you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you We really focus on a whole host of disaster We really focus on a whole host of disaster. We're going to be able to get a chance to do something that we're going to do. We're going to be able to do something that we're going to do. We're going to be able to do something that we're going to do. We're going to be able to do something that we're going to do. We're going to be able to do something that we're going to do. We're going to be able to do something the wildfire premise to prepare residents to be ready before an event, to move into the set posture when there's a red flag or a fire is near you and then to go when it's time to go. Essentially in its simplest form it's a three tiered community emergency preparedness plan. I have lived in this house, which we built my husband and I 26 years ago now, actually. We selected the hardy plate, the concrete siding, and also the metal roof. Then when we moved up here and heard about the 49er fire, that's when we started to say, wow, this really is even more important than we first realized. So the 49er fire is one of the most historic fires in Nevada County's history. They figured it changed the laws of state of California that said this is how you have to protect your home. That came out in Nevada County. Steve Ubex came from the Firesafe Council and the main thing we needed to pay attention to was the ladder fuels. Planting has been removed from the edges of the house so that it does not touch the house. It was an incredible service from the Firesafe Council to come out and spend a couple of hours going through this property. So the ready phase is when there's no immediate threat to you and your family. This is the time when you should be doing education and planning, whether that be training, educating yourself or accumulating equipment, hardening your home, creating defensible space. Defensible space is really all about creating a buffer zone between your house and flammable vegetation. We really focus on defensible space around the home, that first 100 feet, but also around the roadway, too. Another aspect of the ready phase is hardening the home. And really what that means is making your home more resilient to wildfire. That's going to be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home so that embers won't get into under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's going to be using non combustible materials on your deck and around your home. So when an ember storm comes through, it's not going to ignite your home itself. I currently live here in Grass Valley with my parents. All of us have a sleep apnea, so we all have CPAT machines that require power in order to run. I also use a nebulizer and that's used to disperse medication that I need to give myself breathing again. When we have safety shutoffs, we have to hook up our equipment to batteries to have inverters. We have a generator that powers some of the things around the house, but then I obtained a pretty substantial battery from freed, and it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend it to anyone who might have medical needs that require power or really anything. I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snow storm or a public safety power shot we really want folks to be thinking about, okay, what are the things I'll need on hand to whether the storm? Do I need to have candles? Do I need to have battery powered radio? Do I need to have flashlights? So what are the things that you'll need to shelter in place or address the disaster at hand? So a go-back could be anything. It could be a backpack. It could be a suitcase. It's going to be something that you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets, if needed. That's going to have food, water, medication, clothing, toiletries to get you by for 72 hours. You need to think of your go bag as the only resource you may have. Stores may be closed, the power may be out, so you may have to literally live out of this thing for a three day period as an evacuee. If you are someone with a disability, maybe you have a chronic health condition. For me, I have typhoon diabetes, I have an insulin pump, right? And so that's a critical piece that I need to plan for if I'm gonna ever evacuate or be away from my house, frankly, for any amount of time, right? What we find often is that if people don't evacuate with their CPAP machine, with their oxygen concentrator, with their wheelchair, walker, then it can be difficult on the other end. My name is Ulysses Palencia. I work in the 211 call center. I'm just a resident of Grass Valley. I have two daughters, four-year-old and a one-year-old. In Nevada County 211 is available 24-7. So we provide for the community is information. That could be anything from directions to the resource centers. It can be letting them know where the fire is. If they are themselves in an evacuation center, if it's a fire, if there's any information as to whether their power's coming back on during a PSPS. Two-on-one gets the information that we provide directly from the county, so directly from the Office of Emergency Services. The whole team cares. We're all local community members. We all just want to help. So we were all sleeping in bed on Thursday, November 8th, and paradise. And first the house phone rang, picked up my phone. It was my sister who lived in a block or so away from us. We were welcome by a telephone call from my daughter. She said that we were being evacuated. I left sooner than them. I had everything ready. They were on the way out the door. There was not time to think about what you're going to take, what you're not going to take. The night before the fire, I knew it was a red flag warning, and I knew that it was a high risk. So on my way home, I filled up the tank. On the way out, we didn't get too far from the house, and we're watching fire coming down the hill. There was a machine shop right to my right right there, and it had gas tanks and propane tanks. And I saw a lone ember kind of floating through, dancing through the air, and I watched it as it landed on the machine shop. In the time it took me to get my phone back into hand and to take a picture it was engulfed in flames. And I knew that within moments it would start exploding and I would be dead. And just as I moved out of the range of the explosions, they started happening and I prayed for the people behind me. Ten minute drive normally the Chico became almost four hours. So it was a long trip. We started hear a pattern. People kept telling us their story of how they escaped. They camped fire. And they talked about how if it wasn't for my neighbor who came and knocked on my door to tell me there was a fire, I don't know that I would have gotten out alive. If it wasn't for my son who lives next door picking me up and putting me in their car and driving me out of there, I don't know how I would have survived. And so I started really thinking about this connection between isolation and how connected you are to your community, to your neighbors, to your friends, to your family, and how that can be really helpful in a time of a disaster. So we were actually the beneficiaries of someone making that plan in advance to have that group of people that they were going to call and that she saved my life that day. So absolutely having that network really saved lives. Find your five, the idea is that, you know, find trusted allies that can be there and can be responsive and we'll check in with you if a disaster were to happen. So we recommend that you put people in your network that are down the street, that are maybe the next town over, that are outside the county, and maybe even outside the state. [♪ Music playing in background, the final tier of the Ready Set Go is that go piece, and it's simply that it's go. Evacuation information comes in two types. The first type could be an evacuation warning. This is an essentially information that we're going to push out to the public, notifying them of a potential threat in their area where they may have to evacuate their home. An evacuation order is essentially that. We are telling people that it's time to go. There is an imminent threat to life, and we do not believe that you have much time to leave the area. Code Red is a opt-in alerting system that will dial your number. It'll send you a phone call, a text message, and an email, notifying you of an emergency. That message is sent from our office, the Office of Emergency Services. It's going to be very targeted to your area and it'll be specific to you. At 513, the phone rang with the code red call. And so as I was going up 49, I could look over to the left and see the flames in the canyon. The next layer is for staff to actually be out driving in the areas with the high low siren. There's no other reason you'll hear that in an area unless we're putting out that evacuation order, not a warning, but an order. My day started, routine patrol came in, and I was notified by dispatch to respond out to the Jones fire. Houses that had evacuation tags made it so we could just pass by. We knew that the residents had already been evacuated. Residences that did not have the tags, we would have to physically go in, knock on the door, look in the windows, make sure there were no occupants inside. Once you've been evacuated, as you're leaving, put this tag somewhere very, you know, clearly identifiable whether it's a mailbox, a gate, your address marker, so that deputies and officers can quickly identify if your residence has already been evacuated. I mean, you look out my back window here on the east side and you see how close this fire came. It was certainly a shock. And at the same time, it was such an incredible relief to have the house as safe as it was. I mean, I think with personal preparedness and being ready, it can feel overwhelming. It can feel like a lot to do. And the most important piece is to just start with one little bite at a time. Just start the conversation. Have some sort of plan. It can be a small is a meet-up place. You know, a destination that everybody will get to, everybody in the household will get to if there's a disaster. Recognize you live in a community in a county that really does take the emergency response as a priority. We have worked diligently throughout the last few years on ensuring that not only our staff are trained and prepared but we're also putting that that out for our community. The more prepared you are in your own community the better the outcome is going to be. The level of community awareness they have to be part of the solution. They have to communicate with their neighbors. They have to be part of the solution. They have to communicate with their neighbors. They have to be part of the discussion in communities. They have to support the response, the prevention, the education, and ultimately the collaboration and the engagement. People have to be engaged at all levels. The more you think about it now, the easier it will be when the time comes that you need to evacuate. We've created this network and we want you to make sure that you know that you can tap into that. So if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, not sure where to start, reach out to one of our offices, reach out to the Firesafe Council or 211. We're here to support you. I'm going to be to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. you you From the pit hills of the Sierra Nevada, a new hero will emerge. who is ready. One who makes sure their friends and family are set. And has the power to go at a moment's notice. This fire season, you're the hero. We are Ready Nevada County has a new tool to make evacuations safer and more efficient in the event of emergency. This new tool is called zone haven and we need you to know your zone. In order to know your zone you need to go to community.zonehaven.com, type in your address. The stretch of the stretch of the stretch of the stretch of the stretch of the stretch of the stretch of the stretch of the stretch you know you'll find it in case of emergency. Zonehaven and knowing your zone does not replace, Nixel and or Code Red. It actually supplements them and it makes those tools more powerful because you will know what zones are being evacuated or which ones are being placed on advisory. And as a result, you won't have to do anything else other than listen to those messages and know if it's time to go. Even if you don't have internet, this could be done by word of mouth. It can be done by radio or it could be us driving down the street. So please know your zone. From trucky to lake of the pines, from Chicago Park to Spenceville, every single square mile of Nevada County has a zone and having a zone that you know for your neighborhood is going to help you save time to be able to evacuate and keep you and be doing this. We're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing this. because we know that's one of the most likely events to happen in Nevada County. Ready set go is really built. to be prepared for anything, but really we focus a lot on wildfire because we know that's one of the most likely events to happen in Nevada County. Ready set go is really built around the wildfire premise to prepare residents to be ready before an event, to move into the set posture when there's a red flag or a fire is near you, and then to go when it's time to go. Essentially in its simplest form it's a-tiered community emergency preparedness plan. I have lived in this house, which we built by husband and I, 26 years ago now, actually. We selected the hardy plate, the concrete siding, and also the metal roof. Then when we moved up here and heard about the 49er fire, that's when we started to say, wow, this really is even more important than we first realized. So the 49er fire is one of the most historic fires in Nevada County's history. They figured it changed the laws of state of California that said this is how you have to protect your home. That came out in Nevada County. Steve Ubex came from the Firesafe Council and the main thing we needed to pay attention to was the ladder fuels. Planting has been removed from the edges of the house so that it does not touch the house. It was an incredible service from the Firesafe Council to come out and spend a couple of hours going through this property. So the ready phase is when there's no immediate threat to you and your family. This is the time when you should be doing education and planning, whether that be training, educating yourself or accumulating equipment, hardening your home, creating defensible space. Defensible space is really all about creating a buffer zone between your house and flammable vegetation. We really focus on defensible space around the home, that first 100 feet, but also around the roadway too. Another aspect of the ready phase is hardening the home, and really what that means is making your home more resilient to wildfire. That's gonna be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home, so that embers won't get into under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's gonna be using non-combustible materials on your deck and around your home. So when an Emberstorm comes through, it's not gonna ignite your home itself. I currently live here in Grass Valley with my parents. All of us have sleep apnea, so we all have CPAP machines that require power in order to run. I also use a nebulizer, and that's used to disperse medication that I need to give myself breathing again. When we have safety shutoffs, we have to hook up our equipment to batteries that have inverters. We have a generator that powers some of the things around the house, but then I obtained pretty substantial battery from freed, and it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend it to anyone who might have medical needs that require power or really anything. I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snow storm or a public safety power shot of we really want folks to be thinking about, okay, what are the things I'll need on hand to whether the storm, do I need to have candles, do I need to have battery powered radio, do I need to have flashlights? So what are the things that you'll need to shelter in place or address the disaster at hand? So a go-back could be anything. It could be a backpack, it could be a suitcase. It's going to be something that you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets, if needed. That's going to have food, water, medication, clothing, toiletries, to get you by for 72 hours. You need to think of your go-bag as the only resource you may have. Stores may be closed, the power may be out, so you may have to literally live out of this thing for a three-day period as an evacuee. If you are someone with a disability, maybe you have a chronic health condition. For me, I have type 1 diabetes. I have an insulin pump, right? And so that's a critical piece that I need to plan for if I'm gonna ever evacuate or be away from my house, frankly, for any amount of time, right? What we find often is that if people don't evacuate with their CPAP machine, with their oxygen concentrator, with their wheelchair, walker, then it can be difficult on the other end. My name's Ulysses Palencia. I work in the 211 call center. I'm just a resident of Grass Valley. I have two daughters, four-year-old and a one-year-old. In Nevada County 211 is available 24-7. So we provide for the community as information. That could be anything from directions to the resource centers. It can be letting them know where the fire is. If they, if they are themselves in an evacuation center, if it's a fire, if there's any information as to whether their power's coming back on during a PSPS, 2-1 gets the information that we provide directly from the county, so directly from the Office of Emergency Services. The whole team cares. We're all local community members. We all just want to help. So we were all sleeping in bed on Thursday, November 8th, and paradise. And first the house phone rang, picked up my phone. It was my sister who lived in a block or so away from us. We were woken by a telephone call from my daughter. She said that we were being evacuated. I left sooner than them. I had everything ready. They were on the way out the door. There was not time to think about what you're going to take, what you're not going to take. The night before the fire, I knew it was a red flag warning and I knew that it was a high risk. So on my way home, I filled up the tank. On our way up we didn't get too far from the house and we're watching fire come down the hill. There was a machine shop right to my right right there and it had gas tanks and propane tanks. And I saw a lone ember kind of floating through, dancing through the air. And I watched it as it landed on the machine shop. In the time it took me to get my phone back into hand and to take a picture it was engulfed in flames. And I knew that within moments, it would start exploding and I would be dead. And just as I moved out of the range of the explosions, they started happening and I prayed for the people behind me. 10 minute drive normally the Chico became almost four hours. So it was a long trip. We started to hear a pattern. People kept telling us their story of how they escaped. They camped fire. And they talked about how if it wasn't for my neighbor who came and knocked on my door to tell me there was a fire, I don't know that I would have gotten out alive. If it wasn't for my son who lives next door picking me up and putting me in their car and driving me out of there, I don't know how I would have survived. And so I started really thinking about this connection between isolation and how connected you are to your community, to your neighbors, to your friends, to your family, and how that can be really helpful in a time of a disaster. So we were actually the beneficiaries of someone making that plan in advance to have that group of people that they were going to call. And that she saved my life that day. So absolutely having that network really saved lives. Find your five, the idea is that, you know, find trusted allies that can be there and can be responsive and will check in with you if a disaster were to happen. So we recommend that you put people in your network that are down the street, that are maybe the next town over, that are outside the county, and maybe even outside the state. The final tier of the Ready Set Go is that Go piece, and's simply that it's go. Evacuation information comes in two types. The first type could be an evacuation warning. This is an essentially information that we're going to push out to the public, notifying them of a potential threat in their area where they may have to evacuate their home. An evacuation order is essentially that. We are telling people that it's time to go. There is an imminent threat to life, and we do not believe that you have much time to leave the area. Code Red is a opt-in alerting system that will dial your number. It'll send you a phone call, a text message, and an email, notifying you of an emergency. That message is sent from our office, the office of emergency services. It's going to be very targeted to your area and it'll be specific to you. At 513, the phone rang with the code red call. And so as I was going up 49, I could look over to the left and see the flames in the canyon. The next layer is for staff to actually be out driving in the areas with the high low siren. There's no other reason you'll hear that in an area unless we're putting out that evacuation order, not a warning, but an order. My day started, a routine patrol came in and I was notified by dispatch to respond out to the Jones fire. Houses that had evacuation tags made it so we could just pass by. We knew that the residents had already been evacuated. Residences that did not have the tags, we would have to physically go in, knock on the door, look in the windows, make sure there were no occupants inside. Once you've been evacuated, as you're leaving, put this tag somewhere very, you know, clearly identifiable whether it's a mailbox, a gate, your address marker, so that deputies and officers can quickly identify if your residence is already been evacuated. I mean, you look out my back window here on the east side, and you see how close this fire came. It was certainly a shock. And at the same time, it was such an incredible relief to have the house as safe as it was. I mean, I think with personal preparedness and being ready, it can feel overwhelming. It can feel like a lot to do. And the most important piece is to just start with one little bite at a time. Just start the conversation, have some sort of plan. It can be a small is a meet-up place, you know, a destination that everybody will get to, everybody in the house will get to if there's a disaster. Recognize you live in a community in a county that really does take the emergency response as a priority. We have worked diligently throughout the last few years on ensuring that not only our staff are trained and prepared, but we're also putting that out for our community. The more prepared you are in your own community, the better the outcome is going to be. The level of community awareness, they have to be part of the solution. They have to communicate with their neighbors. They have to be part of the discussion in communities. They have to support the response, the prevention, the education, and ultimately the collaboration and the engagement. People have to be engaged at all levels. The more you think about it now, the easier it will be when the time comes that you need to evacuate. We've created this network and we want you to make sure that you know that you can tap into that. So if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, not sure where to start, reach out to one of our offices, reach out to the Firesafe Council or 211. We're here to support you. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. you you From the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, a new hero will emerge. what who is ready. who make sure their friends and family are set. And has the power to go at a moment's notice. ... This fire season, you're the hero. We are Ready Nevada County. Nevada County has a new tool to make evacuations safer and more efficient in the event of emergency. This new tool is called Zone Haven and we need you to know your zone. In order to know your zone, you need to go to community.zonehaven.com, type in your address. Once your address populates in the pop-up window, take that information and write down the zone that is given to you where you know you'll find it in case of emergency. Zone Haven and knowing your zone does not replace Nixol and or Code Red. It actually supplements them and it makes those tools more powerful because you will know what zones are being evacuated or which ones are being placed on advisory and as a result you won't have to do anything else other than listen to those messages and know if it's time to go. Even if you don't have internet, this could be done by word of mouth. It can be done by radio or it could be us driving down the street. So please know your zone. From trucky to lake of the pines, from Chicago Park to Spenceville, every single square mile of Nevada County has a zone. And having a zone that you know for your neighborhood is going to help you save time to be able to evacuate and keep you and your family safe. Reading Nevada County is an education campaign designed to help the public have successful outcomes during emergency events. We really focus on a whole host of disasters or emergency events we want want to have a broad spectrum. We want to be prepared for anything. But really we focus a lot on wildfire because we know that's one of the most likely events to happen in Nevada County. Ready set go is really built around the wildfire premise to prepare residents to be ready before an event. to move into the set posture when there's a red flag or a fire's near you, and then to go when it's time to go. Essentially, in its simplest form, it's a three-tiered community emergency preparedness plan. I have lived in this house, which we built by husband and I, 26 years ago now, actually. We selected the hardy plate, the concrete siding, and also the metal roof. Then when we moved up here and heard about the 49er fire, that's when we started to say, wow, this really is even more important than we first realized. So the 49er fires, one of the most historic fires in Nevada County's history. They figured it changed the laws of state of California that said this is how you have to protect your home. That came out in Nevada County. Steve Ubex came from the Firesafe Council and the main thing we needed to pay attention to was the ladder fuels. Planting has been removed from the edges of the house so that it does not touch the house. It was an incredible service from the Firesafe Council to come out and spend a couple of hours going through this property. So the ready phase is when there's no immediate threat to you and your family. This is the time when you should be doing education and planning, whether that be training, educating yourself, or accumulating equipment, hardening your home, creating defensible space. Defensible space is really all about creating a buffer zone between your house and flammable vegetation. We really focus on defensible space around the home, that first 100 feet, but also around the roadway, too. Another aspect of the ready phase is hardening the home, and really what that means is making your home more resilient to wildfire. That's gonna be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home, so that embers won't get into under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's going to be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home so that embers won't get into Under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's going to be using non combustible materials on your deck and around your home So when an embers storm comes through, it's not going to ignite your home itself I currently live here in Grass Valley with my parents. All of us have sleep apnea, so we all have CPAT machines that require power in order to run. I also use a nebulizer, and that's used to disperse medication that I need to get myself breathing again. When we have safety shutoffs, we have to hook up our equipment to batteries that have inverters. We have a generator that powers some of the things around the house, but then I obtained a pretty substantial battery from freed. And it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend it to anyone who might have medical needs that require power, or really anything. I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snow storm or a public safety power shot off, we really want folks to be thinking about, OK, what are the things I'll need on hand to whether the storm? Do I need to have candles? Do I need to have battery-powered radio? Do I need to have flashlights? So what are the things that you'll need to shelter in place or address the disaster at hand? So go back could be anything be anything. It could be a backpack. It could be a suitcase. It's going to be something that you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets, if needed. That's going to have food, water, medication, clothing, toiletries to get you by for 72 hours. You need to think of your go bag as the only resource you may have. Stores may be closed, the power may be out, so you may have to literally live out of this thing for a three day period as an evacuee. If you are someone with a disability, maybe you have a chronic health condition. For me, I have type 1 diabetes, I have an insulin pump, right? And so that's a critical piece that I need to plan for if I'm gonna ever evacuate or be away from my house frankly for any amount of time, right? What we find often is that if people don't evacuate with their CPAP machine, with their oxygen concentrator with their wheelchair, walker, then it can be difficult on the other end. My name is Yulisses Palencia. I work in the 211 call center. I'm just a resident of Grass Valley. I have two daughters, four-year-old and a one-year-old. In Nevada County 211 is available 24-7. So we provide for the community is information. That can be anything from directions to the resource centers. It can be letting them know where the fire is. You know if they are themselves in an evacuation center if it's a fire, if there's any information as to whether power's coming back on during a PSPS, 2-1 gets the information that we provide directly from the county, so directly from the Office of Emergency Services. The whole team cares. We're all local community us. We were woken by a telephone call from my daughter. She said that we were being evacuated. I left sooner than them. I had everything ready. They were on the way out the door. There was not time to think about what you're going to take, what you're not going to take. The night before the fire, I knew it was a red flag warning, and I knew that it was a high risk. So on my way home, I filled up the tank. On the way up, we didn't get too far from the house, and we're watching fire coming down the hill. There was a machine shop right to my right right there, and it had gas tanks and propane tanks. And I saw a lone ember kind of floating through, dancing through the air, and I watched it as it landed on the machine shop. In the time it took me to get my phone back into hand, and to take a picture it was engulfed in flames. And I knew that within moments it would start exploding and I would be dead. And just as I moved out of the range of the explosions, they started happening and I prayed for the people behind me. 10 minute drive normally the Chico became almost four hours. So it was a long trip. The Chico was a long trip. The Chico was a long trip. The Chico was a long trip. The Chico was a long trip. The Chico was a long trip. The Chico was a long trip. We started here a pattern. People kept telling us their story of how they escaped. They camped fire. and they talked about how, if it wasn't for my neighbor, who came and knocked on my door, to tell me there was a fire, I don't know that I would have gotten out alive. If it wasn't for my son who lives next door picking me up and putting me in their car and driving me out of there, I don't know how I would have survived. And so I started really thinking about this connection between isolation and how connected you are to your community, to your neighbors, to your friends, to your family, and how that can be really helpful in a time of a disaster. So we were actually the beneficiaries of someone making that plan in advance to have that group of people that they were going to call and that she saved my life that day. So absolutely having that network really saved lives. saved lives. Find your five, the ideas that, you know, find trusted allies that can be there and can be responsive and we'll check in with you if a disaster were to happen. So we recommend that you put people in your network that are down the street that are maybe the next town over they're outside the county and maybe even outside the state. The final tier of the Rayset GO is that GO piece and it's simply that it's GO. Evacuation information comes in two types. The first type could be an evacuation warning. This is an essentially information that we're going to push out to the public, notifying them of a potential threat in their area where they may have to evacuate their home. An evacuation order is essentially that. We are telling people that it's time to go. There is an imminent threat to life and we do not believe that you have much time to leave the area. Code Red is a opt-in alerting system that will dial your number. It'll send you a phone call, a text message, and an email, notifying you of an emergency. That message is sent from our office, the Office of Emergency Services. It's going to be very targeted to your area and it'll be specific to you. at 513 the phone rang with the code red call. And so as I was going up 49, I could look over to the left and see the flames in the canyon. The next layer is for staff to actually be out driving in the areas with the high low siren. There's no other reason you'll hear that in an area unless we're putting out that evacuation order, not a warning, but an order. My day started, routine patrol came in and I was notified by dispatch to respond out to the Jones Fire. Houses that had evacuation tags made it so we could just pass by. We knew that the residents had already been evacuated. Residences that did not have the tags, we would have to physically go in, knock on the door, look in the windows, make sure there were no occupants inside. Once you've been evacuated, as you're leaving, put this tag somewhere very clearly identifiable, whether it's a mailbox, a gate, your address marker, so that deputies and officers can quickly identify if your residence is already been evacuated. I mean, you look out my back window here on the east side, and you see how close this fire came. It was certainly a shock, and at the same time, it was such an incredible relief to have the house as safe as it was. I mean, I think with personal preparedness and being ready, it can feel overwhelming. It can feel like a lot to do. And the most important piece is to just start with one little bite at a time. Just start the conversation, have some sort of plan. It can be a small is a meetup place, you know, a destination that everybody will get to, everybody in the household will get to if there's a disaster. Recognize you live in a community in a county that really does take the emergency response as a priority. We have worked diligently throughout the last few years on ensuring that not only our staff are trained and prepared, but we're also putting that out for our community. The more prepared you are in your own community, the better the outcome is going to be. The level of community awareness, they have to be part of the solution. They have to communicate with their neighbors. They have to be part of the discussion in communities. They have to support the response, the prevention, the education, and ultimately the collaboration and the engagement. People have to be engaged at all levels. The more you think about it now, the easier it will be when the time comes that you need to evacuate. We've created this network and we want you to make sure that you know that you can tap into that. So if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, not sure where to start. Reach out to one of our offices. Reach out to the Firesafe Council or 211. We're here to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going Nevada, a new hero will emerge. One who is ready. One who makes sure their friends and family are set. And has the power to go at a moment's notice. This is the end of the video. This is the end of the video. You're the hero. We are Ready Nevada County. Nevada County has a new tool to make evacuations safer and more efficient in the event of emergency. This new tool is called zone haven and we need you to know your zone. In order to know your zone you need to go to community.zonehaven.com, type in your address. Once your address populates in the pop-up window, take that information and write down the zone that is given to you where you know you'll find an incase of emergency. Zone Haven and knowing your zone does not replace Nixole and or Code Red, it actually supplements them and it makes those tools more powerful because you will know what zones are being evacuated or which ones are being placed on advisory. And as a result, you won't have to do anything else other than listen to those messages and know if it's time to go. [♪ music playing in background, music playing in background, even if you don't have internet, this could be done by word of mouth, it can be done by radio or it could be us driving down the street. So please know your zone. From trucky to lake of the pines, from Chicago Park to Spenceville, every single square mile of Nevada County has a zone. And having a zone that you know for your neighborhood is going to help you save time to be able to evacuate and keep you and your family safe. Reading Nevada County is an education campaign designed to help the public have successful outcomes during emergency events. We really focus on a whole host of disasters or emergency events we want to have a broad spectrum. We want to be prepared for anything, but really we focus a lot on wildfire because we know that's one of the most likely events to happen in Nevada County. Ready Set Go is really built around the wildfire premise to prepare residents to be ready before an event, to move into the set posture when there's a red flag or a fire's near you, and then to go when it's time to go. Essentially in its simplest form, it's a three-tiered community emergency preparedness plan. I have lived in this house, which we built by husband and I, 26 years ago now, actually. We selected the Hardy Plate, the concrete siding, and also the metal roof. Then when we moved up here and heard about the 49er fire, that's when we started to say, wow, this really is even more important than we first realized. So the 49er fire is one of the most historic fires in Nevada County's history. They figured it changed the laws of state of California that said, this is how you have to protect your home. That came out in Nevada County. Steve Ubex came from the Firesafe Council and the main thing we needed to pay attention to was the latter fuels. Planting has been removed from the edges of the house so that it does not touch the house. It was an incredible service from the Firesafe Council to come out and spend a couple of hours going through this property. So the ready phase is when there's no immediate threat to you and your family. This is the time when you should be doing education and planning, whether that be training, educating yourself or accumulating equipment, hardening your home, creating defensible space. Defensible space is really all about creating a buffer zone between your house and planable vegetation. We really focus on defensible space around the home that first 100 feet, but also around the roadway too. Another aspect of the ready phase is hardening the home. And really what that means is making your home more resilient to wildfire. That's going to be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home, so that embers won't get into under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's going to be using non-combustible materials on your deck and around your home. So when an embers storm comes through, it's not going to ignite your home itself. -♪ -♪ I currently live here in Grass Valley with my parents. All of us have a sleep apnea, so we all have CPAT machines that require power in order to run. I also use a nebulizer, and that's used to disperse medication that I need to give myself breathing again. When we have safety shutoffs, we have to hook up our equipment to batteries that have inverters. We have a generator that powers some of the things around the house, but then I obtained pretty substantial battery from freed, and it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend it to anyone who might have medical needs that require power or really anything. I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snow storm or a public safety power shot, we really want folks to be thinking about, okay, what are the things I'll need on hand to whether the storm? Do I need to have candles? Do I need to have battery powered radio? Do I I need to have flashlights? So what are the things that you'll need to shelter in place or address the disaster at hand? So a go-back could be anything. It could be a backpack, it could be a suitcase. It's gonna be something that you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets, if needed. That's gonna have food, water, medication, clothing, toiletries to get you by for 72 hours. You need to think of your go bag as the only resource you may have, stores may be closed, the power may be out, so you may have to literally live out of this thing for a three day period as an evacuee. If you are someone with a disability, maybe you have a chronic health condition. For me, I have typhoon diabetes, I have an insulin pump, right? And so that's a critical piece that I need to plan for if I'm going to ever evacuate or be away from my house, frankly, for any amount of time, right? What we find often is that if people don't evacuate with their CPAP machine, with their oxygen concentrator, with their wheelchair, walker, then it can be difficult on the other end. My name's Ulysses Palencia. I work in the 211 call center. I'm just a resident of Grass Valley. I have two daughters, four-year-old and a one-year-old. In Nevada County 211 is available 24-7. So we provide for the community is information. That could be anything from directions to the resource centers. It can be letting them know where the fire is. If they are themselves in an evacuation center, if it's a fire, if there's any information as to whether their power's coming back on during a PSPS. Two-on-one gets the information that we provide directly from the county, so directly from the Office of Emergency Services. The whole team cares. We're all local community members. We all just want to help. So we were all sleeping in bed on Thursday, November 8th, and paradise. And first the house phone rang, picked up my phone. It was my sister who lived in a block or so away from us. We were woken by a telephone call from my daughter. She said that we were being evacuated. I left sooner than them. I had everything ready. They were on the way out the door. There was not time to think about what you're going to take, what you're not going to take. The night before the fire, I knew it was a red flag warning, and I knew that it was a high risk. So on my way home, I filled up the tank. On the way out, we didn't get too far from the house, and we're watching fire coming down the hill. There was a machine shop right to my right right there and it had gas tanks and propane tanks and I saw a lone ember kind of floating through dancing through the air. Following our special meeting to order,, you want to lead us in a pledge? We'll lead you to the flag of the United States of America. Two of the republics, four of which is stands, one nation, under God, invisible, with liberty and justice for all. Are there any corrections or deletions to the agenda? There are no corrections or deletions, Chair. Thanks. Thanks. OK. So because this is a special meeting discussing capital project financing, we will not be holding general public comment for items not on the agenda. Public comment will be taken for the item being considered at this time. The over the phone option for live public comment will be unavailable for date today's special meeting as well. Okay so we're going to go straight into our presentation and Aaron want to introduce your guest and get us started. Sure thank you chair mayor Chair Hall. Aaron Metler, your Deputy County Executive Officer and Chief Physical Officer. With me today is Bobby Chung from K&N Public Finance. He's a consultant that's been with the county for many years and is very well versed on all things municipal financing. We have a brief agenda for you today. We're going to go over a summary of capital facilities projects. Bobby is going to give you a municipal financing 101 session. This is intended to be interactive with questions and answers so that you fully understand the concept of municipal financing. This was a request from your January board workshop to better understand the opportunity and also the risks associated with issuing debt for capital projects. So our intention today is to be educational and also answer some questions that you might have. We'll go through a project readiness recap looking through the projects that you saw in January and giving you kind of a status update as well as looking forward to our county's financial status heading into fiscal 2526 budgeting and then we'll bring it back for a board discussion relative to our next steps forward. I do have some recommendations for you and I'm happy to receive direction from your board today. With that, you could might recognize the slide from January. This is our five-year capital project outlook. And we've broken it up into three categories, deferred maintenance, department requests, and then ADA safety and electric vehicle transition. This list is generic in general, but there are lots of details behind each of these numbers. It's also considered unliving list, right? Projects roll on. The numbers change. Projects roll off as they get completed or as they become infeasible. And so really, this is intended to capture kind of the breadth and magnitude of the five-year capital project outlook that your facilities team is constantly working on with departments and myself. So it gives you an idea of the magnitude that we could have in front of us if only we had all of the money in the world. So the intention of this again is to show you that we have some deferred maintenance projects. This includes roof repair. This includes pavement ceiling of the parking lot of this building. But also upgrades to the jail facility that needs some maintenance as well as department requests which could could include new buildings, such as an animal shelter, could include new behavioral health buildings or facilities, and things that address kind of staff spacing requirements as we grow the organization, we run out of office space, and so to have major upgrades like that do require time and money. And then finally, ADA safety,, and none of that, I was gonna say emergency, but no, it's electric vehicle transition. Those are kind of a different category. Some of those are mandated. Some of them are planned out over a several year time period according to a plan. And so separating those out makes some sense here. Again, a typical capital project timeline, we recognize that it takes an average of five years from concept to completion for capital projects. And there's a lot of reasons behind that timeline. It can shrink and it can extend and it really comes back to the risk tolerance of the government, of the county, how much are you willing to risk going forward with a construction project that maybe isn't fully designed or engineered or permitted, but you wanna do a design build, perhaps. There's some additional risk associated with scope changes with unexpected construction issues that come up midstream that require more money. And so there's just that kind of decision point available for risk tolerance. Cost of materials is also another one that kind of changes the focus over that time frame. But also funding as stewards of public funds, we want to make sure that we're maximizing and leveraging our local dollars as much as possible. And so a lot of grant opportunities, which would be a leveraged fund, require that plans, engineering, designs, permitting, that level of readiness a lot of times is required in order to be competitive for grant funding. And also grants are cyclical. And so while we may spend three months designing a shelter, for example, for animals, we might have a grant opportunity that we realize is available if only we were ready in time for that grant deadline. And so sometimes that cyclical nature of grants requires us to wait and pause for a number of months before we're able to apply. Also with grant funding, what we found is even though your shovel ready and the grant requires you to be shovel ready. Sometimes our definition of shovel ready and the grant was very different. And so sometimes we can receive an award letter, which is great. We're all excited. We're going forward. We're accepting the grant and the time it takes for that agreement to make it back to us is sometimes several months. And this happened recently with a bunch of projects that were state funded where we applied for the funds, received the award and then sat for six months waiting for that grant agreement before we can move forward to go bid for construction. So there are delays that are kind of built into this timeframe that both cause it to extend out, but also provide an opportunity to not use 100% local dollars in the project. Again, large projects also can have complex funding with multiple players, multiple sources, and some of those sources have specific requirements of what you can use them on. So, for example, some grants could be specific to infrastructure So they're used for site preparation, or they're used to extend sewer lines or water lines, but can't be used to actually construct the building. Some grant opportunities are exactly the opposite where they can be used for furnishings, fixtures and equipment. So the internal stuff to make the building operational but can't be used for the capital structure itself. So those nuances are what staff spend a lot of time analyzing in the grant opportunities that come before us and figuring out upwards of six different funding sources for one project is possible, depending on the magnitude that we're looking at. So those complexities do add time, and they do require staff to be paying attention and also be quite creative when it comes to applications and Those bid documents that we go out for construction We do start to stack This readiness alongside each other and when it comes to financing we're looking at a timeline of Somewhere after design is mostly complete before we're executing a contract before we're going out to bid. We're wanting to make sure that our financing timeline hits that sweet spot. And in cases where we're stacking projects into one financing plan, we're going to want to make sure that our timelines are in alignment. So again, looking forward to some synergy here and also being mindful that once you issue debt financing, there's a time frame in which you have to spend it. So being cognizant of that and project readiness is important. With that, I'm gonna introduce Bobby and let him tell you all things municipal finance. And again, if you have questions along the way, feel free to let Bobby know or he and I are available for that. Thank you, Aaron for that introduction. Good afternoon, Chair Hall, members of the board. My name is Bobby Chung. I'm with K&N Public Finance. And I am very happy to be here today to chat a little bit about public finance. Bonds 101, should you want to pursue debt financing at some point in the future? It's always helpful to have, you know, like a basic kind of understanding of the process and some of the factors that go into debt financing. So as Erin said, please feel free to stop me at any time. I've got about 30 slides here, and I'm just going to run through. But again, this is. Could you just be sure to speak right into the mic or bring it a little closer, maybe? Sure, sure. Thank you. OK, this is the brief agenda. So we'll hit a brief introduction about municipal bonds, talk about some of the key players, talk about the actual methodology for pricing municipal bonds, talk about, you know, once you borrow money, your obligation does not just simply go away. There's some maintenance to your debt program, which your staff is very familiar with already. We'll talk a little bit about your, you know, the county's outstanding debt profile, and then wrap up with a very brief market update. So very briefly, just who I am and my role here. We are, you know, K&N is a municipal advisor. We've served as your advisor for the past decade or so. I've been in the industry since 2001 and I work mostly with California counties. So we work with 35 counties in California. And really, we, you know, our role is interesting. We're not a broker dealer. We are really meant to be sitting on your side of the table when you go through the process of evaluating whether or not to borrow money. And if you decide to make that step, to do so in the most prudent and efficient way. So, you know, we're fully registered with SEC and municipal securities rulemaking board and we have a fiduciary responsibility to put your interests ahead of our own. So, we're really on your side of the table. Okay, introduction to municipal bonds. What is a municipal bond and why would you ever want to borrow money? A municipal bond is really a form of a loan, right? I always like to draw comparisons in our private lives. If I were to buy a house, I could either pay cash for the house if I was that lucky and had that amount of money. or if I do did not I could go to a bank or a lender and borrow money and pay off that loan over time. And really that's what a municipal bond is. It's a loan to help accelerate and deliver projects where you in instances where you may not have or may not want to use the cash that you have. You know, and the intent here is to, you know, spread the cost of repaying the loan over the useful life of the facility. And sometimes you may even be able to achieve some cost savings if, you know, if let's say it'll take you five to ten years to save enough cash, you know, the cost of construction inflation over that same amount of time, may make it so that it would be more efficient for you to borrow in order to deliver that project. The county has utilized bond financing in the fairly recent past. Your most recent 2019 lease revenue bonds were used to finance the county's operations center. That's capital. Long term capital is one of the key purposes for municipal bond financing. Other forms of infrastructure, water, sewer, roads, bridges, utilities, that type of really projects meant for public use and benefit. Bonds could be issued to refinance your existing debt. If the market, if the interest rates are lower, then when you initially borrowed the money, there are opportunities to refinance your loan at lower interest rates and have some cost savings there. And some borrowers do short-term cash flow borrowings to help bridge just the uncertainty and timing issues, especially with counties where your main revenue source comes in, you know, twice a year, primarily with property taxes. Okay. One key aspect about, you know, local government's ability to borrow money that differs from private companies is your ability to borrow money on a tax-exempt So basically, the investors who loan you their money do not pay income tax on the interest that they earn. And therefore, they're able to, and they're willing to loan you money at a rate that is less than a rate that, let's say, like a Microsoft or a GE would be able to borrow money at. They have to access the taxable corporate bond market. You access the tax exempt bond market. And because you're able to do so, our dear friends at the IRS have certain number of restrictions in order to make it such that you're not borrowing too much. So first of all, you know, your borrowing must be for private use, must be for public use, no private use, and you have to have the reasonable expectation that you will spend the bond money in three years. So that helps us when we're working with you and staff. Think about what projects maybe grouped in certain bond issuances, really depending upon the timing of the expected expenditures. Your bond funds cannot earn arbitrage, so you can't go borrow money at like 3% reinvested at 6% and keep that difference for 20 years. That's a no-no. And there are certain certifications that you as an issuer make at the time of financing in order to help assure that all of these rules are kept over time. Okay, so this next slide is a summary of some of the common financing tools that public agencies utilize. The first item, general obligation bond, a lot of your school districts are able to pass geo bonds that require two thirds voter approval for various school facilities and such. Not so common in with California counties, right? There've only been a handful of counties in California that have been able to to muster the public support for geo bond measures, Alameda County, Santa Clara County, and I think Calaveras County has a Geobahn measure outstanding, but that's really about it. Much more common is the least revenue bond or certificates of participation, which is really the tool that counties, cities utilize to finance capital. That does not require voter approval, and really it's a general fund back to obligation. So it's not explicitly property taxed backs like GeoBonds are. And then there are other financing options like enterprise revenue bonds, for instance, if the county's a solid waste system, one, it's borrow money for a new, you know, transportation, like we were looking for you, looking at for you a couple of years ago, you could kind of draw a box around those dollars and specifically pledge the revenues associated with the enterprise towards the repayment of those borrowings, and that also is not approved. And finally, community facilities, districts, and assessment district bonds, oftentimes owners in a specific subset, usually a development, could vote to tax themselves for various infrastructure like roads, sewer pipes, that type of infrastructure. But I'm going to concentrate and spend a little bit more time on lease revenue bonds, just because again, that is the most common tool that counties utilize for capital. The county, Nevada County actually issued lease revenue bonds six years ago in 2019 to finance your operations center. Lease revenue bonds do not require a vote of the people because they are really viewed as contingent obligations. So your board makes lease payments towards the repayment of these bonds so long as you have use and occupancy of a pledged asset. So this admin center was actually initially pledged to this transaction and the idea is since you have use and occupancy of this facility you can lease this facility to a JPA nonprofit corporation and then make lease payments to that authority that gets assigned over to bondholders. So it's a legal structure that allows you to make lease payments towards the repayment of municipal bonds. There are a couple of key points here. You need a county asset in order to do so. You could either use the facility that you will be constructing as the least asset, but because you cannot make payments until you have use and occupancy of the asset, it is much more efficient and lower cost for you to identify an existing facility. Pledge that asset at least during the construction phase of your new project. And then you could swap in the asset that you were actually constructing and then tie that to the bonds that are being paid off to finance that same facility. So your 2019 bonds here, the blue is the principal payments, the orange is the interest, and much like a home loan in the early years, you're paying more interest than principal, but as you kind of tick through time on the back end, you're paying off more principle than interest. And this was structured to have a level fiscal year payment over the repayment term of 20 years. Let me pause there, see if there are any comments or questions to what I've covered so far. Okay, next part, key players, primary legal documents and credit ratings. This next slide, when and if you decide to go through the public financing process, there are a couple of different parties that you, you, the county, engage to help go through that process. So, Obviously you, the issuer, is a core part of the financing process. Your board actually approves the financing resolution and forms of the financing documents and disclosure and your staff, multiple offices are typically involved in the process. K&N as your municipal advisor would be playing the role of the quarterback for the financing, kind of keeping folks on track, on task, making sure we often negotiate fees with the other parties and again really watching out for your best interest throughout the entire process. You would want to hire outside counsel, bond counsel, disclosure counsel to provide various legal opinions that the investors rely upon when contemplating purchasing your bonds or not. Basically they give a validity opinion, making sure kind of providing their stamp of approval that the bond transaction is legally structured and they give a tax opinion that the investors rely upon that says yes these bonds are indeed tax exempt. There usually is a broker-dealer firm underwriter involved and they serve as the middleman between you and the actual lender to facilitate the flow of the money. The trustee paying agent is typically a commercial bank that helps enforce the contract that's established by the bonds. And the rating agencies, of course, assign a credit rating that helps assess the credit worthiness of the county. This next slide is a sample timeline, kind of from start to finish, of the public bond issuance process. So really it's like anywhere, I would say, between a three to six month process, most of the time, the process takes four to five months from start to finish. And that really starts when we work with staff leaning up into the formal kickoff of the transaction to really identify that there's a need that needs to be addressed with the financing. And then we usually spend the first couple of months developing the plan of finance, developing the disclosure document, going to the credit rating agencies. And then all of that, the financing package would come back to your board for formal approval through a financing resolution where you give your stamp of approval to staff and delegate to them the power to finish the transaction. And really, only towards the end of that process, towards the tail end, are we actually setting the interest rates where we price the bonds and then close the bonds two weeks later, which is when the money is actually delivered to the county. Okay, there are a couple of different ways to actually sell bonds. There's a competitive method of sale, a negotiated method of sale, and a direct purchase method of sale. And I'll go into each one of these three different ways, a little bit later in the presentation. But depending upon which method is decided upon, there's a whole suite of documents, legal documents, disclosure documents, that again would come before your board for approval. We work with staff, bond council, county council, up to that point to make sure that the transaction is in a form that we think is both saleable and reflects all of our recommendations. Okay. Credit ratings, much like in our private lives, when we need a borrow money, we have a credit score that we look at. The higher our credit score, the lower the cost of borrowing, and the lower the credit score, the higher the cost of our borrowing. And that's the same thing with public agencies. Right? The higher your credit score, the lower interest cost you will be able to secure funding at. And so it's very important that the county maintains your credit rating over time. you have a very good credit rating. Your lease revenue bonds are currently rated double A by Standard and Pores. your credit rating over time. You have a very good credit rating. Your lease revenue bonds are currently rated double A by Standard and Pores, which is, as you can see from the scale, is fairly high up in the investment grade. And really for lease revenue bonds, the highest possible credit rating is double A plus. So you're just one notch away from that highest possible credit rating is double A plus. So you're just one notch away from that highest possible credit rating. Okay. Just a little bit of a deeper dive here with credit ratings. Again, you have an existing rating from S&P. And oftentimes we get asked, you know, what do the rating agencies look at when coming up with our credit score? Some counties tell us, hey, we have a very low existing debt load, shooting our credit rating be very high. Well, yes, that's one of the things, that's one of the buckets that go into the analysis, but it's really only 20% of the analysis. That last bucket, debt and liabilities. They do look at your local economy, the financial performance, so how the county's budget has actually performed, you know, budget to actual over the last couple years. They look at the amount and quality of your reserves and liquidity. So that's why having policies like reserve policies, liquidity policies is very important. They look at your management. That's a full 20%. So, you know, how, again, budget-related reserves, policy-driven buckets. So all of those kind of go into your credit rating analysis. And so when we do this, when we go through this process for the county, we look and see, what exactly are the key metrics that the rating agency looks like? It looks at when assessing each one of these buckets. And I'm not going to go through each one of these here, but these are some of the actual ratios that S&P looks at for your economy, for your financial performance, reserves, and liquidity, management, and debt and liabilities. And when we go through the debt process with you, we go ahead and calculate out these ratios for you so we're not surprised by what comes back from S&P in particular. And I'd also say that, you know, S&P maintains your credit rating throughout the entire term that you have bonds outstanding. Because once you sell bonds into the market, there is a secondary market where investors could trade your bonds if they want to get out of their position. They could find another investor who could buy those bonds from the folks who initially loaned you the money. And therefore those new investors have to be basing their investment decision on the most current financial credit rating all that information. So even after you do a bond transaction, you have the obligation to maintain your credit rating and the obligation to keep current on your annual financial credit reports and provide credit information as you move forward. Okay, any questions with that section before I move on? Yeah. On the S&P criteria, the reserves and liquidity portion how you measure the financial health of the county. Yes. Is it fun balance of the overall county budget or is it general fun balance? It's general fun balance and it is I believe three of the five categories of general fund balance. Okay. Like unassigned and it's the most flexible dollars. The most flexible and what? Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. And the delivery once the money is delivered is it interest-sparing within our account if we have construction the ways it is. It is. And so that can be fed back into the servicing of the debt. It can be. Yes. Right, typically your construction dollars are only around for probably 12 to 16, 18 months, somewhere within that time frame. But it is introsparing that money you can actually keep those interest earnings and apply those towards either the project itself for capital or repayment of debt once your project is done. Okay. And then one quick question maybe for you, Chair Hall, but how does the regional finance authority play into this because the current debt is managed through the regional finance authority process and I'm not sure where they come into play with all this if at all? Yeah, your local debt advisory committee would be looking at the potential method of sale and potential for bond financing in context of current outstanding debt and evaluating whether there is enough liquidity available to make a sound recommendation. So you'll see that later on in the presentation. Okay, thanks. So they would make a recommendation. The board would make the correct decision. Thank you. I'll add on to that. Maybe it applies the same way, but thinking about how the credit rating or our decision is affected by how many bonds we have out. You talk about that? Yeah, that certainly is a factor and this that would be the, just going back here, that last column debt and liabilities, your current cost for debt service and liabilities, basically that's how much debt service you have annually on a budgetary basis as a percentage of your overall budget and they have certain buckets and criteria for that. And that second box, net-dread debt per capita. So what is the your outstanding total debt balance on a per person basis in your county? That's helpful and so Aaron when the when your team is deciding what bonds we should consider issuing you're looking at all of that as well before you're making a recommendation. Yeah, so the whole committee would be looking at all five of these criteria are projected credit rating score based on KNN's calculations and really looking at what is our overall debt obligation currently and what would it be if we choose to move forward and issue this new debt. We would look at that in whole and then determine, you know, how does that affect our credit rating going forward? But more importantly, how does that affect our overall operation of the county, given that additional debt service load that we're proposing to carry? And so it is a combination of not just myself, but also your auditor, controller, your treasure, tax collector, all of the big financial brains in the county will be getting together along with two of the the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial and the financial Is there an update or could that change throughout the process? Yes, thank you, Supervisor. There has been some chatter rumors at the federal level about possibly removing tax exemption as a benefit for local agencies. That concept periodically arises through time as folks try and evaluate various revenue raising strategies, because the IRS would then be able to tax the interest on a whole new category of securities. right? In the past, there's been a fairly strong bipartisan lobby effort across the country to help preserve tax exemption. I haven't heard any update since that matter was kind of first floated. I think that there have been various lobbying efforts to try and preserve that. Follow-on on that. I know you don't have a crystal ball. And this is a very unpredictable administration. But generally speaking, when they talk about this, they're talking about removing the tax exemption for future usable bonds, right? It doesn't ever become retroactive. I mean, I would hope so, but in theory, they could remove it completely. And then the folks who loaned you money at a tax exempt rate would then have to pay taxes on the interest that they're earning. That that seems that seems unlikely fairly draconian but I yeah but in the past is past has been generally going forward I think that had been the idea that had been contemplated in the past yep thank you okay thank you go ahead with your patience Thank you. All right. The next section is method of sale. I touched upon this briefly. Okay. This next slide has a lot of numbers on it, but basically, this chart on the right shows your 2019 lease revenue bonds and how those bonds were priced. So unlike a home mortgage where you get one interest rate for the entire loan, what you're doing when you sell municipal bonds is you're selling individual principal amounts for each year for the entire 20-year term and each one of those principal amounts has a different interest rate associated with it. And so the yield on the earlier maturities is lower than the yield on the longer maturities. That's like the concept of the yield curve, right? The longer that someone, like an investor, would be willing to loan you money, the more interest they would want to charge for their risk. And so you see that here in the yield column here. And so when you borrowed money back in 2019, these were the interest rates. Frankly, rates are higher in today's market. That's just the reality of the market. But we look at this concept called the True Interest Cost or TIC, which is akin to that one number that you get with a home mortgage. So if you were to look at a single blended borrow and rate for your 2019 bonds, which are fixed rate, they're not variable rate, this is a fixed payment schedule, you're able to borrow money at 3.09% basically for 20 years. Tax exams, fixed rate, 20 years. Method of sale, this next slide, touches upon each one of those three methods that I spoke with earlier. So up top, the competitive and negotiated sale, really when you sell bonds into the public market where you're finding end investors that could be individual people just putting in orders. They could be your big money managers. They could be your big mutual funds that maintain municipal bond portfolios. That's the public market where you need to get a credit rating. You need to prepare a disclosure document and your selling bonds into the public market. Typically, for smaller, maybe shorter term borrowings, we always look at the private placement market where you could find a single commercial bank, basically like a BFA or JP Morgan or Chase, that will just buy your debt. That is typically a, does not require a credit rating, no official statement, no disclosure document, but they typically have, they will not loan on a 25, 30 year basis. They will loan typically more on a 15, 10 to 15-year basis and sometimes 20 years. So whenever you, you know, we look at a potential borrowing for the county, we always kind of evaluate this, right? If you come to us with a 10-year, you know, $7 million transaction, we'll take a very careful look at the direct purchase option because it's a little bit more straightforward. Frankly, it's less work, less cost for the county. The direct purchase market typically is a little bit higher interest rate because you have one bank that has to hold on to that loan for the entire term. So if you're borrowing money, for if you're borrowing more money over a longer term, it does make more financial sense to take the public sale approach. But that's kind of the analysis that we do whenever we evaluate financing options for the county. But here's an illustration of a successful competitive sale that Sonoma County used for various energy efficiency projects, I believe, last fall. We were the municipal advisor here and they got, you know, a dozen bids or so through the competitive sale process. So here, Keybankank submitted the low true interest cost bid and they were awarded the ability to underwrite the bonds. On the other hand, if we were to go through the negotiated sale business, the negotiated sale option, you would hire a broker dealer firm as earlier in the process. We would typically do an RFP to bring a firm on board. And then on the day of sale, we would actively negotiate the actual pricing for every maturity based upon the investor interest and all. So we're always on your side to try and push down the interest rates as much as possible, but we kind of look at the investor subscription levels, the tone of the market and all. So yeah. Yeah. Any questions about the methods of sale? Okay. Post-issuance practices. Yeah, as I briefly touched upon, once you sell bonds, there is some continual maintenance of the debt program throughout the course of the Repayment Period. When you borrow money, you sign what's called a continuing disclosure certificate where you commit to basically upload your Act for plus certain tables that are in the disclosure document on an annual basis in order to keep, again, the investor's current on your financial condition. Arbitrage rebate, since the IRS, again, this is a preferential treatment, right? That you were able to borrow money on a tax exempt basis. Any positive arbitrage, so if you have money that's, let's say, in a reserve fund or various other funds that are earning above the rate that you borrowed at, you have to rebate or pay back the difference to the IRS. So if you're able to earn at least what you're borrowing at, you can always keep that amount. Again, I touched on this IRS spend-down requirements, basically spending 85% of the total amount within three years, and really committing to not have any private use at the facilities that are benefiting from tax exempt municipal bond proceeds. In the folks up in Sacramento, CDAC, they have certain reporting requirements on an annual basis as well to make sure that you're actually spending your money and paying down your bonds. Okay. Yeah, just this page, just because it's so important, that continuing disclosure requirement is not only the annual report, but if any one of these laundry lists under number two occur, you must basically, immediately within 10 business days days report that to the market. So if there's any changes to your credit rating, if there's any bankruptcy or payment to fall, obviously stuff that is very urgent, that an investor, a current bond holder would want to know, there is a 10 business date time limit for that. All right. I have a question on the slide 27. Can you go back? Yes. So it did mention. So ensure compliance with public use limitations throughout life of bond. So that's any facility that's built. With the use of municipal tax exempt bond is for public use only that makes sense. We typically have nonprofit sometimes. Do the work or run the facilities or participate. I'm assuming that's not an issue. It's just private use and how strict is that? Like, I mean, I'm thinking of a facility where somebody wants to sell snacks at an event. So there is a diminimus allowance for that. I think it's like 5% or 10% of the proceeds could be allocated for what's known as bad use. So like if you have a coffee shop in your lobby, that usually has a small enough footprint where that would be OK. But this is why you have a Bond and Tax Council typically on call to ask these kinds of questions. And really if you're contemplating selling any facilities that had the benefit of bond proceeds, we should have a conversation about that. And certainly if you are leasing out space to private entities, we should have a conversation about that with staff and council as well. Yeah, I'm not in a minute. Okay, and so that similarly, you know, the economy is very unstable right now. If we go into a bond and we start to build something and prices just go through the roof and we decide maybe that's enough money to finish it. What are our options then? Yeah, so that would be a difficult situation, right? You would have borrowed... So typically we wait until you have a construction contract in place that's usually pretty firm with the cost. So you have a firm number and then we write size the borrowing to that number. If for some reason unexpected circumstances occur, you could borrow more money, you could use cash on hand to complete the projects. It would be difficult to unwind the bond transaction, especially if you sell it into the public market if you wanted to get out of the bonds per se. Okay. I mean I'm sure this question is coming up other places as the tariffs bounce up and down and building materials are rising and supplies are beginning to drop. So, okay, thanks. Go ahead. Some more question, but if you got a grant in lieu of a fund, if you got a grant, pay for part of the capital expansion and you did not draw that down. How would the excess funds be handled? You borrow 100 million, you get a grant for 20 and then you're 20 over. What do you, what happens? Yeah, if you knew that the likelihood of that 20 million coming in was very high, we could structure in a call option for that $100 million, where you could apply that 20 million very quickly to just pay the on-prints. Usually when you issue a long-term bond, there's a call option where the county could pay off with no penalty bonds, but only after year 10. So there's usually 10 years of call protection. But if we knew that, there was a high likelihood of money coming in, I don't know, a year or two after, we could structure in a portion of the bonds with that can be paying off very quickly. So that would make sense. It would be paying interest off. OK, it makes sense. And then one more quick question. The, for example, if we built a facility that was charging medical billing rates, for example, we were making money, we built it, completed it, the bond is moving forward. But we're making money on that. Is there any problems there? So some of your peers have financed healthcare and hospital facilities and part of the diligence process, again that bond and tax counts are due when you're like right up front is they look at doctors contracts, they look at all of the contracts to see if there is, if there is a private use and if that, you know, if that bad use allows to absorb that, the rules around private use and the permissibility are very complex. Unfortunately, frankly, I'm not an expert on it, but that would be part of the diligence process that we would go through before borrowing the money. And just to add, Supervisor Bullock, I think the making a profit, right, it's still public money that would still be required to be used in a public purpose. And so there's that nuance to versus leasing out a portion of a building to a private doctor practice or a private business practice. That would be the different scenario where you would be in danger of losing your tax exempt status. But to the extent that you're building that you financed is still a four public benefit. That's the test. Okay. This next section very briefly touches upon the county's outstanding debt profile, and we work with staff to make sure that information is current. The transactions here, we've just listed the larger transactions, the county has several additional smaller loans that are shorter term. But we take into consideration when looking at your debt load all of these transactions. So here we show your 2019 lease revenue bonds. That was a public sale, 20 year maturity, AA rating. That call provision, optional call provision is in 2029. So as we're approaching that, we will look and see if it makes financial sense to refinance that depending on on the interest rate environment there. And you have a couple of direct purchase transactions. You need new clean renewable energy bonds. I think that's the solar array out here. And those were done actually through direct purchase. So you've utilized kind of both methods of sale in the recent past. Okay. Okay, so what do rates look like in today's market? You know, I mentioned that six years ago you were able to borrow money at basically 3% for 20 years. If you were to look and see, you know, what would a 20-year borrowing rate look like in today's market? You're looking at about 4.38 percent, so quite a bit higher. And these scenarios here aren't targeting any specific project fund amount. We basically said, hey, if we were to, if budgetarily wise, we wanted to spend $1 million per fiscal year on debt service, how much projects would that generate? So you could imagine the longer you borrow money for, the more money you could squeeze out of that $1 million per year. And you see that here, 20-year scenario. You're able to borrow under that project fun line about 13 million that increases to 14 and a half in the 25-year scenario and a 15.6 and the 30-year scenario. But then, of course, your borrowing rate increases as you go up through, as you borrow rate for longer periods of time, 4.38% for 20 years, 4.61% for 25 years, and 4.75% for 30 years. So we're really in a different rate environment. The market has been very volatile, as I'm sure folks are very familiar with, especially over the course of the last months, when the reality of the tariffs really has kind of It's chopped the markets. But transactions are being done both on a competitive and negotiated basis. So the bond market is functioning, we're just at a different rate level. And I want to point out here that when we work with K&N on a specific project or set of projects, we can do a number of different things that change this particular scenario slide. So I asked Bobby to do this with an average annual payment of about a million dollars flat for the whole term. We could flip it and say, I want $30 million in my project fund and he would redo the numbers and tell us what the debt service would be over each of those time periods as well. And conversely using we prefer in government a flat stable payment because that's a lot easier for budgeting. but there are options to have staggered payments that fluctuate. So if we were going to guesstimate, for example, that our ability to pay debt service was going to increase over time, we could structure a bond such that the payments also increased over time. Of course, the risk is that your revenue doesn't increase. So that's why we tend to do a flat annual debt service amount. But just to show you the flexibility here, if we're constrained by how much we can pay in debt service, this is one method. And if we're constrained by how much we need to do the project in the time in which we need to do it, then this debt service number would change. Okay. Okay. Okay. This last section, just a very brief market update, kind of enforcing what I just said. This here is a chart of the bond buyer, 20 bond index, and it's really a 20-year interest rate since the start of the Millennium, I guess, 24 or 25 years here. And as you could see, you know, all the way on the far right, we're in a rate environment now that's just significantly higher than we have been for quite some time. And really this looks like a line that's just shot up really over the course of the last month. And I just listed a couple of the factors here that could impact borrowing rates like inflation, inflation expectations, economic conditions. I should add tax policy changes and policy, certain policy decisions coming out of the federal government as well. There's been a lot of scrutiny and attention paid on the Fed funds rate recently. Right now, the Federal Open Markets Committee, which sets this rate, increased the rate drastically over the course of the last couple of years in an effort to fight inflation. And the big question is, well, why aren't they reducing rates now that inflation is more under control? And you could see here, there's actually a futures market for where the market thinks that the Fed Fund's rate will be over time. So folks think that the Fed Fund's rate will actually decrease on a one, two, three, four times over the course of the remaining calendar year. Whether or not that actually happens is subject to economic releases, data. There was a fairly strong jobs report. That was just released this morning that suggests the strength of the economy has been fairly resilient. So there may not be a need to actually lower this if the economy is not struggling. But this chart changes on an hourly basis and has been very volatile over the course of the last couple months as well. As you might imagine. Okay, let's see. And yeah, that's all we have. Thank you very much. Thank you. We may come back with questions after Aaron. Yeah, I would expect so. So appreciate Bobby, your financing 101 session. Now I'm going to try to put some context to what Bobby was talking about. So a quick review of project readiness. These slides again will look familiar from your Jane Ray workshop. These are the top projects that are still in play that will likely need general fund assistance either in the form of cash, money, or financing debt. So the animal shelter is near and dear to all of our hearts. We have a concept of the concept of the city. We have a concept of the concept of the city. We have a concept of the concept of the city. We have a concept of the concept of the city. We have a concept of the concept of the city. We have a concept of the city. We have a concept of the city. We have a construction documents at some point later this year and put the project out to bid once that financing plan is solidified. So one example of a project, the Sheriff's Office Firearms Range, most of you are aware, it did have a federal earmark that did not make it through the budget debacle of 2024. It is back and submitted for an earmark for 2025-26. We are really hopeful that that goes through and comes back to us as a possibility to help fund this firearms range. The CEO's office is very supportive of this project because it would save us costs when it comes to training obligations. Our deputies are currently traveling very far away to be able to qualify for firearms rating. So having an indoor in county facility would be advantageous to us all. And so we're working with the sheriff's office on how to fund this portion of their training facility. The bit of a smaller project, 15 million was our initial estimate. It's currently out for design build project to refine that number and also refine the design and see if we can either get that price down a little bit or be confident in it so that when we do figure out the financing plan we're sure of the amount of money that's needed. The correctional facility has a remodel and a medical expansion. Both of those projects are in play right now. We had a feasibility study done five years ago that identified what was needed to renovate and maintain that facility. And over the last five years, we've added on a need for medical expansion. And so some of that project has changed and it would warrant additional development review in collaboration with the Sheriff's Office facilities and the CEO team. This is a $30 million project as a gas just by its magnitude and also that correctional facilities tend to be more expensive than others to their security requirements and so we would look to formulate and kind of finalize the concept and project scope over the next year for this one. The Summit Maintenance Storage Facility is one that kind of came up on our radar not too long ago. The need for some storage for our equipment up on the summit that's used for snow removal but also roads maintenance and not having to travel that far up with our equipment would be ideal. We don't have a lot of equipment. We don't have a lot of equipment. We don't have a lot of equipment. We don't have a lot of equipment. We don't have a lot of equipment. We don't have a lot of equipment. We don project here. And then finally, the Sheriff's Office renovation of the former juvenile hall into a dispatch training facility is also in play. This is a longer term project because it's not as critical, but does meet a need that's been identified by the Sheriff's Office and looking at about $8 million in cost at this point. So again, in development stages, opportunity to refine the scope and also identify some potential funding, braiding opportunities here. And so also in January, I talked about the different options that we have for capital project financing. Capital project general fund assignment does exist for this reason. It tends to be rather small in nature and used for those maintenance projects because they tend to be a couple million dollars or a couple hundred thousand rather than multiple millions of dollars. We do have some other county funds available to dedicate towards capital projects, Most namely the Sheriff's Special Revenue Funds, which they're tying to their firearms range, and also training facility. We have Texas and Bonn Financing, which you just heard all about in the last hour as a strong contender here. And then also some public private partnership contribution opportunities with the animal shelter and with some of the other facilities that we're looking at. There's always opportunity, I think, for a partnership scenario. And then, of course, grant awards and federal earmarks. We aggressively go after these funds back to the timing consideration. A lot of times, those grant opportunities. And even earmarks really require solid plans, solid scope, solid amounts, solid timing, and so the more that we can spend getting those details solidified, the better position we're in to be competitive. So in terms of our county's financial status, our general fund balance wanted to bring this slide back as well. We're looking at our adopted fiscal year budget of $40 million in total general fund balance. We're estimating the year end to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to pay cash for some of these smaller projects that we're looking at needing to be completed. So that will be part of the deep dive that your budget subcommittee was going into starting next Monday and will be for their discussion as we move along the process. Our preliminary general fund for 2526, about $100 million in revenue. We are looking at a $3 and the and the and the and the and the and the and. Our proposed expenditures come in exactly at that amount, leaving us with no change to fund balance, which means we don't have extra money in 2526 to throw to debt service. So if we were to go out to bond market now and issue debt immediately, we wouldn't have even that million dollars in Bobby's example to be able to spend on debt service, all things considered, right? There's obviously room for movement within these numbers, but this just illustrates the financial picture that this county is in right now where our discretionary revenue that goes to our general fund that would be used to back financing is very flat. And yet our expenditures are not, and they do continue to go up. And in fact, we didn't start out balanced. We had to ask departments to reduce their requests for general fund dollars leading into 2526. And so what the subcommittee is going to dive into over the next two weeks is how did those departments come at that request for reduction? Some of them weren't able to make it. Some of them made some, made some concessions and others were able to meet the target. So it is a little bit over the map and it really comes back to the policy direction of the board and where you want to prioritize spending of your discretionary revenues. Currently it's pledged towards staffing and programs. You have this capital project opportunity before you, and so seeking direction from you both today and in the future as we move towards budget adoption where you want to program those dollars will be important. Like I said, debt service capacity is going to be challenging. It's not impossible. Nothing's impossible. It's just going to require some robust discussion and some tough choices and so unknown state and federal budget impacts those will continue to fluctuate and be unknown for the next several months and yet we still need to invest in county facilities and so striking that balance and figuring out where the opportunities are and are we ready when those opportunities come will be important going forward. As far as recommended next steps over the next two months in May or June, we're going to have budget subcommittee meetings. Your chair and vice chair are going to take a deep dive into the larger budget, not just the general fund $100 billion, but also all of the other funds. We have a public hearing for that proposed budget on June 10th and then we have budget adoptions scheduled for later in June. Between June and December I'm recommending that we continue this design and development process for not only the four projects that I highlighted today but all of the projects. To really make sure that we're making the most use of our time, we are being strategic and being able to plan accordingly for those buckets of deferred maintenance for department requests and for ADA required projects. We will do this through the Capital Projects ad hoc that committee meets regularly to review projects as they are ready for supervisor input. And then looking ahead to October, December, I would love to review the county's fiscal position at that time when we have year end, current year end numbers. When we know a little bit more about the state's budget proposal, when we know a little bit more, hopefully about the federal budget going into 26. And that's the time at which I propose that the debt financing advisory committee would convene and really look at what are the opportunities here, what are the risks and how are we feeling overall about going forward and issuing debt to achieve some of these larger projects. And so all of that would culminate back at your January board workshop with a more specific planned proposal for all five of you to kind of weigh in on and ask your questions of rather than the high level that we've been giving you the last couple months it would be more specific to this is our planned proposal but again these are my recommended steps and I'm happy to answer questions that you might have and or take direction at this time back Back to you, Chair. Thank you. Very helpful. Remind me going back to the beginning slides, for example, the un. The deferred maintenance that big chunk of funds that we're planning to fund on a annual basis. We do chip away at deferred maintenance on an annual basis. Yes. Okay, and so we're not gonna be looking for bond funds for that. That's not part of the, just the ones that you propose or the ones we're looking at right now. I would say deferred maintenance offers an opportunity for us if we are going for a bigger bond issue and we throw $3 million in there for some deferred maintenance projects that it would take us five years normally to fund. But if we could just do it right then and there, it's a low cost option to bundle it. And that's where K&N earns their money because we're able to say what if we did this and what if we did this and what if we did this and they say yes That will work or I don't know that that makes a lot of sense But I want I want to highlight the opportunity is there We fund deferred maintenance on a cash basis so as much money as we're able to sock away into that special assignment It takes a while to build up to enough money to re-reve several several county buildings, for example. Right. What about, and I'm not trying to come out of the left field here, just thinking about, and I appreciate, I like that you're talking about looking at in October that makes a lot more sense given everything. The projects, so our, our veg management projects that are now now stalled and may not have the funding ever restored, is that something we could look at funding through a bond as well or their restrictions on the type of vegetation management is not considered capital, right? Capital is one time build the thing. Pay overtime. Yeah. Veg management is an ongoing obligation with routine maintenance that's going to be continuous. So it's not something I would recommend for debt finance. There's no way to redefine that. Okay. Questions? I guess to your point, the budget subcommittee could move budget, you know, could move money around, right, into that and then move it out of deferred maintenance, carry bond expense for the deferred maintenance portion. That's's possible. Understanding the fun balances. Something I take special interest in. I just had a quick question just on the timing. So if I understand you right. The budget for 2526. We're not going to actually have debt service. We don't 2627 budget year. Correct. Okay. I just wasn't sure we're not planning to issue debt in this proposed budget. Yep. Thanks. And if we were to move forward next year, we'd have to define that, for example, one million a year debt finance, and we'd have to define that early on as part of the budget process. Right, so we'd have to look at what level of debt service are we comfortable with adding to our operational budget for the next 20 to 30 years. And what does that look like in terms of impacts to our operations? All things considered. to our operations, all things considered. So that's why the timing is pretty critical because you want enough information about where your revenues might land to see how much did they grow, and then also our expense obligations, salaries, benefits, retirement, general liability, cost plan, these are the things that kind of we struggled with this year. Because our revenues were fairly flat, we weren't able to navigate those as well as we have in years past. That could absolutely change. And so being able to watch our revenues on a quarterly basis report back how we are relative to our budget proposal or our projections will be important for us to just be paying more close attention to because we have this identified need that we're working towards. But yes, it may require some consideration for project elimination or program resizing, reprioritization of funds in order to afford that debt service. And, um, guys, jump in. If you have questions, I have one more. What's that? Let me finish this one and then I'll make sure I go back to you. Okay. And guys jump in if you have questions I have one more. What's that? Let me finish this one and then I'll make sure I go back to you. Sorry. So I'm questioning a little bit. It sounded like you were recommending to continue forward with sort of design and potential permitting but basically mostly design and so we're going to be putting money into these projects looking at the designs and getting them ready in case we go out for a bond next year. That could be considerable amount of money. Have you thought about putting some of them on hold until we know more what's going on in October? Yeah I think there's opportunity for staff to spend some time going through that development making sure the scope is where we want it to be before we incur external costs with an architecture engineering firm. At that point we would want to identify a budget and funding source to move it forward in the pre-development stage. And that would be a project that would be fairly confident, either has to go forward or we absolutely want it to go forward. The timing of it becomes more of a priority and more critical at that point that you're outlying cash. But also, we don't want to stop moving forward. These issues aren't going to go away. These needs are not going to magically disappear. And so we don't necessarily want to be caught flat-footed, where we're waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. And then all of a sudden it's here and we're not ready. So managing that sweet spot, again, in coordination with your capital facilities project team, through your ad hoc, through my office, and the Treasure Tax Collector Auditor Controller, like all of us of us routinely talking about these projects. I'm new, right? I'm my year in, but this is my idea is the more we communicate, and we're on the same page, and we're all going forward towards the same goal, the better we're going to be positioned, and be able to grasp the opportunities that come at us, whether that be a grant, an earmark, or some savings in our operations that was unanticipated or unexpected, where we're gonna propose to the board, hey, do you wanna spend this new money on debt? Do you have higher priorities that we need to be aware of? And that's something that will come up as somewhat in our budget committees in the next two weeks as well. Okay. Okay. Any other questions on the board? Just kind of observation. So we're not anticipating that increased revenues through property tax or TOT or sales tax moving forward in this current budget year. We are anticipating increases. They're just not great increases, right? they're not significant enough to counter balance the increases that we have an expenditures in payroll costs and benefit costs and contract costs. And then is there a scenario where we don't realize any increases in all three of those things moving. So both retail sales and tourism are protected to be very down this year. So are we taking that into consideration as we're looking? Do we have a contingency plan for that? Those losses? We do have a bit of a contingency plan. I will say it's not dialed out completely. We will see increases in property tax because of prop 13 what we won't see is the sales of property and that bump in supplemental sale and supplemental property tax will be what we see decrease and also the level in which property tax increases hit because you don't have that turnover you don't have that revaluation as we have in the past during times of real estate boom we are accounting and accounting for that that we're not going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going is pretty flat, meaning the growth is maybe 2% or 4% versus in the past it's been 6 to 8. So we are looking at those trends and adjusting accordingly. I would say in if the bottom falls out of the economy and we run into a situation where our revenues are completely not where we want them to be, that's why we have fund balance. That's exactly why we have those fund balance assignments for general purpose, for contingency, for economic uncertainty. and we would have an opportunity to come to the board and say, this is what we're seeing not come in. Our recommendation is that we tap into fund balance. Or our recommendation is that we stop certain projects that are draining that source of funding, right? There's a whole bunch of, a menu of options. And depending on the situation in the scenario, we would be evaluating all of those options and then coming to the board with a recommendation. I don't really have any questions. I think that when we look at this and where our future is going, you know, we're, we're looking at conservatively, where we're going to go. But we have to keep projects in the hope, because if we do have something that becomes up, I think that's, you have to be ready. You have to be physically ready to make those moves. So, I mean, I know we're all in trying a little times right now, but I think that, you guys stay on top of it pretty well. was really interesting by your numbers and how that works. It's sometimes it's like a little bit much when you're just taking it all in for the moment. But I know we've done it. We've been very, we've done very well over the years with our capital improvement projects. We've done very well with our bonds and we've paid them off. We've been conservative in how that works. And I think that's going to continue because that's what we do here. I mean, that's one of our core priorities is physical responsibility. And I think that that's where we're headed. And I think we have to be able to open those doors when we're ready. And we have to keep them closed when we're not. So this was it was a good eye opener. So appreciate the this workshop. I think it really was a benefit to all of us Thank you for that. It was very informative In your experience, so I know excuse me We had you had that graph that showed the de-expectation is that rates are going to go down in the next year, let's say it's a percentage point, which obviously is going to be a significant savings borrowing. Same time construction costs may be going up, and so there's always that tension and that balance as far as timing. So my question is, and we can talk more later as well. Other municipalities, other counties, how do they navigate that balance between wanting to go forward because of these needs? The often uncertain, interest rate environment, construction costs, is it accurate to say that right now it's particularly uncertain, and or are there there other counties and I know their situations are different that are pulling the trigger. But in general the timing, I mean it seems like, you know, like with the stock market, if you try and market time, you know, you're always going to lose pretty much. do envision it getting more certain and better, and let's say two year period period or other counties or municipalities pulling the trigger now and how do you kind of in a nutshell navigate that because it's always going to be that tension between rates and I guess needs. That's good question supervisor I'm assuming that's addressed to me. I would say that, right, there are some counties that are fairly far along in the process. So if you had a construction bid out and you just received bids, and you're basically more committed to a project, then I'd say those folks are more committed to borrowing the money to do the project. We are seeing, you know, budgetary stress up and down the state, right? That is not unique. And the uncertainty from the federal government, I in volatility, I would say, has encouraged folks to generally try and wait out the volatility. And I'd say, in particular, about a month ago, the bond market, along with the equity market, were especially volatile. A lot of that has calmed down. And just within the last week, we saw some fairly robust competitive sales. We saw a lot of supply in the bond market. So again, I think the period of high volatility related to the imposition of the first round of tariffs is probably behind us. But obviously, as the market reacts to new information reacts to new information, it could be injected with new volatility. So I think that folks who are fairly committed to a project are just moving forward and borrowing the money. We help try and identify if there's a particularly bad day in the market, we will tell you, don't price your bonds today, give it a week, right? If you have a flexibility, it's not a, yeah, so that's part of our role too, is to try and judge from a market perspective when would be a good time to borrow the money. And I would just add from the construction side, when we go out to bid, there have been scenarios where the bids have come back and they are significantly higher than anticipated or significantly higher than we have funds available and we have opted to not move forward at that time. In that scenario, had we issued bonds and then gone out to bid, we still have time. We don't have to be concerned that the bonds are going to expire because we have three years to draw them down. And so in that scenario, we could choose to reject all bids, wait three to six months, go back out to bid and see if they're better. And if they weren't, then we'd reevaluate the whole thing. But chances are good that we would have better bids if we were able to wait out that volatility. So in that scenario, it still works, right? Yeah. So example of that. So, I mean, that was considerable savings. Correct. Yeah. I'm going to open up to public comment. Here it. Michael Taylor District 1. There we go. Michael Taylor District one. I was going to comment along the lines that Lisa was coming with her statements. And point out that if I understood the budget last year, the 24, 25 budget, last year, a year ago in May, the county was already seeing sales tax, property taxes, TOT, all of the normal incomes for the county that are not dependent on state or federal funding or grants was going the other direction. Also, it appeared to me, if I remember reading it correctly, there was projections that it was going to continue to go the wrong direction for the next two fiscal years. So I guess I'm saying, before Donald Trump was elected, we're already heading in the wrong direction. And there was a pattern that was going to continue to head in the wrong direction and I think borrowing money now to borrow itself out of this doesn't make sense and listening to the presentation it does make sense to come back and look at it in six months where those borrowing costs could come down. Inflation could come down and there's more stability in the market. So my recommendation is, take, understand what you guys are already predicted for the next two years and it looks like we're heading that way anyhow and kick the can down the road. Thank you. Thank you. We're going to close public comment. Bring it back to the board. Ellison, do you have questions? Seems like this is a good opportunity as well for you. No, I think it was a really important presentation for the board to hear to look at priority projects, to get a pulse of where our budget is at. I think the next few weeks budget subcommittee and coming in with a balanced budget to the board, I think we could continue this discussion when at the budget adoption and public hearings in July. And we'll continue to monitor quick, you know, say focus on monitoring the situation, non-experts monitoring what our counterparts are doing throughout the city. So, I think that's a good idea. You know, say focus on monitoring the situation, leading on experts, monitoring what our counterparts are doing, you know, throughout the state, and then work through the ad hot committee process with the water supervisors to define next steps. Yeah, thank you for the presentation. Just a couple of comments that the indicators I think at least because I was on budget subcommittee, the indicators did show that there was changes in transfer and permit polls so that was like a flag. But when did the actuals come out and when do we get the actual assumption to match with the indicators that were discussed in public comment? So we'll get the property tax role from the assessor usually in July after the budget's adopted? Yeah, so just one note. The indicators that we use and the graphs we use to project revenue is not exactly the same as revenue. In my opinion, I've seen a lot of indicators, hey, it's going the wrong way. And then what we get is actually great. Great or good. So just a point to note there. And then the one piece for me too is we've talked a little bit about the capital facilities plan. And you know, I had the benefit of being on Cap So it is last year and sitting through a lot of meetings where we talk about projects. There's a lot of detail missing from here and when we talk about borrowing money, I think to your point, you've given us a great overview so I'm not saying that it should be included in this presentation. But I think when we talk about borrowing large sums of money, I'd like to understand or I think the board should understand in great detail the projects behind all of that and on necessarily just the gross kind of overview of big project allocation. So I don't know. I've heard changes may be in the way that cap facilities is presented to the board or how that transparency is kind of conveyed in the process, but I just as one board member think that during times like this would be great to talk about cap facilities maybe a little bit more. Yeah, the intention is definitely to provide more detail in terms specific projects, specific dollar amounts, as well as timing when we're talking about a financing plan, right? We're going to have to have that level of detail. And we should also be making you aware of what isn't moving forward as a result of what we're proposing to move forward, right? So that that nuance of this is what we heard priorization from the board. This is how we're able to make it work. This is what we're not able to make work right now. Here's the plan for that. So there still is, like I said at the beginning, those projects that $90 million doesn't go away. It just changes. It goes up and down. They change budget buckets and the timing and priority. I think looking at it holistically again, it's an opportunity cost opportunity cost. We're able to lump things together, where normally they would be on their own trajectories independent of one another. Financing gives us that ability to look at and consolidate smaller projects into bigger ones. And I will add on the revenue piece, we have been doing analysis lately of how well we've been budgeting our revenues in terms of our budget to actual ratio. And in the general fund discretionary revenue in particular, we're pretty spot on. We have a fluctuation of 1 to 3% over the last 10 years. And so from a revenue perspective, we've gotten really good at being able to project and predict using those indicators. I will say on the expense side, we have for their analysis to make because we always have that vacancy factor and then we always have planned expenditures that for a variety of reasons don't move forward. And so diving into those nuanced details takes a little bit more time, but we definitely are, you know, in times of struggle like we are right now, we want to make sure that we are as dialed and as possible so that we're not necessarily leaving money on the table and we're also not over committing or over subscribing what we plan on doing. So that's where that balanced budget proposal comes into play. As a conservative prudent opportunity for us to say, we're living within our means. We're not overextending ourselves. And in times where we are overextending ourselves, it's a planned use of fun balance. There's a specific project or reason behind it and the board is fully aware of it. So that level of transparency is what we're striving for. Okay, thank you. I think just one other smallish comment from my point of view, I do think this board has been pretty consistently relatively conservative, wanting to be very careful with our funds. And I see that I can imagine that's going to continue. I think we're going to have to do that. And I think that's going to be a great deal of time. and I see that I imagine that's going to continue. I think we're all on alignment on that. The one thing I'm quibble with is there will be no earmarks this year. And I do not think we should be counting on them. I would prefer to see an analysis that shows no earmarks. There isn't even a process in Congress right now for them to ask for them. So I would prefer that we just assume there's none and then you somebody can say, I told you so if I'm wrong and then we have some funds to work with. But along this is similar sort of approach I think in terms of being conservative that doesn't look like there's any possibility of that. We could certainly move that earmark to the contingent financing plan, right? Instead of the primary financing plan. I think that would make more sense. And in Bobby's example, where all of a sudden, we got the $20 million, we were able to navigate that. Yeah, that makes more sense to me. I want to thank you for your presentation. It was very clear. It's a lot of detail and a lot to take in, but it was really, I think, well done. I appreciate it so much. It gives us a lot more tools to bring to the budget decision table. And Aaron, thanks for your always great explanations, answers to our questions. So thank you just for thank you so much for the presentation and we are adjourned. you you you you you you you you