen? Thank you for the question, council member. So as you noted, the county is committed to closing the incinerator and shifting to an improved MSW system. In recent years as I mentioned the county with the support of technical consultants has been evaluating alternatives to the system that we currently have in place including and as you noted there's a number of considerations cost and timing to implement those systems. So as I noted previously transitioning a system of the scale of the system that we have here in Montgomery County is a complex multi-step process and at the same time for obvious reasons and we've heard that from the Council today there's not a huge appetite in making investments in a system that we are been doing in the last few years. We have been doing serious and serious and serious issues that we have been doing in the last few years. the county has avoided making repairs and replacement beyond those that are necessary in order to keep rates relatively low. However, regardless of the system transition, the county in the meantime, as I noted earlier, needs to make sure we are funding the system simply in order to keep it operational. So the investment and repairs that we're talking about today, again both in Derwood and in Dickerson, were included in the FY26 budget because they are the minimum projects that are necessary to keep the system operating and safely and reliably moving forward. So did the county executive department to the administration expect there to already be a plan in place by now and that just hasn't happened and that's why it's been neglected for seven years? I'm just trying to understand how we got here and to avoid what Councilor Rebalkin was noting earlier. You know, are we going to be here in the next few years where Nothing has changed from the point of we still want to get out of the incinerator We still want a plan to move forward you're moving forward with that plan. There's not a lot of interest in putting money into a An outdated car, you know if we're going to go back to that analogy, to keep it running for as long as it's needed, what's changed? Because it's not clear that there is a fundamental change now from what has taken place before that's going to avoid these issues moving forward. So I'll just maybe you don't have for that, and I understand, but that's still a little unclear to me. I did want to ask in terms of the services and who is paying for them, the multifamily, the residential and the non-residential, I just want to pin down a multi-family property, a sub-district B property and a non-residential property. What services in terms of waste are they getting from the county that they're paying these fees for? Because I know sub-district A single-family homes are getting essentially full services of their trash pickup as far as I am aware. Can you just explain what multi-family properties, subdistrict B properties and non-residential properties are getting in terms of what's considered based services? Sure, so thank you for the question, Council Member. So the services that are provided to residents across the county vary on where you live in the county. And the waste generation rate for each sector via multifamily, single family or non-residential is based on the share and the rates that each sector pays and it's allocated based on the percentage of waste generation. So the short answer to your question is that the services you get from the county depend on where you live. And as you noted, services that might be available down county are not available in other parts of the county. Some residents receive leave collection from the county. Some do not. So it really is localized based on where in the county you reside. Okay, so just to be clear, sub district B, just as an example, what exact services are they getting specifically to pay for these base fees? Sure, so when we're talking about the base fees, these are fees that apply across the entire county, regardless of the unique services you're receiving from the county. That's essentially why we call them the base fee because they're base services that fund essentially the equipment that allows us to have a way system in the first place. You're really good at answering these questions. I give you a lot of credit. I just want to be clear though, to synthesize it down. Subdistrict B, what is the difference between what subdistrict B gets in terms of trash pickup, for instance, and subdistrict A? Sure. I'm going to let my colleague, Vicki, want answer this question because she can tell you a little bit more localized and Vicki also lives up county so she can talk to you about her experience receiving county services. So the rate is broken up by the base cost and then your packet actually, Mr. Lefchenko did a really good job about pointing out the various costs Related to the systems benefits charge. Yeah, yeah, I understand the cost. I'm just trying to hone you on the services Because we've been talking about this is the cost of doing business and this is what you pay to get your trash picked up right But if you're in sub district B are is your trash getting picked up by the county? So the cost increases really to the base system, to the infrastructure charges. So all the county residents will pay in properties where they've made this base. Whether you're getting your trash picked up or not. Whether you're getting your trash picked up or not. If you are in sub district A, you have another $160 tacked on to your bill for the collection service of trash. But at the end of the day, you're paying base costs for recycling, for the infrastructure. But the largest fee is on the base. The base. Yeah, so there's a huge fee increase that's being charged, including to many folks who are not getting their trash picked up by the county. They're paying into a broader system and admittedly, they go to restaurants and they, you know, create waste and other places besides their homes. But I just that's not how it's been discussed and I just think it's important that we acknowledge and note that what we're talking here is the base fee, which includes folks who are not getting their trash picked up at their home or their place of business. They're separately having to contract that out. And they might be paying more for that too. So I just think that that's important. Is the same thing to a multi-family and non-residential? Sorry, go ahead. Well, I answered your question. The residents in sub-disc would be, as you're pointing out, don't have trash collected by the county. They do have a recycling, I believe, by the county. That's not the most expensive part of the system, just collecting it. The residents in sub-disc would be, my material is still going to the transfer station. It's still going to the incinerator. They still have to pay for the cost to operate those facilities. That's what this is in benefit charges. Understood. And same is true of non-residential and multi-family. Correct. And multi-family just to everybody's clear, multi-family includes condo, co-op, owner, units, and rentals. Non-, because sometimes we call commercial properties, different things, non-residential in this case would be like an office building or retail facilities. That's correct. Just to be clear of that. Okay, last question, then I'll yield back. You mentioned earlier that there's been a lot of work happening, it just hasn't been shared with the public, it hasn't been shared with the council, in terms of all these plans and ideas where the county executive would like to go with this. Part of the reason why you feel you're ready to move forward with planning and design. One, I'm not sure I fully got the answer to Councilor Balkham's question of why couldn't we separate out and just move forward with understanding what the scope and the magnitude and the options are, which seems like the less expensive part is opposed to the design and architecture and plans, which seems like the more technical and expensive and nuanced part, why we couldn't split those out and why we have to commit to all this today, which is frankly blind, as we talked about without a whole lot of information. Number one, and number two, you mentioned that work had been done already, which means that it seems like it wasn't paid out of the fees, unless I'm mistaken. It was paid somewhere else in the county budget, maybe the county executive's budget, maybe your budget, but maybe it was paid out of the fees here. But if you could explain how the work that was done to this point was paid already and why there wouldn't be similar funds to move forward at least with an initial phase of this so we can understand, you know, for instance, just four or five options of other places that have done something similar. You talked about how jurisdictions all over the country are dealing with this. Everybody's got waste. Everybody has to deal with that waste. Everybody's looking at transitions, the climate dynamics and the impacts on communities are not unique to us. If you could just walk through that, that would be helpful. Thanks for the question, council member. So the work that's been done to date is limited analysis that was funded to the FY25 budget. It was $3 million approved by council last year and that was also paid out of the solid waste fund. In terms of, you know, I think one of the themes that I've heard from members today is that there's a number of questions that need to be answered about what this transition would look like, particularly what the new technologies would look like that have the promise of allowing the county to reduce the emissions from our waste stream significantly. And the truth of the matter is, is that if we without funding put towards that work, we won't be able to develop the type of planning that will be necessary to answer all of the questions that we're going to need to answer as a county. So it's a little bit of a check in a next situation, but if we are not able to actually start the planning process, we won't be able to, we won't have resources or the ability internally to answer the types of questions that we're going to need to get to as we move forward with this conversation. And to the question of could the work be tiered out and would that result into translation into a translation and reduction that's not our understanding at present. But to the extent that there was a desire to consider tiering the work differently, we could certainly have that conversation moving forward, but I want to underscore that if there's no funding we won't be able to move forward at all We'll be helpful to know what level of funding would allow you to move forward with a initial phase of planning to at least understand what the options are You know, I'll note the three million dollars that you mentioned for the very cursory, you know It sounds like a lot of money for you know what we have so far, which is not a whole lot that's been shared with us, but that would have covered the full cost of the transfer station, critical repairs that are absolutely no optionality at all. And so I think there is some prioritizing here that is a bit of a challenge, but if you could share that with us, the appropriate time would be helpful. And I also think it would be helpful for us to understand what if any capacity there would be within the DEP budget with DEP personnel to take on at least some of the initial part of this. You just understand what our options are, what other jurisdictions have done, what the scope and the magnitude would be because I feel like we're very early on in this and we're being asked to commit to quite a lot. It's not just the $36 million over three years, which already sounds like a lot for planning and design. It's, but would probably be hundreds of millions of dollars of an entirely new way system, which is just a major question for us to grapple with and it's impossible for us to do in, you know, six weeks during a compressed budget schedule under the wire. Thank you, Madam President. You can't remember how many of us. Thank you. Well, I hope there's something stiff in that Yeti director Manger. So let me just say how much I appreciated the conversation that you and your team had with me a week ago. Many of my questions were answered then. I was very skeptical of this fee going into that conversation. I appreciate the questions and comments from colleagues. I think the fees sadly particularly in the category of addressing the immediate needs of the incinerator are the cost of doing business for better or worse given the circumstances. I do associate myself with the comments of colleagues particularly in that the MRBT category mostly just we're at a position right now because of the conversations we've been having about the current status of the world. Anything we can do to provide relief, immediate relief to county residents who are having to pay additional WSSC fees, we're discussing a potential income tax increase. I mean, people are being hit in every possible direction. And so to the degree to which there are things we can control that ease some of that pain, I think we should actively pursue. I guess I wanted to focus on just two questions, one that hasn't been asked yet. And this mostly gives you an opportunity to uplift this issue since we're in a public space, but did get some compelling letters from our hospital association regarding their concerns about this increase fee and the impact on our hospital system. I think they estimated that just the increase alone would cost more or less the cost of a new MRI machine, which is obviously substantial. But as you explained to me, the way that policy is currently written, obviously those that have more trash pay more. But could you talk a little bit more about that, particularly for those industries that have been hard hit by current times and why there's not much relief we can provide them at the moment. Sure, thanks for the question, Council Member. So, yes, the, as I mentioned earlier, to provide a little bit more of context about the Raid structure here, Montgomery County, which is set in section 48 of the County Code. The waste generation rate for each sector is used to determine the share of the rates that each sector pays. So what does that mean? It means the base expenses are allocated to each sector by their respective waste generation percentages. So the more waste you generate, the more you pay to fund the system, that process is that waste, which sounds quite logical. But just to dive a little bit deeper, so what that means is that when it comes to the non-residential sector, it's a formula-based allocation, which there's more detail in your packet, but essentially, the fee for the non-residential sector is calculated using formula. That includes the gross floor area, i.e. the size of the facility, and how much waste they generate there. So space and volume of trash. By contrast, the way the rate structure currently exists for both multi-family and single-family, those are flat rates for each of those sectors. Thank you, I appreciate that. So if this is something we want to tackle moving forward, it would have to be addressed in the code. That's obviously not before us. I'm not proposing anything right now, but it is something we're gonna have to think through moving forward, particularly as the fees potentially continue to increase. My last thought is more of a comment. So DEP directors have been looking at this issue for 20 years plus and everybody has been trying to figure out a way, particularly under this administration, of finding a viable alternative. And nobody has been more aggressive than this county executive through his appointed DEP directors and finding solutions. And there hasn't been one that's been identified in part because there is no silver bullet. And there are costs and pros and cons associated with every respective angle that we look at, but it's all going to largely be predicated on it, significantly minimizing the amount of waste we each produce, both collectively and individually. And then and only then are we going to have more options and viable options moving forward. So this has been kicked down, the can has been kicked down the road for a long time. And now we are coming to a head. And so now it falls under your responsibility with where the bouncing ball has landed at the moment. And I do believe you are doing your best to make do with a difficult circumstance. The failure of the current system would be catastrophic and it's not something that we can even play with. And so I understand why it's important for us to continue to make these types of repairs to just maintain the level of system that we have. So I will reluctantly support the fee increase relative to the improvement of the incinerator, the ongoing maintenance of the incinerator and the ongoing projects. But I agree with Council Member Fanny Gonzales just saying that publicly regarding that last category. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Kats. Thank you very much, Madam President. And thank you, Director Munger, and your entire team. Just to put a finer point on the B area for I'm in that area. I have a private hall. The city of Gathesburg does not pick up trash. See, Rockfield does. And I do pay a separate recycling fee. I pay a private, so my first question is does every private hall that picks up in Montgomery County, do they have to bring the trash that they picked up to the Montgomery County facility? I'm going to let my colleague Willie Wayne respond. Thanks for the question Council member. So the base fee contains also the tipping fee for the transfer station. So everybody in the county could bring that material. You said could bring. Could bring. Yes, but the question is, do they? There are some private companies that decide to internalize that volume into their own facilities outside of the county. But if they choose to bring it to the transfer station, it will be free for them if they are paying that base fee. But that but now first off, anyone that would go to the transfer facility that doesn't use a private hauler just takes their trash and takes it it to the tree. They're already paying that fee anyhow because that's when they're tax bill. Correct? That's correct. That's correct. So, but a private hauler doesn't necessarily have to use your hour facility. The second question is, what do other jurisdictions charge for this type of service? Thanks for the question, Councilmember. So, it's a difficult question to answer because many surrounding jurisdictions fund their solid waste programs through means other than a system-benefit charge like the one we have here. So it's difficult to compare. But we have done some comparison and I'll let my colleague Kiley Lawlaker speak more to the comparison that we've done as we compared other counties. But it's not an exact one for one just based on the funding structure. Okay. Hi, so just looking at the one that is sort of the most similar to the way that we handle it in terms of the funding structure. We did look at Prince George's County and so they have separate fees for non residential and residential properties. For non-residential properties, they charge a fee per square foot, again, depending on low, medium, or high generator categories, so sort of similar to ours. Our fee is based on each 2,000 square feet. So if you multiply it out, it does appear that their non-residential fees are higher than ours. It would be about ranging from about $10,000 per 2000 square feet for a low generator to 35,500 for a high generator. So it does appear the non-residential rates in Prince George's County would be higher than what ours or would be under this proposed fee increase. The residential system benefit charge is in Prince George's County is $35.49 per unit. So that's lower than what we're proposing. But again, it's difficult to do it direct comparison because the differences in the way their fees are structured. Well, you're saying that it's lower than what you're proposing. You're proposing an additional, I just lost that chart. The $35, or is it on 49?49? We're suggesting that that would be an additional $85 for a single family. And you're saying they're charging $35? Yeah, just for their system benefit charge, they also have additional charges for Refuse Collection, just like we do. Well, and I understand that part, but just for the system, just for, it would be like comparing B to B, then they're charging $35, and we'd be charging an additional $85, which is 27% more than when someone is paying now. So that's, would that be another, someone in Montgomery County would be, what is being suggested here would be paying close to $400, $350 for single family trash just for the system itself. Am I wrong on that? No, that's correct, but I'll just note that it's an integrated system with charges allocated across sectors that obviously add up to fund the total system. So if you're looking at residential, single family, multi family, and then commercial as well, if you pull the lever down in one of those categories, the lever has to come up in another one of those categories because of the costs of the underlying system. So I think what was noted is that there may be, there's a delta of an increase between the non-residential rates, but a delta of a lower in the residential. So I'll just note that in both cases, it's funded by different revenue streams that are structured differently. And I appreciate that that's a confusion. But the bottom line is that we're saying for 2,000 square foot commercial. Well, most grocery stores, especially anymore, are around an acre, which is 44,000 square feet, or 60,000 square feet or whatever. So just the additional, and he caught me, I was looking at my calculator, but just for the additional for a grocery store, the additional for a grocery store in Montgomery County, the way this is being proposed, it would be about $16,000 more per year for that grocery store to be in existence in Montgomery County. Guess who gets to pay for that additional fee that they're paying, it's the person going to that grocery store? This is, to me, what we have done is put the cart before the horse. We don't have all the information. And I appreciate that you have to have the, whatever it is, the $35 for the inflationary in contracts. I understand that. But for the critical repairs, the question is what's critical and what's not all of the All of the trash that is picked up whether it's single family whether it's multi-family whether it's meeting You all of it goes to the same place Every part of it. It's not unless they decide that that a private hauler's not even bringing it to us So I I have tremendous concerns with this I. I understand we need to have trash pick up. I understand we have to have trash pick up. And it has we have to have a place to put it. But I as far as I'm concerned, I believe we need to look at what is the possibility of having the least amount of repairs that can be done so that we can get to a major conversation on what's the next step rather than say, let's spend $63 million over five years and then get rid of the system. To me is absolutely illogical. I understand you're in a rough spot, but to me, that's an absolute illogical system. That's where I am. Thank you, Madam President. Thank you, Council Member Luki. Thank you, Madam President. So taking everything in that everybody's been saying, and of course as we had an earlier discussion about the incinerator earlier this spring, and I note that Councilmember Fannie Gonzalez raised, I don't like making my trash other people's problems, and I was really, really direct about that because that was what, in fact, had happened. Where I grew up, because where I grew up was where other people's trash came. Because it was one of those communities that didn't have a lot of pull as they say, right? And so and I understand that this has been in the works for some time to try and find a solution to closing the incinerator, but also I feel like there is this hyper push right now, and that is adding on additional fees here in the form of the planning and design aspect of this, which is the column that I, too, have concerns with, and I'm not interested in advancing, mostly because, and somebody did say concept of a plan, and I actually think that phrase was used by somebody who's down the street in a white building and I don't want to fund a concept of a plan and I do want to know what the three million dollars that was funded in FY 25's budget. did that bias terms of this process? Because I think that's really important for the public to know, and we're, you know, we have less than 60 days left in this fiscal year. So can someone speak to that? Sure. Thank you for the question, council member. So just to sort of, I think, separate your question into two pieces, both of which are important and I appreciate you raising. So the future design planning work that's underway and for which you also see a budget item requests in the FY26 budget, would as I as I mentioned be used towards planning and designing and advance waste processing system for the county. Initial analysis around that work was completed with the assistance of engineering consultants in FY25 and that analysis is what we have at this point and what gives us a sense of what the technology holds for counties like GARs. It also gives us a sense of where it's operating elsewhere, how it works, what type of diversion rates you can expect to receive in terms of what you can pull out of the trash streams. So I just want to note that when we're talking about that work, we essentially were able to use a much smaller amount of money granted still significant funds in order to do analysis around this work and how it compares to our existing system so that we have a starting point to understand that technology as it compares to what we have and as it compares to other systems. That funding is separate in a part of what most of the budget requests we're talking about here today in terms of dollars is, which is more, you know, the larger dollars that we're talking about are about critical repairs for systems continuity. Is that, but I want to make sure I'm answering your question. No, I understand the chunk of the fees that are related to the repairs of the existing, you know, fully appreciate that we have to keep the incinerator running, presently, because there isn't an alternative. We don't have another solution. We aren't in that phase of it yet, right? And I guess, you know, part of it is, is 3 million, did the report for the figuring out the advanced weeks processing system and comparing it to other jurisdictions that have it versus what we have now? Is that what costs 3 million dollars? So, so part of the funding was used for reviewing multiple alternatives that that are reflected in that report, but we've also conducted an assessment of environmental factors feasibility here in Montgomery County because there's site specific determinations i.e. what exists in another part of the country or another part of the world might operate a certain way we need to have an analysis about how how that would work if we were able to do it here in Montgomery County. And additionally, because of the number of contracts involved with any type of systems change, there's a procurement process which needs to be followed. And as part of the funding was also used to assist with the development of the procurement, the procurements that would need to come as part of this process. of this process. So those are some of the uses that have been put to use from the FY25 funding, but it's not limited simply to the report. Okay. So in terms of like the, it sounds like a portion of that funding was used to figure out how to do procurements for whatever it is you're going to come up with that would need to be, how do you, how was the money spent on figuring out how to procure a thing that hasn't been identified yet? Yeah, so it's a good question, right? And we talked a little about the chicken and egg. And so I mentioned earlier that the mechanism through which the county's planning to proceed with this work would be through what's known as a pre-construction services agreement and that essentially would allow us to enter into a contract with an entity that would work with us in the years leading up to the construction of that facility so that we would be actually working hand and glove with that contractor to answer those questions because as you said like it's if this is a this is a this is a technology that exists elsewhere in the world but is not is not widespread yet and so we do need to do that work on the front end but the way we would do that would be through the pre-construction services contract. So we would actually be doing that with the help of a contractor, given what we're talking about in terms of scope and complexity. Right, okay, so it exists somewhere else in the world. And for purposes of this, we're talking about, we'll call it green column on circle 49, right? Since we haven't referred to the page numbers in a while, I'll stick with the council presidents, circle 49. So green column 49 is a thing that exists in other places in the world and could provide some good functionality here in the context of whatever it is we ultimately are able to figure out and decide on because it is just with respect to this technology is with respect to removing additional items from the waste stream that could in fact be recycled, right? But we don't know what else we don't have all the other questions answered. Yes, we're trying to do multiple things in multiple ways to reduce the overall amount of trash that goes into the waste system by composting, food scraps composting, recycling, et cetera. So my question is, this is one piece of a thing which ultimately the full analysis, once you've figured out your comprehensive plan, may not fit into it. Is that a possibility? So I think your question really exemplified how many aspects of this issue there are council member, but I think what I would offer as a framing for how we can think about this issue going forward is that there's a number of complementary aspects to how we reduce the amount of waste in this county. Sure. And I think about it, I'm a simplistic person, so I think about it in three categories that are distinct. There are source reduction strategies, which are things we can do that prevent things from existing as trash in the first place. Thank you, Council, for your support of the Bring Your Own Bag Bill. So for example, because of that bill, there will be fewer bags that exist as trash to begin with. It never existed. It wasn't built. It was not produced for that purpose because we had a strategy on the front end. Another category of projects that are very important and we're very ambitious with the Montgomery County our recycling program. So that includes all the things we talk about when it comes to mixture cycles, composting and all of the strategies that we have to take things that are in existence and might be in our kitchens already or in our lives elsewhere and do something with them other than throw them away. And then there's the much less fun third category, which is what we're talking about today by and large, which is what about everything else that still ends up in the trash? And that's a tough category when you're talking about a county as big as ours, and it's a tough category as we've acknowledged for jurisdictions across the country. But the reason I think that the technologies we're talking about in the green column are important and will be relevant to the conversation going forward is these actually allow us to sort what's in the trash dream, which none of the other buckets do. So we might stop things from being produced in the first place. We might recycle things, but what this technology would actually do do, would do what you've all thank you take in the time. Those are some encouraging signs from above here. I told you it's not the most fun category. Yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate that. But like my concern is that there is a very real possibility that given the ephemeral nature of the other factors that relate to the whole what is needed, comprehensive strategy to get us to closing the incinerator that it is entirely possible that three fiscal years worth of $12 million chunks a year could get us to a place where ultimately the decision is that's not the direction we needed to go. And now we've spent $36 million, but because we have so many question marks on the other associated pieces, it might not be the thing that ultimately we need to built, right? And that's my question. Is that a possibility that that could happen? So it's a difficult hypothetical to answer, council member, but before the heavens started weighing in and telling me to stop talking, I stopped talking. What I was going to say about these technologies is that they really, they do really operate in a way that is distinct from and complementary to the other categories. So even if we max go full speed ahead on all of the source reduction and all of the recycling, these just by definition operate differently because they would actually be sorting this the third category of our waste stream. And so I know that's not a complete answer to your question, but I think what I would offer is that even with those other categories, this is a complementary strategy that also by virtue of the fact that we'd be talking about a mechanized system as opposed to something that is reliant on changing consumer behavior, which we know is very difficult to do, that it would give us a little bit more, it would give us a more objective path to understanding and realizing what what rates of diversion we could expect from our waste stream because it would be tied to a mechanized system. Okay. The Arcadeus report is that something that the council would be able to have from DEV? Absolutely. So we've had the chance to brief the three transportation and environment committee members but we're also happy to schedule time with the full council individually or collectively to walk you through to walk you through that analysis. Or just like, could we read it? Absolutely. I might have questions I might not. Yes, absolutely. We fully intend to make the report available both to council as well as the public. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you. Just on that note, I think it is important that the council as a body publicly get a briefing on the Arcadeist report. A lot of the questions you raised are the very issues the consultants had to review and make decisions on or write or assumptions about. And that's information that the council really needs to decide whether it even supports MRBT versus another alternative. Yeah, and thank you, Mr. Levitenko, because that's an outstanding point, which is again, back to other colleagues' points. Very hard for us to be making this decision in the context of this budget in a very narrow time period, when this really should have been a longer, fuller, more robust discussion about that specific project, and then go into the budget piece, which is we're kind of doing it backwards. Thanks. Thank you. Council vice president, you're on to. Thank you. I appreciate the robust discussion and all the questions and comments from my colleagues. So, I was I'm going to go on reverse order since the report came up. So the Archaes report is the report that costs three million dollars that laid out the initial potential proposed options about how we move forward with our advance waste assistance that correct? No, the report was funded through FY 26 funding, which was total $3 million, but it self did not cost $3 million, but you are correct in noting that it does lay out an alternatives analysis, which looks at the county's current system for handling municipal solid waste, as well as comparison against alternative systems. So you're correct in that respect, Councillor Byser, President. Our law professors at Catholic University would be proud about the way your answer in question is that you're doing a great job. And allow me to thank you, but allow me to correct myself on that note. I was referring to FY25 funding just now. Yeah. So I was right on what it is, but not right on what it cost. Got it. Correct. Okay. so how much did it cost? I Don't have that total in front of me, but happy to provide that information to the council But a subset it came out of the FY 25 three million dollar funding and I'm happy to follow back with more information on On the contract drawdown the, there's some money left that you would intend to use, where I'm going here for the green section on the thing. What's the remainder, whatever it is, would be used towards what? Would it be used towards the green part of Circle 49, the continued work, what what would that be useful? If there's remaining money in the contract or is it have to be used just with that company for some follow-up? I see multiple mics lit sure so I'm getting a lot of Eager suggestions here. Did you want to weigh in Rich? Well, I'm not sure about what's exact what's left on the contract itself But in in terms of what's going in the 26th budget, the amount the 3 million that was in fiscal 20 by 4, 1 million has been reallocated to try to not have to increase rates to generate another million dollars, and there's a 2 million dollar reduction you'll see in the list of itemized changes, early as shown in the packet and on the page in front of me. That's the money coming out of the budget because they were going towards the $12 million for the MRVT planning. I should also say my name's Rich Harris off in that office of management budget. Okay, you're flying and you can use me more. So the report, you don't know how much it cost but it didn't cost $3 million. That was appropriated in there. Yeah, I'm happy to loop back. I just don't have the exact front of me right now. And I think you were saying there the continuing cost is being funneled back into the prospectively into what, what, what, what did you explain that again? What I was trying to say is that the, the money that was in the budget for fiscal 25, for the fund, the $3 million. The $3 million is not in fiscal 26. Right. Because it was a report. It was a one time cost, right? Right. I just wanted to be clear that it's not an ongoing cost. Understood that. So we are great to know. Because again, we're talking about money that's used to figure out what we're going to do going forward. And so the report that you should deliver to us and to it should have had been delivered to the T&E committee. It's great that they have a briefing but my understanding is they don't have the physical report. Is that correct? So we've shared the the conclusions of the report with the TEE. There's not a substantive amount of information that's yet to be shared that hasn't already been shared, but the formal report is still forthcoming. So the yes or no answer would be no. Right, the report has not been shared. Or that would be yes. The full report has not yet been shared, but the conclusions of the report have. With the T&E members. Correct. Got it. Right. Just to clarify, that's been the T&E members, not a public discussion of the T&E committee or the full council. Right. And so the public would have no knowledge of what's in the report. No. We've also been providing briefing for the County Salt Waste Advisory Committee and those briefings are public and the materials are available online. So there's some information out there. Okay. Well, I just, I would just emphasize that I think it would be great to share it. And so that we can see it because here part of this is an executive versus legislative function here. The executive's role is to do what you're doing to go figure out what to do do, and then to come to us, which is our function, and say, here's the money we need to do x, y, and z. It's hard for us to fulfill our function if we don't have a firm grasp on what you're hoping to do and accomplish. And obviously, there always need to be some deference and some trust and some expertise in that deference to the subject matter experts, which I totally get. And that's part of the function of separation of powers as well. But I think what you're hearing is it's tough to make a decision about raising fees, which in part funds what we're going to do going forward when we don't have a real clear sense of what that is. And I think that's part of the challenge. Now I know we did have a briefing and I thank the council president for doing this. She pushed to make sure that we had a briefing maybe a month or two ago. I can't remember now. but... January. Okay. Several months ago, where we did go over some very general high level, like here's if you had to take it out of town and put it on a train, like you know stuff that was helpful, that was a helpful briefing. And I'm assuming some of that was based on some of the things you got out of the report. Would that be a fair assumption? Yes, and I'm glad you found the briefing helpful. Thank you for the feedback. So I just think we just need more of that. Like we need that we need the report. We need more of that because I don't think you're trying to hide anything. I just think it's just hard to justify to the public the fee increase for that portion when we're not really sure what we wanna do. Now all that being said, I agree a thousand percent, which I think most of my colleagues have shared that we have to fund the maintenance of the current system. We can't not have trash picked up. And as unfortunate as that is, that's the system we have. And we have to make sure that it continues to function until we transition to something else. Now, reasonable people can disagree about how quickly we can do that transition and we've had those discussions as well and we'll continue to have them. But I don't doubt the executive or your desire to move that forward. On the fees themselves, when did we last increase the fees and by how much? You mean all of the solid waste charges? Every year there has typically been an increase in each of the sectors. We're not talking about a 25% increase. Usually it's more, it's three to eight per second. Like inflationary or if you're not using it. And it is varied by sector. It's varied by the type of fee like the collection charge, the refuse fee, the base and incremental charges. So, yeah, every year the council has to consider the charges and pass a resolution to approve the new charges. Typically, there has been marginal increases in the meet year. When's the last time we've had a significant increase like this? Have we had one this large? Not that I can recall in recent years. I mean, that's not to say we haven't had capital equipment purchases built into the fees. Right, that's what I'm going in. But they've been more routine. The transfer station, you know, all the solid waste facilities, they have equipment replacement schedules and those have generally been followed, even at the transfer station. You heard about some of the older equipment, but some of the other equipment has been replaced. This is really unique to the RRF situation in that- What's that argument now? I'm sorry, the resource recovery facility and the incinerator. This is more you need to that not having had significant capital work done probably in the last six or seven years. So that's where you're seeing the catch-up needed. Right. And now there's a looted to by I think director Manger and others that the fees didn't go up as much because there hasn't been the maintenance and repair or replacement at the incinerator for you're saying six seven years. Is that a fair assessment of why we are here today having to be in this position? Thanks for the question council member. So yeah, I think as we were talking about it earlier, there's a logical question which we've heard today from several Council members as to making investments in a facility from which we are transitioning away from. And that same question could, and I imagine, was asked in previous years as well that may have preceded me. But so the short answer is that as we've essentially avoided making repairs and replacements beyond necessary in recent years, We maintain that approach reflected in this year's current budget because the counties in the process and has been of transitioning away from that facility. And so this is in your view, the bare minimum we could do to keep this thing going. And while we transition, so this is, this is the basement number. There's nothing else that you could because it's already been stated. We waited. while we transition. So this is the basement number. There's nothing else that you could, because it's already been stated, we waited six, seven years to do major things. You've already been delaying it. And so you let it build, and you can argue the logic of that approach, you know, some people would say, you know, we often talk about in Pilar and other things. If we want to maintain things something for a long time, we invest over time. So it doesn't get to critical stage of having to replace the compacted but some things are at their end of life and the context of Dickerson. Is this the lowest number you think is there no trimming here left on this number? That's correct. The list of capital projects that is reflected in the FY26 budget, amended budget request, noting that on April 24th, we provided an amendment that reduced the overall request by $7 million for FY26. The list of projects before you right now was narrowed to those strictly necessary to continue the safe and reliable operations of both Dickerson and Derwood facilities. These are the announcements right before the, these are circle 46789 or from six. Yes. That's correct. Yes. So, these are in fact limited to those repairs necessary for safe and reliable operations of those facilities as well as compliance with all permits and environmental compliance requirements. And this will get us to the transition, or you're going to have to come back in following years and ask for more. At this level. Sure, so I believe this figure is in your packet, but at this time rates are expected to continue to increase slightly because there will be repairs necessary in subsequent years as well. It's not just an FY 26 expenditure, but we also acknowledge that our base cost and our service costs are increasing. So those would be reflected in subsequent budgets. I'm sorry, and what page is that on? Keith, Mr. Leopter, where is the out 13? Circle 13. And that's the, I understand there obviously everything costs more every year. The same service costs more each year. We were dealing with that in other budgets, but it won't be this level of increase going forward, right? I'm sorry, Councilmember. Could you repeat your question? So the large increases we're seeing this year, you don't expect to have that level of increase going forward. I'm on central 13 years. I'm just looking at your chart. Yeah, so, um, uh, we mean, so you have 31% this year, 6.5% next year, and you have a negative going backwards after that. Sure. So to orient us, perhaps around numbers, that are the total work. And then I can talk specifically about the increases and how they can, how they, how we can think about them being reflected in future rates. So the amended FY 26 budget request includes $28 million for repairs of both Derrward and Dickerson. We expect those to that figure for again repairs of both Derrward and Dickerson to be present. But lower in the subsequent years, we're look at present. We're looking at $17 million in FY 27 and 14 and a half million dollars in FY28. But I just want to acknowledge that there's a lot of influences that are as was acknowledged by Mr. Levchenko that are factored into when we're talking about what the actual rates end up being calculated as and those include increase to our base costs as well as debt service costs. So it's not only the repairs that will lead to rates, but the dollar values dedicated to repairs in future years would be less. We would expect there to be slight increases in rates going forward, however, due to increase in base costs and debt service costs. Right. Yeah. Just to clarify also, circle is is reflective of the March transmittal. Got it. So the numbers are not quite apples to apples with the amended request. And also the rate model does not include capital costs for capital construction of any alternative right now. So you do have in here in the March Transmittal, there was the MRBT, current revenue assumed and you have the RRF short term costs, but those drop off after a few years if you remember. So if you've already increased the base charges and then those drop off, you're going to see some negative numbers, but the reality is you're going to have a capital project following that somewhere. That's just not in here yet. So that's why it's, you almost need a, you know, you need a tour guide with this to explain what you're seeing and what you're not seeing. But the first thing is this is March. So it's a bit out of date already just because of the amended request we got over. All right, my last question is related to the going forward. I wrote down the quote you said, which I think makes a lot of sense. You know, if we invest nothing in the what comes next, you won't, we won't have anything. So that makes a ton of sense that that you do have to plan into Council Member of the Boulham's point, like trying to parse out what that means. I also took it to say, because you're very careful with your words, that if you got less, you could do something with it. If you got less for the green section, you could do something with it or you already contracted because you kept mentioning this facilities Pre-construction facilities agreement, which I know is a term of art where you hook up with the person you go on a date You get dinner you sign an agreement and they help they help guide you through it. We're using the analogy that you put the record that was not my analogy. Yeah, yeah. So you sign up with a company, with a contractor, and they help you figure out what to do and then they're also a part of doing it. Right? isn't that basically what this is? That's correct. Okay. Do you already have that agreement? No. All right, okay, and you're gonna Is that gonna be like a competitive RFP type process? Yes. All right, and when do you expect that to go out and and why do you expect that to Be 12 million over three years or each of the next consecutive three years? Well, would acknowledge that it's conditioned on funding, which brings us to our conversation today. Absolutely. If you do nothing, nothing will happen. I got that. I think we acknowledge that. So I'm looking to my colleagues for the latest timeline we're anticipating for that RFP assuming funding is granted by Council. Yes. If we get funding for that, I'm sorry, I'm Kayleigh Lollaker, I'm Chief of Zero Ways Programs. I got you. Thank you. So we would look to put out a procurement for that in the middle of calendar year 2025. So this summer. Right. Okay. And the, how much of the 12 million you're asking is that totally encompassing of what you think that will cost? Is that the entire I'm soon and there's some administrative cost. What do you let me rephrase the question? What do you think that agreement will cost that contract with that group that you pick will cost? Why are we getting the $12 million from? Sure, so based on the project itself and engineering us submits that's the enough That's the expected value of the work that would need it to be done in the next three calendar years in order to advance the project so That's based on engineers. It's million is correct. Okay, go ahead. You know keep It's based on engineers. You're based on, but how can you pick that number when you don't know what you're going to do? So it's based on analysis of the overall complexity of the project and the type of work that we anticipate would need it to be performed in order to do planning and design of that type of project for a county of our. So it's based on, and if my colleagues would like to add additional context by all means, but we do have a sense of the types of services that we would need at a high level to execute in order to perform this analysis. So that figure is reflected in the budget request for the next three years. Okay. And I just am trying to understand what would be another reasonable, like is that you obviously ballpark that is that based on other communities are size or I just if because you're hearing concern about the number and what helped me help you and what would be a How could you get the work started come back to us with some more information? But maybe not be as number that would need to increase rates as much because I think that's what you're hearing from folks on that section Sure, and I don't have a number that I could offer you at this moment that would be other than what's in the FY26 budget request, what's in the FY26 budget request is based on what based on the scope of the project, what we, according to analysis, performed by our engineers, think would be necessary to fund the types of work that would need to be done to plan this project. But I don't have an alternative number that I could offer to you at the moment. OK, well, I know we're taking straw votes, and I'll yield now. I just hope that you could potentially come back with something before we're done here, because we're actually not even doing it. We're not even taking both first. We knew this was going to be complicated. So you do have time. I am 100% for all the improvements. we gotta do it, it's not great, I don't like it, but we have to do it, because, you know, not only is trash collection and... I mean, you do have time. I would, I am 100% for all the improvements. We got to do it. It's not great. I don't like it, but we have to do it because, you know, not only is trash collection and the fourth most deadliest job in the country, it's also something that you need. And so, but on the other part, I think reasonable questions have been asked, particularly by committee members who have been dealing with this a lot longer about how you're going to spend that. And is there another number given all the pressures of rates and taxes that are going up that we could potentially start the work because we don't want to do nothing, but that would help us to you know kind of slow down the rate of increase this year. So thank you, thank you Madam President. Thanks. Before I turn to my next colleague, and maybe it's just, we've been talking about this almost too long and now I'm getting confused. So I want to clarify one thing. As Council Vice President Joando is talking, we have on page two, there's a CIP amendment for the $12 million. And that's in our CIP. That's separate from the money we'll get from the fee increase. No, it's separate from the operating budget. Okay. So it does not show up in the operating budget numbers, but it's the same funding. It's solid waste disposal fund current revenue. So it hits the charges in a similar way. Once again, the rate model factors all that in when determining the rates. Just wanted to double check. Council member glass. Thank you very much. I appreciate all the thoughtful questions and engagement by colleagues, particularly those not on the T&E committee who are having this conversation really for the for the first time and again extend my appreciation to DEP for helping answer every question to the best of your ability because it is confusing. I want to I want to go back to the conversation about subdistricts and and subdistricts A and B, and frame it I think in the way it needs to be. The Fee about subdistricts and subdistricts A and B, and frame it, I think, in the way it needs to be. The fees that are being proposed are not necessarily for trash pickup, but it's essentially trash disposal, and it doesn't matter which subdistrict one is in. Is that a better way of thinking about it? That's correct. As Mr. LePchenko correctly and artfully explained at the front of the conversation today. We're talking about the disposal fund, the collection fund is separate. So any distinction between sub-district A or B is a distinction without a difference, really. Because it's a resident, a property owner, a a homeowner who is paying a fee to have their trash disposed. This is the system's benefit charge which applies across the entire county. Correct. Okay. The inflationary and contract cost increases. Just want to go back to that. I know I asked about that in the front end, but just wanna accentuate a point. Our trash collectors, they're unionized, correct? That's correct. Okay, it's important to fulfill their contracts and obligations, just wanna state that for the record. Another point that has been discussed, but not really elaborated on. We talked about the how DEP during the budget process you had introduced an amendment changing the fee increase from 35.5 million to 28.5 million is that correct? And that's coming from the sale of electricity from the incinerator. There were two ways that the county was able to work at the direction of the county executive to reduce the FY26 rate impacts by $7 million. Four million of the $4 million was, as you noted, council member, able to be funded from FY25 using a crude revenue from the sale of electricity. For those who aren't familiar, the waste energy facility generates electricity, the sale of which generates revenue. And then $3 million was able to be moved to an out year and thereby avoid them from being in FY26. So that's an aspect that hasn't been discussed the sale of electricity from the incinerator and I'm not so much interested in the electricity generating aspect but the sale of the electricity, how much does the county or is it the incinerator, the operator of that? How does the sale of electricity work? So for those of you who followed the state legislative session and in Apple is this year, there was a lot of conversation on this topic for a related reason because in addition to electricity, sales revenue for which the county receives revenue, historically the county is also received renewable energy credits revenue, renewable energy credits were removed from the state renewable portfolio standard and what does that mean? It means well on a policy level the right sizing of the state renewable portfolio standard but on a financial level, the right sizing of the State Renewable Portfolio Standard, but on a financial level, it means that the revenue, which previously included revenue generated from renewable electricity credits and electricity sales going forward will include revenue only from the electricity sales, and that's starting in the beginning of FY27. So when we were talking earlier about future years, the FY27 rates will reflect the fact that as of the start of FY27, the county will no longer be receiving revenue for the renewable electricity credits. However, back to your question, which was the sale of electricity itself, the revenue from electricity that is earned by the county varies because the revenue, the market itself for electricity sales varies based on a number of factors. But to give you a sense most recently in FY 24, the electricity sales revenue for the county was just over $10 million. Does that go into the general fund? No. Where does it go? Because you're now applying $4 million. Was it the former? It does not go to the general fund. It's an offset to operating revenues and within the sole way system. Expenses essentially to operate the system. Got it. And based on the scenarios you've put forward would, is the plan to use those funds or portions of them in out years as well, or was that just to make this fee increase more palatable in FY26? So the revenue from electricity sales is used to offset operating expenses and will continue as long as the revenue exists. Thank you. An important point there that you raised is the state is no longer allowing the renewable energy credit, right? So that will diminish. Continuing about the money, I wanna pick up on what Council Member Balkham noted before about the fee increases in the out years, and Director Manger, you noted that part of that is dedicated to debt service. Can you expand on the debt that we need to pay off with the fees that is being requested? Sure, I'm going to let my colleague Vicki on speak to that. Thanks for the question. We have a $60 million goody remediation project that was under consent order. That project has been ongoing and we plan debt issuance actually later at the end of this fiscal year 16 or 16 6.0 Okay, so You're now telling us that part of this fee increase Has to occur because it's tied to debt service debt service coverage racial payments of debt service, right? And if we didn't increase the fee, we would have to find money somewhere else to pay the debt service. So when we're talking about the base chart, the system benefit charge, it's the base fee. It includes the system that processes our waste, as I mentioned, it's an integrated waste system, including facilities both in Derwood and Dickerson. And it also includes debt service costs to the county. So that's also paid out of the base fee. Right. So thank you, because I think up until this point, we've been siloing the fees and picking them apart with regard to inflationary and contractual costs, ongoing remediation that is needed to do trash collection today, fees for future projects, but now there's a fourth column, which is, no, you're saying no on this one? It's in the first column. That's in Cumberton, the first column. Yes. I appreciate that. OK, very good. I'm relieved to hear that. So good. I just want to let colleagues know that leaders from the aiming for zero waste task force contacted me because they've been following this conversation. And in their observation, they shared with me a letter that was sent to the council back on May 7, 2020, nearly five years ago to the day. And the letter says, if the plan forwarded to the council includes closure of the RRF, also known as the inciterator, the county council, which is responsible for approving this policy change to the plan, will need additional analysis of the costs and benefits of changing the county's primary waste disposal before making a decision. If closure is approved by the council, the county will need to move forward expeditiously with all of the transition work needed to meet a 2026 closure date. That was written five years ago, nearly to the date. Much of that has not happened. And it's only through this budget process or we being forced to have this conversation, which is not as straightforward as even the aiming for zero waste task force would have wanted it to be. And the reason is because there have been years of neglect on this proposal. For nearly six years, nothing has been done, nothing has been proposed, and the maintenance that has been required never came about, and we are now sitting with the bill. And Councilmember Albernolz, you were spot on in what you said earlier, that failure of the current system would be catastrophic. And so I just want to close by saying this conversation is not in a silo. Earlier this morning we had a nearly similar conversation if you take a step back and think about it with WSSC. Water. Earlier this morning we had a nearly similar conversation if you take us that back and think about it with WSSC. Water and trash, two of the most basic functions of local government that have faced years of neglect, they're getting older and we as a community need to figure out how we keep our people and residents healthy and safe and clean. It's two sides of the same coin. And it pained nearly all of us to have to support WSSC's work at a rate increase that I know no one wanted. But we had to do it because there were no other options. Here there are a few different options, but we have to do something. It is obvious that the fee has to increase. The question is, how much do we increase it to in order to keep our residents clean? I appreciate the council president for setting this conversation aside so that we can think about this, deliberate, either amongst ourselves and our neighbors get a pulse of what people think. I'll tell you this, when I first got the budget and saw this proposal, I was at my barber. I know you might not think, but I do still have a barber. I asked Jalal what he thinks of having his trash collection fee increased by $700. He wasn't too happy about it. He's an independent barber just trying to make good for his family. And so I am thinking about Jalal. I am thinking about all of our other small businesses on how we keep our residents healthy and safe, but also Making sure that they can still learn a living. So thank you Madam President Thank you. I have Councilmember Freetson and then Katson and then we're gonna wrap it up All right, I'll try to be brief. Just a couple follow-up questions based on some things that were mentioned that I just want to hone in on. The $3 million contract, we're still in the process of that contract. We don't know how much has been spent but you're going to share that with us. So we have this contract that's going to be ongoing to start next fiscal year presumably but we're being asked to enter into a new contract at the same time. Can you just explain what the $3.00 million contract is still going to do after we finally get the report that's not done. But the conclusions that have been at least shared with the Salvis Advisory Committee, at least privately, with the members of the T&E Committee, but not publicly to the Council or privately to Council members on the committee. Can you just explain what's left of that contract and then how that differs from the $36 million engagement? Sure. And before. Sure. Thanks for the question, Council Member. So just as a clarification, the $3 million was the appropriation amount in FY 25, not the value of the contract. And like I said earlier, I will certainly check what the remaining value is on that contract and share that with the Council. To your larger question of what happens going forward and how this work relates to itself and each other. So I just want to acknowledge that when we talk about redesigning a system the size of ours, that is an important yet distinct task from operating the system that we have. So part of what the appropriation from FY25, the $3 million appropriation was that it acknowledged, we know it was that we have an amazing team at DEP and a number of amazing contractors that we work with day in and day out to maintain and implement the system we have. And it truly is a credit to the recycling and resources management division, which will he overseas and his terrific team, because in all weather, and I know you all do the early morning phone calls to in the winter, but day in and day out, implementing the system safely is no small feat, and it's something that we really pride ourselves in, whether it's at the transfer station or whether it's in the collections that we do. But the point is, is that implementing this system we have is a huge job onto itself with a population as large as ours. So the reason the appropriation in FY25 was really important was because we didn't have the horses internally to also redesign our system essentially and tell us what that redesign could be, what it should be. So the... But is that... are we going to report that tells us that? Because my sense is if we already have the conclusions and what you've shared with us at this point, we're not anywhere close to that. I mean, we're at the point of having a basic idea of what we might do to get to the next phase of finding out what we ultimately are going to do before we actually do it. And if you're confused by that, so we're home to us, which is why we've been talking about this for the last two hours. But this is the pre-conversation to get us to the initial conversation, to get us to a point where we can actually talk about what the construction of a project is actually going to look like. It's the pre-plan for the actual plan to get us to an actual project that can actually be constructed. So I'm just confused as to, it sounds like the way the current $3 million contract is being described of what we're going to get as a deliverable from it is a lot like what the $36 million project is going to provide and it doesn't seem like we have that from the current $3 million and And it's not totally clear with the $36 million is going to get us at the end of the day. And when? Because it's not going to lead to operating anything. It's going to lead to moving us one step closer to a potential plan to actually construct something that has a waste system that is more aligned with where we'd like to be. So I just, if you could provide to us in writing after this conversation, we're not voting today, exactly what the $3 million contract covered, exactly what the deliverable is on that and exactly when the council and the public are going to receive it. Number one, number two, the exact cost out of the three million that has been expended and any future costs out of that existing appropriation that are anticipated in this fiscal year or next fiscal year if it's going to have carry over if it's in covered funds and what those services and deliverables will be. If it's not the full $3 million amount where that money is going within the charge you know within the fund balance and you know how you're covering that. You noted before that you're not asking for the $3 million again when Vice President Joanda's line of questioning of course because the contract is up so the $1 million you're carrying over be helpful to know what that's covering and the $2 million you've just reduced. But I think that would be helpful and then if you could give us a detailed breakdown of the timeline for the competitive bid that you're putting out, the projected expenditure timing of that. Because it also seems interesting that there would be a 36 million, exact 12 million, 12 million, 12 million over three fiscal years. If you're not going to go out to bid until July, or close to July, we heard early summer mid 2025, it's gonna take many months for you to receive that, decide, move forward and then start expending funds based on that contract so it's not going to be a full fiscal year. So unless it's three years that carry over to subsequent fiscal years and you're encountering the funds early it would seem that the first fiscal year would be a pro-rated amount based on that timeline and the subsequent fiscal year. So it's just it's unclear besides having a you know, baseline number that has been put out that's not totally clear where it came from. Was it from the consultant? Was it from another jurisdiction of similar size and scope and system that transition? That would be really helpful for us to understand if you come come back to us on that It was noted earlier about you know paying for the trash system Or paying for trash being this boat. I just want to be clear as noted by Councilman Bacats earlier Folks are being charged as whether they are utilizing this or not. So it is true as I noted earlier that this is the cost of having a waste system which you know we all need to pay into that to some degree we all create waste even if where you live or where you work doesn't dispose of the the trash that you make there or the waste that you create there on site, you know, in the county. doesn't dispose of the trash that you make there or the waste that you create there on site, you know, in the county, you know, we all want to have a waste system that actually is disposing of the waste, but it's not paying for your trash to be dropped off, not necessarily picked up. It's paying for a waste system, whether or not you use it or not. It's just important that that be noted, because that is a distinction, and there is a potential difference there, even if there is a value to all of us, regardless of whether or not it is utilized to have a waste system that functions, that's a critical government responsibility. And then, it's been discussed before that the fee increases are capital in nature. That these are deferred maintenance and other dynamics. There was a small piece of it that was related to inflationary increases in other dynamics. There was also some conversation earlier about personnel cost that got a little bit confusing to me. Are we funding Personnel costs and contracts out of the fee increases? Is that part of this? And can you break down what that amount would be? Well, everything in the Solid Waste of Sozofund is covered by Solid Waste of Sozofund revenues. I'm talking about the increase. Right. Well, the increases, as was presented in the March, Transmitted by the executive. You have a lot of personnel related changes. You may have, you have got the FY26 compensation adjustments. Those would be funded out of the solid waste charges. You may have annualization of costs from FY25. These are common things you would see in other budgets. Those are covered by those have to be covered by the charges if they're increases, if they're decreases they might help reduce the charges. Okay, are part of the whole mix. It would be helpful as part of the follow up as well to break down within the three columns. Column one, debt service inflationary increase, contractual obligations, how much of that is personnel related, you know, column two in the chart, what exactly is that program? Because it's very, very high level. And we're being asked to fund very real dollars that we need a little bit more granular detail. And there just aren't a lot of details here of what we're actually asking folks to pay. And these are huge increases. I mean, these are not marginal inflationary adjustments that are happening. We're asking people to pay massive increases. And I think they deserve to understand fully what that money is growing towards. And then column three, we already talked about the green, which is, you know, breaking down, you know, the timing and the actual cost of what that will go towards. Appreciate it and you'll back. And just Council Member, happy to follow up more detailed information as requested. In terms of the specific projects that are funded through this request, there's an additional, there's a section of the package, circles 29 through 35, that detail each of the projects that are underlying this request So I just wanted to acknowledge that that's there now but I will Work with the team here to follow up with the additional information you requested to explain what's within each category I appreciate that I think the what's missing is the breakdown of how that relates to the chart because a lot of the conversation is the chart and what the fee increases are and what we're being asked to authorize and there isn't a connection. There's a bunch of things that are being funded and then there are a bunch of costs related to the different categories and we need to equal out the equation to understand this piece This piece goes to this part, this piece goes to this part, this chart corresponds to these projects and that is not as clear as it could be and would be helpful for us to have this follow-up material. Happy to be here. Happy to provide. Thank you. Council Member Katz. Thank you very much, Madam President. I'm very glad we're actually having this conversation. I'm not very glad we don't have enough information, but I am glad we're having it because we truly needed it. And it continues to be needed. I'd like to drill down just a little bit on the debt that you now have. How much was that debt and when was it occurred? We have not issued debt. We are planning for the debt issuance, which is the debt service is in this FY26 budget. So the sixth, I think it was the $16 million figure that you were talking about. The total project is $60 million. We've got $60 million. Right. We funded portions of it through cash over the years in the actual debt that we are issuing is about $38 million. So okay. That answers that one. And I agree with Council Member Glaz, I quote a Council Member, all of them not as a quote. But the failure of the system would be catastrophic. There's no question. But the question is, and Councilmember Freetz and certainly had three columns. I like a fourth one, is what is the minimum? The minimum that could be done in FY26, that after this discussion has changed it all, so that it would only get us to the point, we don't want anything to fail, but would get us to the point that we can have the entire conversation of where we would be heading for FY27 and beyond. Thank you for the question Council Member. So by way of context, the request that's before you, I want to acknowledge, as was noted, that what was sent over in March was a dollar amount that we then reduced a little bit by $7 million in April 24th. So the list of projects that's before us now and the dollar amount that's requested in the dollars in on April 24th. So the list of projects that's before us now and the dollar amount that's requested in the fees for maintenance of our present system is in fact the list of projects that's limited to systems continuity. So only for this year, everything would be just for this year. Coming up. If I'm understanding your correct your question correctly, yes, we are only talking about costs that would be incurred for these repairs in FY 26 right now. There would be subsequent costs in 27 and 28 and that was the dollar figures I was recounting in response to a previous question I'm happy to recap those but the list of projects before us right now is in fact the minimum list of projects necessary for systems continuity. So why are you borrowing $60 million? not borrowing $60 million and that is, and that we're only borrowing a subset of that close to $38 million. And that is for the Goody remediation project. So completely different project. This is the Goody landfill. So say that one again, please. You're borrowing $38 million. Yeah. And that's only for 26. That would be what you need for 26. That's by 26. Well the Goody Landfill remediation project was a project the council approved several years ago. Yeah that's different. Right. And it was intended to be bond funded. They were able to defer some of that by using basically Pego, but now they are planning to bond fund the rest of that project that remains. And now it's start in 26, but the bonds for that obviously would go beyond 26. All right. So some tracked out, goody. I understand that one. And there was nothing guess and everything else involved in there. And, and, but only for, and I understand that one and there was nothing gas and everything else involved in there and and But only for and I understand the transfer part. I mean, I was I remember when when the county bought the transfer Facility the land and all the excitement that caused but I I appreciate that the transfer facility is more than likely going to stay there. And I appreciate the fact that you're going to need to fix up whether it's for whatever you mentioned that are 40 years old, whether or not we need to buy three the first year or whether we can buy one this year and that gives you two. All of that is what I consider to be minimum. But the whole thing for Dickerson, to me really is putting gasoline in somebody else's car. I just don't understand why we do that. I understand we have to keep it safe, but I don't understand why we'd have to do it to the degree that is being suggested. And obviously, if you could give us, give me that, give the fourth column, I'd appreciate it. Sure, Council Member, I appreciate the question. There's a memorandum in the packet which explains that which goes into the detail that you're describing it's an explanation of need for projects over 26, 27 and 28. So there is extensive information available. We're happy to sit down and talk through that with you if it's helpful. And as I mentioned earlier, the list of products we're talking about was narrowed down to those necessary to save in reliable operations of the of the talking about 27 and 28. I keep talking about 26. I want to know what we get us through 26 not 27 and 28. We get there eventually but not yet Right and that figure is what's represented in the FY 26 budget request. Thank you, Madam President Thank you councilmember sales and she's gonna close us out all right So we everyone has asked a lot of the questions I We already discussed, we already discussed, uh, last week. So I will not, um, repeat them. But I did want to, um, find out where do condos fall in this, um, category? Are they multi family or are they? Oh, okay. Good. And then these amounts are on top of the 160 per household amounts. Or the new amounts. What are you looking at? Looking at circle 11? The assumptions? If you look on page five, so multifamily, if you go across under the CE amended and FY 26 they would pay $19.88 for the year. Okay. Okay. That's yeah. That's all I had. So looking forward to hopefully lower numbers for the bare minimum because I know that you're going to transition us out of this cycle very soon and be proposing some ideas so we look forward to the updates. Thank you council member. Thank you director. Okay thank you for the background I I think there are one of the reasons we wanted to do this on the very first day that the Council full council was reviewing the budgets because we knew there would be a lot of questions and the need for some follow-up and I think you have all of the items that we need to follow up on. So that would be good to get soonish. We do, we are voting on May 14th on the actual solid waste management fee. So to get that ahead of time and Mr. Lachenko, I know we weren't going to take a hand vote on the solid waste management fee, but there were there any other pieces of this that we needed to do anything with as we advance on working on our budget. Well, I did note some of the areas where the committee had made recommendations, which including like the Solid Waste Collection Fund budget. And also the refuse charge and the collection charges did not come up today specifically other than in the broader impact on the sectors. So those have much, either no increase or a very, very, very small increase. So I'm assuming those are not really part of the follow-up that we need. We're really focusing on the base and the incremental charges where the big increases are. And the bigger picture issues of the MRBT project and the RRF costs. So those other areas I'll assume the council's preliminary okay with. Obviously you'll see it again as part of the packet for the March 14th action. I am not seeing any questions, so I will just tell my colleagues, make sure that you take a look at those since we've had we dove into the Solid Waste Management fee today just to make sure and if you do have questions, don't wait till May 14th. Please bring them up now, but I think today we dug in deep on these issues and we look forward to the follow-up. And I'm not seeing any other hands. Thank you, Mr. LeChenko. Thank you, Director Manger and the entire team. Very much appreciate your time. And with that, that is the last item we have for today. We are adjourned. Thank you.