Board of Commissioners · Work Session · May 19, 2026

But welcome to day one of our budget process and I will turn it over to staff for our budget overview. Thank you, commissioners. Uh, manager Hager, I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. We're going to throw up a lot of numbers.

Feel free to break in and ask questions. Don't get overwhelmed. I think thematically we're going to try to hit on a a really interesting question that one of the board of education members asked last week, which was why why has it feel so tight? And I'm going to show you uh in five-year increments what we've done in the last five years compared to the five years before that to hopefully answer that question while also focusing particularly on the revenue situation that sort of guides this year's the upcoming 2627 budget. And those revenue estimates that we're going to show you are shockingly small compared to previous years. which means in response

we have to have significant uh discussions about where we fund on the expenditure side. up. Moving forward, let's see. All right, we got it now.

Fantastic. In summary, real quick, and again, I'm focusing on numbers, we started out the year with roughly 50 plus million dollars in expenditure, needs, wants, requests. That includes $28 million from DPS alone. And look at that.

how much annual revenue, new revenue dollars we had. 7 million. Compared to previous years where we had 13, 15, 20 plus million dollars in new revenue, what we know now is that of the key revenue sources we looked at, we actually had a reduction in revenue. So, we're out 57 almost 58 million between what we want and the ability to pay for

what we want. And that's a pretty startling area to be in. What are some of the key revenues we looked at this year? Well, there's always growth in property tax revenue without a property tax rate increase.

That number is $391,000, which is not much in a $700 million general fund budget. Sales tax growth $771,000. Normally that number is 56 million has been as high as $10 million. 5 million because we're concerned about our revenue sources coming into the next fiscal year and we want to make sure we have some stability.

So we're not appropriating our savings account as much as we could because we don't want to get in a stressful financial situation about that. I just want to for comparison I'm going to show you just a couple of years ago. It's the same slide, same major numbers. Look at how

much additional property tax we had in 23 24 without a property tax rate increase. That's money available for departments to ask for for increased inflationary costs, new vehicles, new positions, new funding for DPS. 9 million. Medical holds was going up three million.

That's $35 million in new revenue. I want you to look at the same numbers again this year. I'll just go back and forth so you can see the difference. So in essence, what's happening here is we have very little to know to actually negative revenue growth in 2627.

And I think if you'll look at your if you're reading the newspapers, I think the city of Durham had the same basic discussion last night about their proposed budget. They had a reduction. Their general fund budget was actually reduced. Wake County and other counties have experienced the same issues. Higher expenditure costs, low to no to actually negative revenue

growth. With that in mind, the manager's priorities understanding that framework were to first number one maintain the county's fiscal stability by decreasing the amount of fund balance to ensure we have sustainable amounts to use in the future, maximize existing revenue, and recommend a responsible tax rate increase. if one at all. And I think she did a great job at that with only a two cent tax rate increase being recommended for the general fund.

As always, try to provide adequate funding for Durham public schools. Support existing county employees and that's key. That may not necessarily mean vacant positions, but focusing on filled positions that have live bodies in it and making sure that we support our employees as best we can. We talked about limiting property tax growth.

We want to provide services at least at the current levels we're at, but we also need to focus on some key public safety needs. Over the last two years, we've really tried to work with EMS to get them to positions they need to catch up to the population growth the county's experience. And finally, we

always have to provide adequate funding for planned capital projects. Just as a reminder, this is the revenue recommended revenue budget. Just want you to note that two revenue sources make up 80% of our revenue. And if you went back a couple of slides, property tax growth was $391,000 and sales tax growth was $770,000.

12 million. 80% of our revenue only grew 1 point one plus million out of a $700 million budget. Where's our expenditure budget goes? 4%.

Let's round it up to 75% goes to personnel cost. People are expensive. um and education which is a priority and a focus for the county. You see other operating costs are 16%, capital debt supports 8%. But 80% of our budget revenue comes from two sources and 75% of our expenditures go to two sources.

Easy to remember. Now I'm going to show a couple of slides and I'm going to turn it over to Ki. But when I talk about property tax revenue, one of the big questions is why are we only getting $391,000 in new property tax revenue in the general fund? It's a long tale.

I've tried to shorten it up here. When we kar and the budget office are estimating property tax valuation, which is the beginning number we use to ultimately get to property tax revenue. We were doing this David in February of last year. February and March last year before any appeal on any property had happened.

We took into account previous revaluations. We took into account previous years and we took out a certain amount of money knowing there's always going to be appeals in a reval year. In fact, we took out the biggest holdback number we had ever done because we were worried about appeals. But what happened? We had even more appeals than

we had imagined. So, what I want you to focus on is when we based our budget last year, again, it was February. It's 18 months before all these appeals had happened. 7 billion in valuation.

What happened after appeals? That number was actually $83 billion in appeals. 3 billion in valuation between what we had budgeted and what we knew after the fact. So when we started making this year's budget, we knew we had a number that we knew.

5 billion. 8 billion. So between real valuation to what we have budgeted, we grew about what we grow every year, which is close to 3%. But budget to budget, which is

8 billion. Are y'all following me on that? So, we really grew 3% after we had better knowledge of the real world, but budget to budget, we only grew 1%. And that's why we're at $391,000.

Next year, we should not have that problem. We should grow hopefully, all things being equal, around 3% in valuation, and we'll get back to a multi-million dollar property tax growth before a property tax rate increase. All that means is across both funds, the general fund and the capital financing plan fund, our total property tax revenue growth without a tax rate increase was $453,000. 391,000 went to the general fund. 6% that's as close to perfection as you can get. Our tax base valuation grew only

$82 million but that's budget to budget. 1%. All right with that I'm going to turn it over to Kar who's going to explain some of the nuance of what happened. Thank you K.

I believe I'm good now. All right. Thank you. All right.

Kard tax administration. Um I just want to add some context and a little more um information in regards to what Mr. Lane just mentioned and he described everything perfectly. Um, for context, this is just a little

illustration in regards to what the Department of Tax Administration was dealing with during the time period of the work that was being done for the 2025 reappraisal. As you can see, when the market when we started analyzing the market, the beginning of the reappraisal, the market was at 383067. That particular market increased up to 460. And during the time the schedule of values was being prepared to be turned in to the board of county commissioners, the market started declining as you can see on the uh illustration here.

And nothing matters past December 2024 in regards to the reappraisal. But we were looking at a market that peaked in early 24 and steadily declined from that point on. The appeal deadline was set for June 16th, 2025, which is a month after the budget process begins each year roughly. Uh require estimates to be made

regarding how many appeals would be received. That estimation was 7,500 and what ended up being received was 10,533 appeals. So more than 3,000 appeals were unaccounted for in regards to the budget process. This particular year, 2026, we extended the deadline again.

This will be the last year that we do that unless the board has any um input. Uh we would choose to make sure that that returns back to the normal early May deadline. Kind of puts us in a better position to be able to make decisions in regards to uh the county's budget. This is an illustration just depicting exactly what took place with the reappraisal. So, prior to the 2025 reappraisal, the total market, the total value for Durham County's real property was roughly about 42 43 billion. After the reappraisal

and after appeals and equalization, we are at 72 billion. 4. 6. 6 billion.

That's 23% in regards to the actual value appealed. 1 roughly 9% of the total value appealed for residential properties. Also, we have to consider the actual losses regarding tax relief. It's another 320 million. Appeals can be gauged based off of how many appeals received. We can do some our best to project.

There is nothing we can do to monitor tax relief. We get those applications. We have to wait to get those applications, process those applications, and then we will see exactly what those impacts are. Kier, before you go off of that slide, could you just for anyone who's listening, explain um how some of the basis for appeals for commercial is different than residential?

>> Well, commercial appeals, well, all appeals have three approaches to value. You have the sales comparison approach, the cost approach, and the income approach. Commercial properties have the benefit of the income approach in regards to mainly these two categories that hurt us the most were apartments and office buildings. But all commercial properties that lease or have rents are going to have the benefit of the income approach.

Residential properties, owner occupied properties do not have the benefit of the income approach. Right. Thank you. So, in other words, anyone who may have had vacant space could use that as a as a loss to challenge the value of their property.

And that's why we see some enormous >> Yes. >> Uh appeals in the commercial office and things like that. Thank you. >> Yes.

A quick example would be a three property, three values for a property in commercial. You could have a sale price, a property that just sold for $85 million. They could have a cost approach that may come somewhere between 7075 to $85 million. And then they could have a income approach value that's somewhere in 60 in the $60 million range.

And that's just based on the market conditions. They have a good sales market. they that sales market might

impact or show some impacts to the cost approach in regards to those benchmarks used for price per square foot, things of that nature. Whereas the income approach could be impacted by something completely separate like vacancies um like the rents that are being in de whatever the market's demand is for those particular parts of the commercial income approach. Thank you, Ki. Appreciate it.

All of that boils down to, as we talked about, and I'm showing on the screen above you, but what I want you to see, this is the history of new revenue, property tax revenue, delta amounts without a property tax rate increase in previous years. multiple millions of dollars, particularly starting in 2122. Look at the amount of new revenue the

county experienced without a tax rate increase. And look at 2627. That's the 400 and some odd thousand for both the general fund and the capital financing plan fund. That is not the same revenue amount compared to previous years.

In order to support the many expenditure needs the county had, the county is forced with slow growth in sales tax revenues, very slow growth in property tax revenue, reductions in some of our intergovernmental revenues and small increase in other place to raise taxes. So, the managers recommended a 2cent tax rate increase for the general fund, the capital financing plan fund, which is where we pay for cash for certain projects and we pay for our ongoing annual debt service, which is about $111 million. 57. That tax rate is staying flat for this year, but I will let you know that in upcoming years that number is probably going to have to grow as we take on

paying for 22 geo bond debt and some other needs we have upcoming. So when we look at the history of property tax growth, including property tax rates, the blue part of those columns is what I want you to note first. That is natural growth. Then you all as commissioners, previous boards and this board have added property tax rate increases which is the green part of the column to support the expenditure needs of those fiscal years.

Again look at the growth from 1718 to 2122 and then look at 2223 moving forward. They're different amounts of growth demanded from property tax revenue. This does include property tax rate increases. We're growing.

Our revenues start are growing at a faster pace by board choice in this area. But remember, we're trying to help answer the question that the board of education we're growing in revenue. Where's all the money going? I'm showing you the growth in revenue. Although 26 27 it fell off a cliff. Yes,

ma'am. Commissioner Burton. >> Yeah. Yeah.

She was I remember that question. She asked that and she and I think a lot of our residents wonder this. We're growing in population, right? And you think, okay, we're growing in population, people want to move here.

How does not not generate the revenue that we need? Because I think there these are two false um they're illusions, right? You see all these people moving here, but yet we're not having the revenue that we need. So yeah, if you can explain that >> we have it, that's a philosoph philosophical question.

We have increased revenue significantly. sales tax growth, which I'm going to show you, property tax growth, including pro. Our revenue growth has been significant. There's two sides of that equation.

Our expenditure growth has simply outpaced our revenue growth. If you were to sum it up in a slightly conservative way, you might say we have a spending issue compared to a revenue issue. Our growing

population has been supported by growing revenues. We just have spent all those revenues for choices that are I will always say you all have infinite needs coming at you and finite resources. There's never enough money. We have grown in the amount of money you've had available.

There's just always infinite needs. So what is a two >> Can I just add I would just add yes we are really fortunate that we are increasing our revenue and we are growing because there are a lot of places where that's not the case but we're also seeing a decrease in support from the state and federal government. So, we're not only have we're having to fund more things through local funding than we had to do before. >> And and I would just echo that, you know, our partners um whether they're

are federal partners, state partners, there have been changes in philosophy in areas which have resulted in a reduction of dollars that flow through um that impact services that we've done in the past. And so it's a a tipping point and and an opportunity for us to evaluate what we can afford now as well as longer term as these shifts appear um to be staying. Um, we had a conversation at one of our meetings and I talked about maybe six, seven years ago, our intergovernmental levels were at least 6% higher. And so the county can absorb uh dollars, but there becomes a a point in time that our ability to do that without raising taxes um just isn't there. And so that's why you're seeing governments, local

governments, uh, across the country revisiting, well, what can we afford and what level? Because we know we have to cover our capital needs, whether it's for the courts or um the libraries or the schools. We also have those ongoing inflationary operating expenses, utilities, other kinds of things. So it is a balancing act.

And to Keith's point, we are growing and we're very strong. I mean, when you look at our base, um, pre-revaluation to where it is now, it's 68% higher than what it was. And so, that's a very strong economy and a strong base. This adjustment happens when you have re-evaluations, reappraisals.

There is that slight chance. That's why managers and budget directors, tax administrators, you sort of hold your breath until all of the appeals have occurred. Um, but this particular

scenario, we we did um learn some lessons. Um, but our tax administrator did a great job of of of making sure we had our best approach throughout the whole cycle as well as trying to ensure we um supported our residents as they went through the appeals process. But to Keith's point, our expense side of the house, and that's why we did some reductions, um, is something that we're going to have to continue to revisit. what level of service can we afford and how do we meet those needs as we do grow in population and um going forward that's a just a shared priority between all of the community on how do you address these complex areas thank you manager Hager real quick what is a two cent property tax rate increase mean for a citizen owning a house this table that's done by David and by the

way I do want to thank David ades and sitting beside me here for all the numbers in the slide. He's the numbers guru and and couldn't do this without him. That table will show you if you have a $400,000 house, a twocent tax rate increase is going to mean an increase of $80. $200,000 house, $40.

You can do the math on the rest of these. 1 million in new revenue desperately needed this year to pay for certain things like almost $11 million new money for DPS. This tax rate increase pays for and new EMS ambulance units pays for some other things, some lost revenues. So just to give you an idea, we are still near the lowest tax rate we have been at least as far back as I could track it to 1993 94 that blue line is the historical tax rate trend for the county. And I told this to some folks at the Carolina Arbors because I wanted to smile and say we have one of

the lowest tax rates we've ever had in Durham County. The problem with that is that your property valuation is probably the highest it's ever been. But that goes back to manager Hager's point that we are a growing county. You don't have a revaluation increase of 60 plus percent unless you're popular.

But the tax rate in and of itself is wildly lower than it was 30, 40 years ago. This was a table we showed you last year that's a trend of both. I think a commissioner asked what's the city tax rate and the county tax rate increases. And we can give you this table and clear, but what I want to point out in blue is Durham County has had a tax rate increase eight out of the last 10 years, while the city of Durham has had a tax rate increase six out of the last 10 years.

Want to note that in 2425 and 2526, the combined tax rate increases were the largest increases percentage-wise in 30 plus years for Durham County residents. Well, Durham city residents. That increase includes the tax rate increase for both the city

and the county. There's a eight and a half cent tax rate increase in 2425, almost nine cents in 2526. We're only at 2 cents right now because the county's recommending a two cent and I believe the city just presented their budget last night with no tax rate increase. There are also some other small tax rate increases in our volunteer fire department or fire districts normally.

Uh there's New Hope, Eno, Redwood, and the one highlighted in yellow is just came to the board as we created a new district from Mangum uh for the Mariah Fire Department. And this is to support uh a couple hundred parcels out in the far north part of the county. And that's a new tax day tax district. 7 cent tax rate increase on their property as well to support this fire district.

Onto our second biggest revenue source, sales tax. we get about $133 million. That's what we're estimating collecting in 2627. 3% increase. It's a total

net delta increase of $3 million. 2 million of that 3 million by board priority, that's article 40 and article 42 sales tax are dedicated for capital financing. So that $2 some odd million doesn't go to the general fund. The only amount that goes to the general fund is article 39 and article 46.

And that's only $771,000. Remember when I told you at the beginning of the presentation, property tax delta increase is 391,000 for the general fund and sales tax delta increase is 771,000 for the general fund. Not a whole lot of money, but look at it historically. And there's a dividing line between 2021 and 2122. We were on average we were getting new money from sales tax 5 million, 5 million, three million prior to 2021 and then after uh COVID hit and there was a pretty big stimulus of federal money into the system. Look at the growth in sales tax for the previous three years

2122 through 23 24 11 million 11 million 21 million and then in the last three years that number has fallen way back down. No, I was just going to make the comment. We knew going into COVID with those infrastructure dollars that um that infusion would in fact um end at some point. So, we're coming back to precoid numbers.

And so, although those large numbers were there, we knew and we were disciplined um that they would would um normalize. >> We knew they were going to fall back. Yes, ma'am. Manager Hager, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I also want to say we've hit a little bit of a double whammy with that.

They were eventually had to fall back to reasonable growth estimates, but we've had inflationary pressures on things that don't have sales tax on them. utilities cost, gas cost, food cost. There are a lot of things that people paying more money for that we

don't get to collect sales tax on. So that's part of also the slower growth of the last couple of years. So remember now I've showed you two graphs historically with slowing growth in our our property tax and slowing growth in our sales tax and that's 80% of our growth in revenues. Some other key revenue sources has this is the budget we're uh change the delta number for the budget for 26 for 27 EMS patient fees are hoping to increase and get a plus $2 million there.

That's great. Uh we have increased the patient fee. There's a maximum amount we can get from is it Medicaid, Medicare, David? One of the two.

But um but we're still hoping to get it a plus two million there. Register of deeds revenues are trending upward. Great. Investment revenue is trending upwards.

that hits both ways. While we're making a little bit more money, we're saving it we have on savings in the bank, we're also paying higher interest rates on loans for our long-term debt instruments. State Hold Harmless decreases 1 million and lower fund balance appropriation because we

need to be fiscally stable and conscious of what the future may bring. 5 million. So, all that adds up. And let's look at the historical general fund revenue growth.

This is the key slide I wanted to show you. Look at the difference. That red line sort of defines previous five years and the latest five years. And you just see a wildly different set of growth patterns in those two 5-year increments except for 2627.

Not only, as the manager noted, did we have to come back to a normal number, we've had a number of issues, changes in federal policy, state and federal federal policy, uh, with intergovernmental revenue where we've lost money there, slower growth in property tax and sales tax. So, we had significant revenue growth. To answer the question, higher growing population. Look at from 2122 to 2526. $29 million in new money, $37 million, 35 million, 25 million and$18 million

without a tax rate increase. We found creative and ne necessary ways to spend that revenue plus have some tax rate increasing. 26 27 is a different story. These are some of the other revenue or the total if you look at the key revenue sources where we've gained money and lost money.

Sales tax plus $770,000. 8 million in intergovernmental revenue. The SNAP funding from the federal government, the dine program and public health went away and a number of other things. Boom.

8 million disappears. Fund balance appropriated. We talked about that. That's the number four and a half million that we're decreasing our use of just to make sure we're fiscally stable and ready for anything else that comes our way.

You see a lot of pluses and minus. We had one time money from last year transfer from other funds to help balance the budget last year. We lost that money. This year ABC net profit distribution if you talk to the head of there people aren't buying as much alcohol again for any number of reasons.

youth aren't drinking, which is probably a good thing, but that's an expenditure you pay for when you do not when you have enough available dollars. But if you're paying more for utilities and doctor cost, you're probably not going out there and buying that bit of vodka or tequila or whatever your choice of drink is. All that to be said, that's a net loss of $8 million in this coming budget from those revenue sources. This is a slide that David and I talked about for hours and we think is very um is very informative.

The orange columns are growth in expenditures for each of those years and those blue lines are the revenue growth in each of those years. What do you notice without a tax rate increase? What do you notice? Expenditure growth at least as you all are making decisions is higher than natural revenue growth. That forces you all to have property tax rate increases. That's why I say we have a spending issue that we have to make decisions on

as well as a revenue issue. We've had significant revenue growth. We have just chosen as a county to have higher expenditure growth. We have to make those decisions again moving forward.

And I I just want to point out that those priority areas have supported the needs of the community. And I don't want to to to miss that. Whether it is education or human services, we've addressed some community priorities, some of which are a result of a growing population. Um and when your partners uh are shifting their approach with spending and not um allowing the dollars to flow like they had historically, it means more pressure on the local dollars. So just wanted to always balance that out. And just to add to what the manager said, we can look over the past, you know, less than 10 years, we have increased our funding about hund00

million for Durham public schools. So that, you know, which we've wanted to do and that is because our community supports public education and investing in public education. So to the manager's point, um that's that's where the money was going. >> Exactly.

>> And but unfortunately, we we don't have the ability to do that anymore or at least right now. >> One other subtle point I want to make is there's compounding growth on these numbers. So when you say 9% growth in 2324, that's on a higher number to begin with. Just like I want you to think if you put money in the bank going from $1,000 to $2,000 it's 100% growth.

That's pretty significant. But it's not the same thing as going from 1 million to 2 million. That's the same 100% growth, but you're talking about two entirely different delta numbers. So as our budget gets bigger, it's harder to keep finding the same amount of 8%

revenue growth a year. Does that make sense? >> Just quick question. I want to also know how fast percentage-wise has inflation grown over the last five six years.

I guess yeah, >> we can we can get that um for you from the CPI. Um consumer price index is kind of the standard for that. Um and we've looked at that in the past. I think what we're getting at is we're not we're not trying to judge the spending.

We're just saying revenue is a slow creepy crawler. Keith Keith gave an analogy a couple years back of a takes a lot to move a a giant ship going forward. And revenue is just like that. It's just going to slowly eek up. There's going to be some good years, but there's going to be some years that not as good. The problem is if you have 3% average revenue growth, but you need expense pressures for whatever the multitude of reasons at 4%, that's where we are at this point is where we're our expense pressures are of

the point where they're kind of outpacing just the natural revenue sources. But we'll get you that CPI history. So if I look at delta, all I want you to see is all you need to understand is that green line is separating from the blue line. The blue line is accumulated new revenue over the years while the green line is accumulated new expenditures over each year.

They are not on the same path. They need to if you look at from 2021 to 2425 the slope of that green line changed entirely. If you've ever gone snowk skiing, there's the bunny slope which are 1718 to 2122 and then suddenly you hit the expert slopes at 2122 or 2425. That's a little bit more than we could carry without increasing property taxes every year. We need to kind of get that slope down or accept the fact that we're going to ask from citizens for tax rate increases every year to support the many needs that they may demand. That's all I

wanted to show you on that slide. All right. Now, we're switching to the expenditure side of the equation. That same red line splits previous 5 years and the latest 5 years.

What I want you to see more out of this than anything is this is education spending. And I'm going to show the rest of the county as well. I'm not picking on education, but just showing you how much new money went to education each year. From 1617 to 2021, it was 4 million, 8 million, 7 million, 9 million.

Then you go from 2122 to 2526, it's an entirely different increase amount each year. So you obviously have to have revenues increasing at a much higher level to pay for this or property tax rate increases. But do you see the difference between the separation of those five years? Trying to answer the question about where our money is going other than education.

This is everything else we've spent money on in the county and the general fund minus education. When I say education, I go back to the slide. I'm also including prek funding and DTCC

funding in that other this is other than education. It's the same concept. Look at the previous 5 years and the latest 5 years. Two entirely different sets of expenditure growth percentage-wise and amountwise except for 2627.

Outside of using a property tax rate increase in the upcoming budget to support education and largely public safety, the rest of the general fund is probably decreasing, but it's entirely different than the last four to five years you've seen. But I just want you to see the growth. It's like we shifted into an entirely different gear in the last 5 years compared to the previous five years. Personnel costs are no small part of our expenditure costs.

Same thing here. We'd like to show you just personnel cost increases previous 5 years 4 million 5 million 7 million. Look at it from 2122 to 2526 an entirely different range of growth numbers except for the upcoming fiscal year.

So if we look at all of our general fund expenditures, the same pattern previous five years at a certain growth level each year and then after COVID hit, we've just sort of blew our expenditures up, increased dramatically year-over-year. That's not s it wasn't sustainable for a whole number of reasons. largely because revenues had to fall back to earth as the manager noted plus some changes more conservative changes and some bills at the federal and state level of causing us to lose revenues. So we had to fall back and that's where we're at.

The question is how do we move how what do we do moving forward and that's a large part of what this manager's budget is about not only funding 2627 but asking some of the hard questions about what do we do moving forward long term. All right, are there any questions on that trending? I I wanted those sets of slides to sort of answer that really important question of population growth equaled revenue growth, but we've also

had tremendous expenditure growth. The 2627 budget summary looks like this. 04, just over a billion dollars, less than 1% growth. 5% to 699 million.

Let's call it 700 million. It's only a $10 million increase on 700 million. 9 million. If you took the DPS increase out of the budget, the rest of the general fund budget actually decreases.

What are the priority expenditures? 9 million. 27 million. 6 million this year.

6 million. 23 million. That's

largely for an EMS. 10 new positions and an ambulance. That's 22 positions I think that the county has funded for EMS over the last two years. They're going to come in this afternoon and hopefully talk about that.

The sheriff did a great job of requesting a reallocation of detention officers, five of them, to new LEO positions to help support uh coverage throughout the county, including RTP. And then the manager asked to help pay for largely our compensation increase and our employee benefits. She asked departments for a 2% reduction in their budgets, which they are carrying out as we speak. limited number of new positions.

Only seven new positions are being purposefully added through the recommended budget, but we had 14 new positions added mid year throughout the year. So, it's a total of 21 new positions this year. But if you look at the history there, manager Hager has tried very specifically over the last two years to limit the number of new positions coming into the county. What I tell you up at one of the first couple of slides, personnel cost and

education costs are our two biggest expenditures in the county. What are those new positions? 10 for the EMS paramedics, one for a human services clinical counselor, and we're also decreasing the number of dine positions. These are vacant positions right now.

97 positions. That's going to leave 10 for the dime program. Remember, the dime program was fully funded for decades by federal funding. That money has disappeared this fiscal year 2526.

and to uh uh director Rodney Jenkins and that uh crew's work and the manager, we have cobbled together enough money to run 10 positions through this year's budget. It's going to cost the county an additional $500,000. But to carry that program out in 2728, it's going to be a million plus dollars a year on county dime that used to be federal funded just two years ago. >> I just have a question.

The water and sewer positions, are they paid through the enterprise fund? >> Yes, ma'am. >> I I think it would really be helpful if

that could be reflected in in like what the funding sources for the positions like it says opioid settlement fund for those two positions there, but I think those four water and sewer if you could also because it's important that's not coming. it's not being funded through the general fund. >> So we can refine our chart so we can make it more clear that is a different revenue source. So thank you for bringing that to our >> So this table is trying to show midyear changes plus the new positions. The ones that cost the county are the ones in blue up at the top and that's the seven positions. do what I do want to show you I think is more important is if you look at growth in positions from 1920 to 2627 we have to grow positions but we limit but 300 new positions the county is carrying in the last less than 10 years those are expensive they increase our

our uh risk of benefit cost increases they they effectively cost us more in benefits but also salary increases and and a whole bunch of operational costs that go with those positions Now, real quick, because know we always want to show this. Durham public schools funding. I'm not going to go through the whole budget. Just going to stick with Durham public schools because you've got reviews from some other key departments.

9 million to $235 million. 85% increase over 2526 budget. But we also fund $88 million worth of indirect costs for DPS in terms of SRO officers in schools, public health school nurses, nonprofit funding. We have DPS fund related debt service of $70 million estimated for 2627 project build support and prek support of $10 million. All of that helps prepare children to go to Durham public schools or keep them safe and healthy in Durham public schools.

Go back. I have one more question. The information that you sent us about benchmarking locally funded positions, did that include the SRO's and public health nurses? >> No, that only focuses on the positions >> within Durham public schools because the source of that because we're trying to compare apples to apples.

So we were evaluating um those dollars that flow through the um the the school districts as reported to the department of public instruction. >> These are control. So for us to um delineate that comparison data will require additional followup, but we can uh definitely do some checking with some of our peers to see do they also support SRO's and if they are within that school

budget or if it's something that's funded on the local side. So we can do some followup. Um, that's a good question. And public health nurses, others that the county has.

>> Yeah. I mean, because school nurses, again, if other school districts are considering them to be part of their local employee, you know, part of I just I'd be interested to know that. So, we we can definitely do a survey and and get that information back as to >> whether or not they fund some of those areas that we're funding on the county side of the budget or if it's within their appropriation within the school district. >> Yeah. I just wanted to say I know there are some school nurses that are paid through DPS that they're DPS employees and from what I understand when this came about this was tried to meet the goal of having a school nurse at every

school as much as possible and coming to the county to help with that. But there are a few nurses that are paid through that work for DPS. Yeah. and and based on general knowledge, jurisdictions across the state will support the public schools in different ways.

So, it will be good, you know, to >> maybe it will be tough to tease this out because SRO officers and potentially public health school nurses may be funded by county funding through the the school budget. We choose to fund some of this outside of the school budget so to limit the increase going to charter schools as well. So, it's it's to the manager's point, it's hard to do apples to apples when you get down to that level of nuance, which is why we did a DPI version of what we did. >> I do think it's relevant that these are locally funded positions one way or another, >> right? >> Per all of that that $235 million we

have to take out 5 million that we're given for um current capital expense. But if you look at the school's current expense and you divide that by the number of students, the per pupil funding increase is $368. Uh, and it's up to $5,929. That's not only because of an increase in the current expense funding for DPS.

It's also because there's a net decrease of 608 students we're estimating for both charter schools and Durham County, Durham public schools. Durham public schools is actually probably going to lose a thousand students, but charter schools are probably going up three or 400, which makes a net loss of 600 students. So with a decrease in students plus an increase in funding, you get a significant increase in per pupil funding, which keeps us top three county districts and probably top five of all school districts in the state. This is historical funding for Durham public schools. It is significant. Again, if I were to have a red line somewhere between 2122

and 2223, the amount of funding for DPS has increased significantly since then. We're doing the best we can, but as their budget gets larger, their demand for sort of just ongoing funding will increase for the county as well. Again, this is compounding numbers. Point out $101 million since I think 201718 to 2627.

101 million $67 million in the last five years in additional funding for DPS. I'm almost at the end here. I'm going to try to confuse you. Uh but I want you to see how money flows between the funds in Durham County.

General fund is where 95% of the activity happens in the county. But we have money that moves by board policy from the general fund to the capital financing plan fund. We pay for our benefits plan fund by with charges to the general fund that moves money to the benefits plan fund to pay for our health insurance and vision insurance. We have money from the capital finance

plan fund that moves to the public art fund. $300,000 a year. Just gives you a flow of how money moves around in the county because I'm going to show you in particular what our capital financing policy is. Are there any questions on this?

Can you even understand this at all? Okay, great. How much debt do we have in 2627? We have an estimated $111 million in debt service we have to pay.

If you take your mortgage payment on a house you're paying on and you multiply it by 12, that's your estimated annual debt service you're paying on your house. The county metaphorically has a number of houses it's paying on. It's paying on buildings and DPS buildings. It's paying for the building across the street renovations.

We're still paying on the courthouse because we pay 20 and 30-year bonds on things that have been built and are or have been here for 15 years. So, we have to find $111 million to pay off our debt payment for 26 27. Where are we going to pay that? We do it through a policy that you all have set or commissioner set way back in the late

80s I believe and we have followed that policy consistently for 30 or 40 years and actually it's a very helpful policy and keeps us in helps us keep our AAA bond rating. 9, we'll call it $60 million. And we transfer that money to a different fund called the capital financing plan fund. 57 cents worth of property tax, 64 million, and a little bit of interest.

So that has a pot. Now that fund, the capital financing plan fund has $125 million in revenue to do something with in 2627. 1 million of it in straight cash to projects to help people build things. What do we build? And I'll show you that in just a second or a number of things with cash, but

also want to show you we transfer $300,000 due to board policy from previous a couple of years ago where you wanted money annually going for public art support. So, of that 125 million, 300,000 is going to the public art fund where that money builds up to pay for a small art project or maybe an expensive $1 million art project as this dollars build up over time. 1 million goes to cash for projects. These are the projects that cash is going to.

It's ongoing HVAC replacement. If we have a whole bunch of buildings, we've got a whole bunch of air conditioners on top of those buildings that need to be replaced or repaired on schedule. We have roof replacements that we need to do. We have lots of parking lots that need to be replaced.

We have some IT automation. We buy We always give money to open space land acquisition to build up money when we're ready to pay for farms or or other pieces of land. We have DTCC that we're helping them retrofit HVAC. We pay for we give them cash. We put it in a capital project and make it available for them to spend. But I've still got $111 million worth of

debt I have to pay for. 3 million. This is on top of the annual expenditure you give them for operating. This is paying on debt service for DTCC to renovate their buildings or build a new life sciences building.

Same thing for uh the Museum of Life and Sciences. A lot of those exhibits our children go out, our county children go out and enjoy every day are directly related to the funding that we have given the museum and that we're still paying on those exhibits. So, and then there's county related debt. Are there any questions on how this money flows?

Fantastic. I was that clear. All right, I'm at the end. So, the budget timeline, we are in the middle of the 19th meeting. We're about almost all the way through that with this meeting after we mine the rest of them will be a lot quicker than mine. Manager Hagar I hope.

Uh then we have a meeting on Thursday 1 to 5 meeting a public hearing on the 26th meetings on the 28th, June 2nd and June 4th. And hopefully we will approve the budget on June the 8th. Did I see a question from Commissioner Jacobs? No, I thought so.

Okay. And that's the end of the presentation. Any questions about the budget? >> Commissioners, any further questions?

All right. Thank you so much, Keith and David Ki and budget staff and tax staff and others as we've tried to um present a budget that we feel will address the needs of our community. Although we know there are areas that we couldn't quite reach the level that we desired. As Keith shared, there were over $50 million worth of requests. And so um we hope um as we go through the next fiscal year, those priority areas that we know need additional resources through

realignments, we may be able to address the ones at least on the county um side of the budget. We will next have conversations about our um organizational effectiveness and a robust approach with performance management. And I will have John Kefir, the director of organizational effectiveness to introduce his team who have worked really hard. They work really hard all the time.

Um but they've had an additional uh goal of helping departments tell their story more effectively in an communication. You did receive a link to the measures and if you looked at our budget document last year, you will note a a tremendous um enhancement in how we're telling our story. So I will stop talking so John can um give an overview. Thank you, John.

>> No, thank you, manager Hager. Uh, good morning, commissioners. Um, I am John Kefir, director of organizational effectiveness, and I do have with me today uh the members of our performance team and strategy team, Pat M, who is our performance and evaluation manager, CG Garner, who is our performance analyst, and Ashb Jones who is our data analyst. Um the work that we're getting ready to discuss um reflects um several months of extremely hard work by these three and um very proud to be able to share with you all today um the work that we've accomplished and and kind of where we're going to be going next as we move forward.

Um so today we're going to talk through four different topics. Um we're going to briefly touch on the goals for this year's performance cycle. Um we'll talk through the performance evaluation process that we uh undertook for fiscal year 26. Uh we will discuss some of the performance reporting that we've done this year and highlight how it's changed

from previous years as manager Hager mentioned. Um we are doing something different this year. Um, and so we'll talk through kind of the dynamics of those changes and then we'll wrap up with some further information about kind of a few things left for this fiscal year for our team that you'll be able to see the products of um and then kind of what our priorities are going to be for fiscal year 27. So for fiscal year 26 um organizational effectiveness performance work had uh not a simple goal but a straightforward goal uh and that was to increase the quality and quantity of performance information available to county leadership and the public.

Um and so within that uh overarching direction we established three priorities going into this year's cycle. Um the first priority was to ensure that we as a county have an accurate complete comprehensive picture of the full scope of programming across the enterprise. Um coming into

this year uh we realized that there had not been kind of comprehensive discussions about the range of programs that were being administered by county departments in almost 10 years. And you guys have heard me talk before. 10 years is a long time. If you think about the past 10 years, a lot has happened.

And so we felt like it was important to really start at the beginning um and to invest a lot of time in kind of updating our understanding of the programs that are administered to make sure that we were capturing everything in our performance evaluation framework. The second priority um once we've once we accomplished that was to ensure that the performance measurement the performance measures the performance evaluation for these county programs was strong valid and upto-date right to strengthen the quality of the information that we were reporting to the public um to strengthen the comprehensiveness of that information um to help better tell our story. And

then the third priority uh again to was to improve the quality of our reporting right to improve the depth, the clarity, the uh the polish, the the readability of our performance reporting materials for you all as well as for the public. And so we set out to accomplish those three priorities. And so we're going to walk through kind of the various efforts that we undertook to achieve those um those goals. So I'm going to actually turn it over to our performance and evaluation manager Pat M to walk us through the performance evaluation process as a lot of this work uh certainly reflects his his leadership of the performance team.

Okay. Good morning. Thank you very much. So our process basically had three large steps. So we underwent a program identification process with departments and we partnered with the budget teams.

Thank you very much to them for all of their assistance. Once we had the foundation of the county programs, we went into an analysis of all of our legacy performance measures and then refined all of the measures that we were going to bring forward into the new budget document and our new uh forms of reporting. So our first step was to meet with all of the department portfolios and prep them on the why behind all of this work. So we gave them an overview of what we expected for an end product, our plan deliverables, and we wanted them to start thinking through this new framework and go back to their teams to brainstorm and start thinking through the current state of their organizations and the county as a whole.

So we did use a standard rubric and a set of tools, but we really leaned on departments as the subject matter experts to push us on some of the terminology and best practices in describing the work they do. Our ultimate goal here was to create a comprehensive program listing which accurately communicates the breadth of breadth of services provided by the county. And uh this would serve as a foundation that we will build our measure framework upon. And we want to

note that we did sat or we sat down and uh met with every county department. This wasn't just an exercise in emailing back and forth. We actually had conversations. So, we want to thank departments for their time there.

We had multiple meetings that spanned several hours, but we wanted to make sure we did our due diligence and pushed each other and brainstormed and had conversations. So, we were trying to be good partners there, make sure we often went to where they worked to get that done. So, when we talk about programs, this term is thrown a lot thrown around a lot in the public sector. So for our purposes we describe them as the primary units through which departments organize their work, allocate resources and measure performance.

So we did some research looked into best practices about um describing this kind of work. So our more academic or formal definition is a collection of related activities which contribute to achieving a broader objective or purpose and specific outcomes. Some alternate or simpler ways to describe it be a smaller number of buckets in which they group their major activities and functions. um these might be the main functions a department would mention in their

elevator pitch or in one case we asked a department uh to just look up at the ceiling and tell us what their department does and they fired off four different things and we said those are your programs right there that easy. Um and in some cases it might be organized uh by the way they have their division set up. So we didn't necessarily have a one-sizefits-all method. Again we use standard tools but we wanted to make sure they had the freedom to best describe and communicate how they do their work.

And for those who might prefer a visual example, this is kind of how the overall structure works and the relationship between these different terms. So the department is the formal organizational unit which implements the programs. The programs are collections of smaller activities which logically group together and work towards a specific purpose. So for one example, public health does a lot of different stuff.

Um in their environmental health area, they do health inspection, soil sampling, lead testing, uh pool testing. So those are all things that we would consider activities and they roll up into an environmental health program. So we want to make sure we didn't have large number

of programs for departments. We aimed up for an average of five. Uh most of them ended up having maybe three or four. I think the largest department was public health with seven.

And on this slide you'll see a sample program listing for three different departments just to illustrate how each department had a bit of freedom to organize their programs. So the office of emergency services went with four programs based on their org chart and it directly aligns to the divisions that they have. So they have EMS, emergency management, business operations and the fire marshall. Tax administration is an example where they took some of their major functions such as taxbased assessment, revenue collection and resident support and went with those.

Public health had a larger variety of activities and programs and we went back and forth. In some cases, we had a standard tool where departments were wondering whether something should be an activity or program. Went through a set of 11 questions and depending on how they scored, we would maybe push them one way or the other. But um this is just to illustrate that every department

was a little bit different. But we were very consistent in how we went about this work. And just to give you the results, so we did this work between January and March. So we facilitated meetings with 30 or so county departments.

This resulted in the identification and assessment of around 118 county programs. And the reason we say that's approximate is because this work is going to be continuous. So each year we're going to come back and make sure this is the right number of programs and that they accurately accurately reflect what the county is doing at any given time. Again, this created the foundation upon which we're building out our performance management framework and working to effectively tell the story of Durham County and its services.

And then now that we had that foundation, we moved into our performance measurement process. So our first task was reviewing hundreds of legacy performance measures. So we had nearly 700 spanning back to about 2016 2017. So many of these were carried forward, but many of these were maybe internal measures or something a

department came up with even before COVID that we didn't necessarily think was valuable for the community. So, we do have everything documented, but we wanted to make sure that what we were spending time on measuring reflects our needs for today. After refreshing the list of measures, we worked with departments to select and refine measures which best tell the story of their services, were feasible to collect in the short term and report on in the budget document. And we knew from the outset we would likely identify some ideas for strong measures that we didn't have the data for yet, might require additional planning to collect.

So, we're going to continue partnering with departments on those efforts going forward. In these conversations, we had some pretty simple prompts for departments, but they did get them to think pretty critically. So, for every given program, we asked about their typical results, the outcomes, which define success in those programs, and whether they have measures communicating that success. We also talked about current or future measures, which communicate outcomes and their overall story to the community. And very importantly, as we mentioned earlier, where do gaps exist in their current reporting and what support will

they need to collect the information? And so whether it's resources or rep prioritization, we want to make sure that we're working with departments to help them communicate this, make sure that the measures are strong as well. And on that note, we came up with some criteria based on some research and best practices, but our goal is to get as many measures in the county to have these different aspects. So they show a direct link to the program's purpose and outcomes, have a valid and reliable data source, and it's feasible to collect that information.

um they have multiple years of data. Where possible, they show an efficiency or outcome. So you'll see in some of our documents, we have some outputs just to give some context, but the efficiencies and outcomes show how well we're doing that work. And we want to make sure we're clearly communicating the impact of these programs.

So we want to use plain language and have clear and unambiguous visuals so anybody in the community can pick up these documents and understand what we're doing. And just some numbers here to represent what we did. So between March and May again, we had another 30 or so meetings with departments, some follow-up calls

or follow-up meetings to review those over 600 legacy performance measures. We landed on about 400 performance measures across 40 departments and partners. So I want to make sure that we mention we did work with for instance Durham Tech and the Museum of Life and Science Alliance Health to gather some more measures to report on than we had in the past. And in the companion document which John will talk more about, we created about 200 data visualizations and narratives which we gathered from departments.

And the reason the number of visuals is fewer is because in some cases we combine measures. So you might see a visual that has you know three measures or we might have mentioned a measure in the narrative or something like that. So it's over 400 in the budget book 200 visualizations which contain data from over 400 measures. So, in summary, just want to make sure we thank and recognize the departments for all of the time we put into this. And I've done this work in a few places and the momentum and the buyin that we have right now is not something you often find. So, just want to thank you all for your support and thank manager

Hager and John for their leadership and vision throughout all of this. All right. So, as mentioned previously, our kind of third priority for the year was to improve our performance reporting structure. Um, specifically, we wanted to kind of accomplish three things.

First, we wanted to maximize the amount of high quality performance information reported. How do we how do we tell more of our story, right? Not just how do we tell a better story, how do we tell more of our story than we've been telling previously? Um secondly though, while we're doing that, how do we still make sure that that information, ensuring the performance data is reported effectively and efficiently, right? How do we make sure that information is meaningful and digestible for leadership and the public, right? Putting more information out in and of itself does not accomplish anything if that information is not easily able to be understood by all the

many different audiences that need to be able to understand what we are accomplishing what we are doing throughout the fiscal year. And then finally, how we wanted to look at how do we compare in our current approach or in our previous approach and in the approach that we're designing against peer jurisdictions to make sure that Durham continues to grow towards being a leader in this space. Right? So, what could we learn from our local and regional peers as well as national leaders to help inform our performance reporting structure?

So to start with, I do want to kind of look retrospectively at kind of where we were when we set out upon this path. Um, and so for a moment, just want to highlight the way that performance information was reported in the counties uh in the past couple fiscal years in the county. The primary method of which was through um enterprisewide performance reporting in the annual budget book documents. Um the structure

within the budget book historically uh I didn't go back 10 years or anything but in the past several years that I was looking at the reporting was departmental. There was program information within the budget book but it was not connected to the performance uh data. The data was presented departmentwide. Um, and it did have embedded visualizations and narrative elements.

Although the specific uh visualization structures and narrative content varied pretty dramatically across um across departments and even within departments across measures. Um do want to note from a process standpoint uh at least for the past several years again this was a very decentralized process where departments were very independently responsible for updating and reviewing their performance information including developing their their visualizations and narratives. And so as you look across the whole department um there was a wide variety

of approaches and how this information was being communicated um again kind of across departments but also within departments and so those were um when we're looking at that I don't want to present it as as uh as a negative this approach has tradeoffs um there were there were several strengths to this strategy as well as weaknesses. Um, in terms of the strengths, uh, there was the opportunity to share contextual information for each measure. Um, you were able to, uh, through the visualizations you could, um, you could provide in the narrative, right? You could explain what is going on, not just the numbers, right?

It made that easier to digest for people. Um, the visual structure that we were utilizing created opportunities to highlight trends. we were showing multi-year data so you could very easily see across fiscal years what was happening within each different measure um and then kind of

the uniformity of process while decentralized made it very efficient and predictable for departments they knew what to expect um and were able to um plan going into the year how they were going to try to approach uh that particular process. On the flip side though again the strategy that we were adopting we were limiting it to uh two to two to four measures ideally per department which limits the total range of performance information reported. There were significant gaps in our story within the performance data that we were presenting. We weren't covering every program.

We weren't covering every aspect of the programs that were being reported. Right? Um and so we were not able to fully inform leadership the public as to the various results that were being achieved through the departmental programs. There was a lack of consistency across measures and departments. There were there were different standards that were being

followed in different places resulting in um different approaches to the communicating information and different uh types and quality of narrative which kind of over time would undermine the effectiveness of our communications around performance. And then again that decentralized development process resulted you know contributed to that kind of differentiation of standard across departments. And so you ended up with a a document that looked like it was developed by you know 50 60 different people because it was developed by 50 or 60 different people each kind of taking the approach that they felt like uh best represented their department and their program. So one of the manager's priorities as soon as the as OEE was formed, one of her priorities was she wanted us to really improve the the the quality and the quantity of the performance measures

reported within the budget book. And so this year we took a different approach as Pat has described. We had an OELled process to identify the measures for inclusion in the budget book and we supported and facilitated the collection of updated data. Um performance data was organized by program rather than by department with the goal of at least one measure per program.

And I'm very happy to say that across 98% of our departments and programs, we were able to accomplish that goal even where we had new departments, new programs and new measures. Um, and so, you know, we I think when we look at it, there is a significantly larger number or larger amount of performance information being pro being provided this year as we had in previous years. And we did switch to a tabular presentation, right, which both increased the amount of our permitted measures, but also as we're

going to discuss, included some trade-offs as well. So again, this this approach reflected what we felt like was the best way to accomplish our goals within the budget book structure. Um, but there were still some tradeoffs, right? So again as a strengths we we increased the number of measures but we did so in a way that did not necessarily increase the size of the budget book document.

Um you know we added several hundred measures but we did not add several hundred pages. In fact in some places shifting to the tabular structure allowed us to make the budget book more efficient than it had been in the past a little more streamlined and digestible. Again, one of the key things that we were able to do was to improve our coverage of departments and programs. Um, you know, for this year's budget book, we don't we we have very few instances where when if there were questions as to what was a program, what was a department accomplishing during this fiscal year that we wouldn't be

able to provide an answer to that question. Um and then just again the overall consistency in standards and presentation through centralized pro through centralized processes measures of the same type are being treated the same way. The data is being structured consistently across departments across programs um and being presented in a uniform way throughout the document. There were trade-offs though again that we recognize created obstacles for the public.

And so, you know, a couple of those things. You lose that ability to have narrative context within the budget book. Would you like I can stop and you can ask a question if you prefer. Shirley, >> you hadn't gotten to the box yet.

>> Sorry. >> You hadn't gotten to the box. I had a question about you on I'll I'll get to it. >> I saw you moving the mic, so I didn't want to talk over you by any means. Um, so again, we lost that narrative context. We lost the ability to

highlight those trends over time and some of the relationships between measures and data by presenting them in a tabular structure which collectively, right, for some audiences would make this information potentially more challenging to digest and to kind of um limit the the the readability and and understandability for for certain groups depending on kind of their interests. and their needs. >> Yeah. Could you um go back to that?

All right. So, um could you could you talk a little more about the weakness where it's more challenging to highlight relationships between measures and data while also a strength is consistency and standards and presentation through centralized process. So like instead of all of the departments defining their own thing Right now we have kind of one consistent way to do that.

But how do you it doesn't feel like those two things align here. How is it more ch now that you have a consistent way to present this information? How is it more difficult to talk about the relationships between the data because it's more consistent? >> You have a better way to >> define it now.

So it seems like it'll be easier for you now to highlight the relationships than all the departments doing their own thing, you know, previously. I I'm referencing this more in the context of within a department or within a program. So like with the previous structure, right, you could combine measures into one visualization structure that would highlight how they're impacting each other, right? you get that kind of relational this a change in this one measure is then contributing to a change in this other measure. Right? When you're presenting

it in a tabular structure that becomes much more difficult particularly as they're all being grouped together by individual programs, right? Or and there were even some instances where there might be pieces across programs that are connecting to each other in ways that you're not again you're not able to necessarily communicate. And so that's that's what I mean like you lose by putting them all into a table, right? You're not it's not as readily apparent why one trend is impacting another trend, right?

Which you would be able to do in a more visualized narrative-based structure that we had previously, right? We felt like we were losing that type of detail by switching to this particular strategy. The broader picture, yes. Right. like there's consistency, there's a better depth of coverage, but if you're not necessarily familially familiar with the programs, you're not necessarily like a data guru, right? Like you might not be able to make some

of those connections just by a tabular presentation of data. And some of those connections may be important to our story, right? Does that help? Okay.

Um, so you know, our response to those challenges, which which is really relatively simplistic and straightforward, was just to create a companion, a supplement that would allow us to address those uh address those shortcomings in the new budget book structure. Um, it's not simplistic from a work standpoint, but like, you know, conceptually, right, it's it's fairly straightforward. Um so we created a companion performance document to address those weaknesses right and so through this document we are able to present the data visualizations and provide narrative content for the program measures included in the budget book specifically we are for each

measure or for again as Pat noted sometimes we're combining measures but for each representation we are we are we've asked we asked departments to provide three separate narrative explanations again for all measures. So we're getting that consistency across measures across programs across departments. We ask them to provide content to explain the measure to help folks understand the measure. Why does this matter?

Why is this data important? What is it saying about um the benefits to the community? the the needs that we're meeting through this for through this particular program or through these programs. The second piece is to explain the actuals and the trends, right?

What is what is that data that's being presented mean and how is it changing over time? And then finally, where is that data coming from? Right? It's important for the public. It's important for you all as leaders to understand the source of our data and

understand that we have looked at it to ensure validity, reliability, um, and and utility for this purpose. Um, and so, you know, through this approach, we were able to kind of fill those weaknesses in the new budget book approach, but without blowing up the budget document and really making that document unwieldy and unmanageable for the other purposes that we're trying to accomplish um through that process. And so uh but I do want to note one thing before moving on as as you can as you read through that document. We did have quite a few measures this year for new departments or for new programs or even new measures within established programs where the departments really wanted to show these outcomes or um or kind of where they were moving towards in terms of evaluating results. And we did in those instances carry the tabular presentation over from the budget book. Um but we did

still provide narrative content for those measures um as possible. Right? So we did not want to do visualizations where that would have been inappropriate from a best practice standpoint, but we still wanted to provide narratives for those measures as well. So again, when we look at this across years, you can see we've we have fairly radically changed the way that we're presenting performance information that we think will be an effective foundation.

Again, you're going to hear us keep saying foundation. That will be an effective foundation for moving forward into future fiscal years, which gets us to what's coming next. Um, so one of the things you'll notice with the companion document that we've already provided is that is the companion performance document for the recommended budget. So between now and the end of the fiscal year, OE is going to be continuing to work with departments to finalize narratives um for the performance measures within the companion performance document. So, we've already kind of identified

opportunities for strengthening those narratives and we will be having targeted conversations with departments over the next several weeks to kind of get that finalized for the adopted budget. So, we will have a an updated version that will be published for the adopted budget. Um, an updated companion document for the adopted budget, although the structure and visualizations will will remain unchanged. Um, we're also going to be working at the major's request to develop work departmental work plans for fiscal year 2027 for each department.

Um, this is, you know, going to be kind of a multi-purpose plan that will outline the priority uh initiatives for the department for the fiscal year 27. um key kind of stakeholder engagement activities and other targets, but also will outline specific performance management and reporting priorities for the fiscal year. So again, it'll connect into how do we continue to move forward

with each department within this space. Those work plans will subsequent sub subsequently serve as a framework for us to be able to have periodic reporting during the fiscal year. That's not something we've been doing for quite a while. That is something though that manager Hager and the rest of the executive leadership team um feels is very important to make sure that we're not just having performance conversations with the budget but that it is something that is ongoing throughout the fiscal year for OE internally.

Um we are you know this this was just the first step. We are not done right as we've mentioned repeatedly the fiscal year 26 efforts were really designed to allow us to assess the landscape of performance across the county. We had a new team coming into this and so we were very deliberate in wanting to spend time really understanding where we are right now. Instead of coming in with a defined

vision and start forcing things into the bo into those boxes, we wanted to really see where we were, see what our foundation was, strengthen that foundation, and then be able to move forward. So in fiscal year 27 we will be further refining and strengthening that framework. Um specifically we are going to work towards development of a performance measurement guide or handbook for departments that will establish kind of clear standards for different types of measures um and to provide support materials for them to be able to better integrate this work into their ongoing operations. we are going to work towards establishment of a clearer hierarchy or categorization structure for methods as one of the things you'll see in the documents we have right now is we treat every measure largely the same in the documents that we have right now. Um but we want to move towards a more defined structure where we are identifying those

key performance indicators as well as the other types of measures that we'll have um within our framework for each program in each department. We want some some measures we already have targets for, but we want to make sure that we have defined targets and where possible stretch goals for individual measures across departments so that we are able to anchor measurement and what we're trying to accomplish. Um and then uh finally we want to map the alignment of performance measures both new and existing to the doc forward 2029 strategic plan that we have been updating over the course of this fiscal year and that will be coming back to the board for approval of those slight language modifications. Um and then finally from a reporting standpoint um you know we have very the we're very proud of the documents that we've managed to create but we want to spend time developing a more dynamic ondemand performance reporting structure for the

county so that again it's not just we're not just having this conversation once a year. not just sharing with the public this information once a year, but it's readily accessible at any point um for them to be able to drill deeper into county performance. So, these are kind of the things we're going to be working on um in terms of our performance measurement, our performance reporting um as we go into uh the upcoming fiscal year. And then as mentioned, we are going to be working with county leadership to operate an annual performance process with most likely quarterly meetings to discuss work plan progress and interim data on performance measures. And again, this is designed to give county leadership an ability to readily access performance data to improve their ability to um keep their hand on the rudder of county operations and make sure that we're moving in ways that maximize our ability to accomplish our goals.

And I'm going to be selfish for just one minute. I know we got a busy agenda, but I do want to do say two things before I wrap up. One, um, you know, I'm up here presenting this as the accomplishment of organizational effectiveness, but this is really the accomplishment of the county as a whole. We could not have done this work without significant investment of effort from the departments on a very tight timeline overlapping with other challenges that they were facing.

And so I do want to just quickly say thank you to um our colleagues across the county for the hard work that went into this. We know we we were asking for a lot. Um every email I sent that was like here's the next step. It was like oh they're going to get so tired of hearing from me. Um, but everybody the the level of engagement, the level of energy that that folks were able to put into this work was incredibly inspiring and I'm

just extremely grateful for um all of the support that departments gave us across the fiscal year. And then finally, I just want to note, you know, this year for organizational effectiveness for the staff on and the performance and strategy team, you know, the year started with a reorganization and followed with a dramatically different approach to this work. Um, and I do want to say thank you to my team, Pat, CG, and Ashby, who really rose to the level asked very quickly. Um, and without the three of them and their positivity and their professionalism, we never would have been able to make the progress we've made, even though there's still a lot of work left to do. And we'll continue to move forward. Um, I do want to acknowledge that they have they've been through a lot of change this year and just want to highlight the excellence of their work and um, the the appreciation I have for for them being

on my team. So, thank you. >> All right. Thank you.

Any comments? Oh, Commissioner Burton. >> Yes. Thank you so much for your presentation.

I just want to say I don't really have any questions. Um, when I was reading the budget notebook this weekend and I felt for me it was just the charts and everything. It was so much clearer to get the information in such a concise manner. My first budget with thought I really couldn't understand it that well.

But this time just looking through the data and it was just very clear. It was very understandable and really clearly seeing okay we are responsible for 32 departments like that number was clear right. I just loved how it was in the table of com um contents and for us as county commissioners when we go out into the community and we have to communicate

okay what is county government doing particularly because so many of our residents um don't fully understand the difference between the city and the county. It really was a great I just love reading it because it made me understand fully what Durham County government does and it helps us do our job a lot easier. So, thank you for this. Thank you, County Manager Hager for um having this because it was just um it was just really easy for me to comprehend.

So, I just want to give you all a big shout out. Thank you so much for your hard work, >> Commissioner Jacobs. >> Thank you. Well, thank you all so much.

This is transformational. It really is. Um and I I just this is amazing work. Um I see this as something where you are I love the way you all have been working internally with departments

hand in hand. Um, and at the same time it's internal, but it's also external because I really look forward to how we can make sure that the public has access to not only the budget book, but also the companion document. I looked at that last night. I skimmed through 283 pages of the companion document and um and they're both really important, you know, for people who who want to see the bar charts and the uh the line graphs and really understand the narrative. um you know the having both and it's amazing that you guys have done produced both documents in partnership with all the departments while the managers asking people to make budget cuts at the same time is really really amazing. Um,

so one of my questions is how will this all be shared with the public and including the companion document? Like what do you all what do you all envision? Like it may not like over time. What are some of the ways that you think about that?

>> You know, I I will start and I know John, you have more succinct um ideas on it. Our goal is to um in some of our my updates to the community to point to our resources or departments and and share those highlights. I will say from a storytelling perspective, when I do my weekly updates, it's a little easier now to highlight a department and share where they are because all the data is in one place and it it begins a story of, you know, what we desire to do and how we're being impactful in those various places. So, I see it integrating

in a lot of different ways. um also with more interactive um types of dashboards in the future as well. Um this work was quite involved. Budget uh played a role uh as well as we um tried to um revision and reshape what we were doing.

Our departments have gone through a lot these last 12 months considering um we're asking them to also look at making some adjustments in their budgets. Um and and it was a review of what's required and what's mandated and and that was a very tough exercise. If if Keith, David, Heather, and the rest of the team could talk through that, you know, everybody feels like they're mandated. And so getting to the truth of well what does the general statute say versus what you feel in your heart it can it can be quite a conversation and that was a beginning part of that foundation as we looked at base budget

review which made it easier when we started to talk about well tell us your story and what should we tell the community about our outcomes and our outputs and how we compare to other peers because that's something personally that has always been important. I can benchmark against myself, but who does it best and how do we keep reaching for a different level of excellence? And so I just want to thank the departments for their work because they were the ones in the trenches and um budget played a role, but the driver for this component is the organizational effectiveness team. And thank you again for your work.

Um, I guess it was probably about a month or so ago as we saw the tea leaves and how the climate has shifted. And I'm like, hey, we have to tell our story even um more effectively and u more often. And John said, "Well, you know, we can do this companion document which was planned for later this year. We weren't

" So, thank you departments for that push because it feels like we keep pushing but they keep delivering because we have the best team in the country. So, again, thank you. I can't say that enough. >> Thank you.

And I I would like to request I know we normally put a copy of the budget book at all the libraries, a hard copy. Um if we could actually I know it's a lot of paper, but I think it's important to have also a copy a hard copy of the companion. Yes, we can do that. >> Okay.

At all of our libraries for people to Okay. Um, so when I just have a few things. One is um when I read the companion because I haven't finished reading the budget book, but I did go through the companion document there. as you know I mean I know it's a work in progress but there's a there is quite a range in terms of the um you

know the the the measurements that are being reported there's obviously certain departments that have been capturing their data for a very long time I mean I'll shout out to like justice services for example um and so they they have very clear performance performance measures and outcomes um and and or something like DSS where we have state and federal standards. So um I'm wondering um and I know this is something that um our chair talks about a lot. Some of the measures when I looked at them I I thought to myself, well what's the real target here? It wasn't always clear to me like what is the target?

What are we aiming for? Whether it's our own goal or whether it's a state or a federal standard or a national standard. So I

think making sure that we have some type of target is going to be important for contextualizing like well how do I know this is a good outcome? So that was one reaction I had. Um, the other was how do we use this information for policy making and decision-m and I'll give you an example. I was shocked when I saw soil and water their reporting and they had really good measurements for volunteer agricultural districts.

I'm just don't remember the exact number, but like three years ago, it it showed that we had something like I'm just making this up, like 900 between 600 and 900 acres of land. I think it was around 900 that were in volunteer agricultural districts in Durham County. And then

last year it was like 200. That's a shocking difference, okay, in just a few years to see the decline in land in voluntary agricultural districts. And so that makes me think, oh my gosh, this is a really alarming trend. And it also ties back into things like I'm giving you an example. I've been personally fighting for Durham County departments to be included in assessments for resonings and you know resonings that are going to impact the urban growth boundary and deplete agricultural land and as I don't know what happened with the cheek road resoning last night but there were something like 27 something ag volunteer agricultural ederal districts, VADs surrounding

close to the Cheek Road resoning. So that's like where that data point actually comes into play as something relevant for a reasonzoning. So you see what I'm saying? Like I feel like I hope we can get to the point where the information that everyone is collecting can somehow filter back and be used by us for making policy decision-m or you know red flags or so that that's one of my questions is how do we get to the point where it can really be a tool also for policy making and decision- making.

So, I just wanted to raise that. >> I'll give a couple of comments. Um, I I think it is the utilization of the information because folks know it's there. In the past, it was not there. So, you may have gathered it at a lot of different um places. And so,

with time, individuals should see this as the source to get the key points on a specific topic. And I know I do that for certain things. If I want policy documents, let's say on community colleges or universities, I go to iPads because I can compare the institutional peer data and I get it and it's always consistent. We see this as a very similar process that you will know these 10 measures will always be in the document.

It may be refined, but it is a source of information when you want to have those key policy type data points. And we'd like your feedback to to let us know, are we missing some key areas? And it will be fleshed out further. Our our excitement is it's much further along than where we were last year. And if we move at the same warp speed, I'm excited to see what we'll look like next year.

Yeah. Yeah. >> If I could just add a couple of things on your first point about the the targets. >> Again, I think we acknowledge that that is something that needs to be addressed with with urgency.

Um we will be working that'll be part of the conversations between now and the end of the fiscal year for the document that goes with the adopted budget where we can. Some of that is just going to take more work with the department to kind of help them establish those targets where we don't have a historical standard or an externally opposed standard, you know, imposed standard that we're trying to meet, right? Some of that we have to deliberatively figure out. And so that'll again be part of the conversation as we move forward. And like I said, not just targets, but also where are we trying to get to, right? like we we you know we have we may have baseline targets but our internal target may be even higher and how do we communicate both of those things right and so those will be things that we continue to work to address um in terms

of the second point you know my hope is that by by getting people I mean like I said the level of engagement with performance this year was significantly higher than it's been in recent fiscal years we've heard that from department after department after department um and So my hope is that through these efforts, through the periodic conversations with leadership during the year, folks will become more comfortable with the information and will look for opportunities, right, to utilize that information when they are doing other types of work. I think it's making the information available is only part of the process there. It's also getting people comfortable, invested, um, and looking at it as a tool in their toolbox, right? And not just an administrative responsibility.

And so I think we're trying to build that culture. And I think I will say I think I'm seeing shoot, you know, shoots of progress there, um, as folks are engaging with this information. So

hopefully that'll be something that we can continue to see grow over time. Well, I love that the idea of engagement and changing people's different different ways through their work. One last point I just want to make. Well, one is definitely want to see how we tie this back to the strategic plan and then ultimately like how are we moving the needle on reducing poverty uh connecting people to high wage jobs, things like that.

But the other thing is I'm wondering how in these measures we can as much as possible incorporate return on investment. For instance, Justice Services Department in one of their measurements, they show that the pre-trial release programs and all these different programs that they're administering has saved $11 million in one year in keeping people out of the jail. Saved the county $11 million.

That's incredible. So how as whenever we can I guess thinking in the future like how can we show like this investment or this program is giving us what saving us money like return on investment. So that that's one other thing I just know how any thoughts you all had on that. >> Yes.

So for this year we had tried to encourage folks to seek out opportunities in the narrative structures around specific measurements to be able to tell that story. Um but I think in the longer term again trying to connect performance and resource allocation will be something that we continue to prioritize >> right and another you know veteran services did the same thing they're bringing in this amount of you know whatever. So thank you so much. Yeah, we appreciate the feedback.

>> All right. Um um thank you all for this. This is excellent. I I really like the progress and the direction this is

going. This is a priority of mine and to see this kind of come together uh the way that it has is is quite impressive and I really appreciate it. Um I'm not necessarily worried about um at this moment seeing like what should our measures be and part of being a foundational right you have to establish a baseline right we have this year is really going to be about baselining like what does good look like or what does success look like and then subsequent years then we start to say Okay, what's your stretch goal for something? Or what does it mean to reach those goals?

Or what do you need to reach those goals? Or if you're not reaching your baseline, um then you know, how do we what do we need to do to improve that, right? And so that's that's like a major part. The

first thing is moving the huge ship into getting in direction of actually doing measurements. And that is that is what I've seen here and that's what I see in this um in this presentation and and so forth. So I I really appreciate that. Um um so as we're talking about these um foundational baselines um we want to make sure that we have and I'm sure you all already do this.

I'm just kind of saying it out in the out in the world for the community. We want to I mean we it's not that we're not going to have targets. That's not it. And I want to talk about what that process looks like after the U budget is adopted. um we got to have targets but we have to say you know we need to look at this data

because previously we just didn't have that framework to create those those baselines we don't really have anything to go off of. Um so talk to me about you know what do you vision what do you envision that process of you know just starting out as far as um you know setting some generalized targets where you going to get what's going to inform you into starting something this year you know like getting some target these general targets not necessarily saying that okay you got to hit these or or whatnot we're establishing our baseline but we still have to have targets can you talk to me about what you envision that process being like over this year. So this time next year what we're looking at is well what did you believe that you were going to accomplish? What was what did you accomplish? And then next year which would be the 27 28 what are you going to do to accomplish those? Like can you talk to me about that process?

>> Yes. So to a certain degree we're still I mean we're still finalizing some of the vision components of this but I do think in terms of broader strokes for one it will continue to be a collaborative process right we will continue to rely on departments to be the subject matter experts what we will do is to bring in the perspective on best practices when it comes to analyzing data measuring you know measuring performance um what you know uh what's appropriate for you know what's appropriate based on the characteristics of the program right what what are the sources we would look at to establish those types of targets whether that's benchmarking whether that's external that we you know we as as commissioner Jacobs pointed out right we do have a lot of programs that the targets are out of our hands right and so it's how do we incorporate that into our work and communicate that piece of it right and So I think it's it's going

to it's going to be very department and program and measure specific but it'll continue to be collaborative where our goal will be to bring in the kind of best practices the kind of broader expectations and then rely on the departments to be the subject matter experts. We will as we have push back where we feel like it's appropriate but we will have to still continue to rely on their expertise when it comes to that. I think the the further down the road piece, right, I think comes in with, you know, um is a broader conversation with leadership is is we've talked about anchoring things in in strategy, I think. So part of that is, you know, being able to incorporate both the retrospective look with kind of forward forward- facing forecasting and strategic priorities of the departments. Um and but again the fundamental model right will continue to be utilizing

their subject matter expertise into their programs and us providing kind of the best practices from a measurement standpoint right I I couldn't individually tell you for justice services what you know like whether what their substance use treatment target participation you know program participation rate should necessarily be. they understand the research as to what is both reasonable and ambitious, right? And so our our job I view as helping them be able to make sure that the way they're looking at the research, the way they're looking at the data, the way we're articulating that as a target, as a stretch goal align with the best practices for measurement. So I think, you know, again, we're still continuing to evolve in that direction.

Um, but I I think that kind of is the way I would articulate my vision for how that process will look moving forward. >> Right. And thank you for that. And to Commissioner Jacob's point about um you

know where do we see this saving money I think when you start to measure things and you and you start to ensure that departments are hitting their goals or making their goals or exceeding their goals inherently you're going to save money in the different places and what they do or the savings comes in different forms. You know, if we talk about, you know, with social services and and homelessness, for example, if we reach whatever goals that they have, inherently the reaching those goals means success for those who are unhoused, which means we won't have as much support in that, right? This may not be directly, it may not be a straight line savings, but as far as some of the examples that you gave, but when we put a a framework like this into place, it's going to help our government run more efficiently. And efficiency overall

will be savings to taxpayers. And that be that helps us with good stewardship overall. And that's what that's what excites me about this. And I mean, I never thought that we'd be this far this quickly.

So, I really appreciate what you all have done. The foundation, the framework I'm going to the uh the framework that you guys have put in place. Private organizations takes years to get to this point. So, the work that you guys have done has really been amazing.

So, thank you so much. >> Thank you. Only thing I was going to ask, yes, in saving money, but also seeing how our residents quality of life is getting better. So, that's important too.

So, yeah. >> So, thank you. >> Thank you all very much. >> Now, we're going to um make a little bit of adjustment.

Uh we're going to go to transportation now. We're going to hear transportation. We're going to do transportation and then we're going to do lunch.

Lunch is already here, but we'll go ahead and do this and then we'll go go do lunch. Okay. All right. >> And I have to leave close to noon and um Miss Pierce is going to sit in my spot and Maurice will join us shortly after that.

>> Okay. Very good. And uh Commissioner Valentine should be here at or around 1:00. Good morning.

>> Good morning uh board um commissioners. Um, so transportation is here with another update on the development of the final uh FY27 dorm transit work program. Um, Ellen Beckman, I'm transportation director. Um, Brandy Miner is here, the

transit program administrator and staff working group administrator. Um, and Katherine Egleston, uh, the deputy CEO of Go Triangle. Um, and then we have other Go Triangle staff also here in the in the audience. So, as you have heard in our presentations over the past several months, we've had a challenging year, you know, with the transit plan.

Uh, we've had lower than forecasted revenues, funding gaps on existing projects, a shortfall in the city's transit fund, and many new requests this year. Uh we are nearing the finish line though and I'll provide you a brief update on some recent actions, next steps and then Go Triangle staff will provide an update on their updated uh bus operations request. So last time we were here on May 4th, Durham County and City of Durham staff provided a presentation on the city's request for one-time capital funding to fund two specific capital projects for the city in FY27. Uh so as as described

that proposal had been developed over a few months including staff and elected board discussions. Um based on the direction provided at the May 4th meeting. Uh we finalized the detail of that request over the following week and the staff working group administrator incorporated the proposal into the final work program document. Uh Brandy sent that work program document to the staff working group last Wednesday for their review and the staff working group um meets tomorrow and is asked to make a recommendation for approval uh of the final work program.

The staff working group's recommendation then comes back to the board of commissioners and the go triangle board for approval in June. So um at the same time in May we did recre receive an updated request from go triangle regarding their bus operating request. Uh you may recall that uh Dr. Lee raised this as a question on May 4th. Uh we noted that it it had not been reviewed yet, but it could be considered at a later meeting. Uh so due to the

timing, uh the staff working group has not discussed it yet, but as staff working group chair, I did include it on the agenda tomorrow for an initial discussion. Uh so with that, you know, Durm County of course sincerely values the services that Go Triangle provides to our residents and we certainly intend to give this request due consideration and we're proceeding with that review. And so as part of that, um we have asked Go Triangle staff to provide this presentation today. >> Thank you, Ellen.

Uh thank you manager Hager, Dr. Lee, members of the commission. Really appreciate the opportunity uh to be here with you today and share this information. We were able to share this information with the um audit and finance committee of the go triangle board last week um and so are very happy to be able to share it with you as well today. Uh Go Triangle shares uh excuse me serves as the administrator of the Triangle Tax District which is responsible for stewardship of the halfsent sales tax that's dedicated to transit in the region uh as well as other regional transit resources.

There's not a single regional transit plan. There are three separate plans uh each with its own governance structure. Go Triangle is the one entity that connects them all providing a regional perspective and providing mobility and connectivity between the region's urban transit systems in the city of Raleigh, city of Durham, and town of Chapel Hill. The current Durham transit plan was adopted in 2023, but the underlying service concepts and financial assumptions uh were developed in 2021 and 2022.

Since that time, um, several key assumptions have changed. The regional commuter rail effort is no longer moving forward. Travel patterns have shifted toward m more all day demand. Uh, traffic congestion has increased on key corridors and ridership uh, includes a growing share of lower income riders who rely on transit for essential trips. In parallel, an updated Wake Transit plan that provides funding for expanded regional bus service, including additional investments in the

corridor connecting Raleigh and Durham, has been developed and adopted for the FY27 uh transit work program. Um the Durham process has so far not supported operating increases beyond um current allocations, but unfortunately the baseline assumptions that are in the current plan do not match uh the operating conditions or service needs that we see today. Um so the staff working group meet uh meets tomorrow as as Ellen mentioned um and is expected to finalize the annual work plan um that will come before this board and the go triangle board in June. Uh the question that will be in front of the staff working group tomorrow is whether to proceed with the status quo for FY27 operating programs or whether there's um the ability or interest to advance costneutral reallocations um to better respond to uh conditions that we see for current rider needs. So across the region, we've seen different trajectories for the FY27 process. In Wake the staff committee there uh recommended a FY27 plan that includes

8 million in new funding for Go Triangle's regional services uh including support for expanding the Durham to Raleigh um express route uh in Durham as well as Orange. FY27 planning so far, as you've heard many times, uh, so far reflects continuation of existing assumptions. Um, multiple operators have requested changes to be incorporated as plans are finalized, and you've already heard from the city of Durham about their requests in earlier meetings. I will just briefly um, go through Go Triangle's request for you today.

So, first up, Route 800 is one of the most heavily used Go Triangle routes connecting RTP, South Durham, and Chapel Hill. Um, the route carried more than 18,000 trips uh in the month of March. The route currently runs on schedule only about 77% of the time, which is below our target metrics. And this request focuses on improving reliability by adding travel time uh and layover to respond to congestion and improve the on-time performance of the

route. Secondly, our Durm to Raleigh express route is currently a peak focused service with limited trips in the midday. Around 40% of the riders on uh route 800 in Raleigh make, excuse me, the route 100 in Raleigh make a transfer to the 700 to get to Durham. uh because of limited options on the express route today.

This request uh that we have for route DRX would upgrade the express route to run uh consistently every 30 minutes throughout the day, creating a more efficient connection between the region's largest uh urban centers. As part of the FY27 public engagement process in Durham, survey respondents identified Route 800 and Durham Raleigh Express among the top priorities for consideration in the work program. The comment period closed in midappril and we received the summary report um from Durham County a couple of weeks ago. The FY27 process in Durm and Orange um as Ellen mentioned has been more difficult than previous years uh and the

staff working group has not reached alignment um early in the process. County staff in both Orange and Durham uh have asked providers to stay within existing allocations. So in response, Go triangle um developed a costneutral option to be able to address uh near-term reliability and regional service priorities within the existing resources allocated uh for regional bus service within the plan. This chart shows how small the regional bus operation slice really is in the current Durham plan.

Yet, it's the part of the plan uh that is connecting the city of Raleigh, city of Durham, and town of Chapel Hill in the absence of a larger uh regional transit plan. Our staff is the closest to the day-to-day performance of the routes that make up this slice of the pie um and is most familiar with the operational realities that are required to implement and sustain high-erforming regional service. A costneutral reallocation could offset these recommendations uh through planned operational efficiencies on route 700

and 705 which connects uh downtown Durham with RTP along with deferring planned expansion assumptions for route 700 as well as route 400 connecting Durham and Chapel Hill that are currently assumed in the financial model in FY30 and FY31. This would not eliminate those future projects or remove them from the transit plans, but it would adjust the timing of a relatively small portion of the future expansion expansion funding in order to address current reliability and connectivity needs. These assumptions could be revisited in future years as transit plans are updated in the coming years and long-term priorities and available capacity become clearer. Finally, we recognize partner concerns about the timing of this request. Our staff has raised these service needs throughout the FY26 amendment process and the FY27 work program process. While earlier alignment on how to fund these improvements would have been preferable, uh maintaining the status quo has real impacts for writers today, which is why we believe it's important to bring this

option uh forward at this time. Ensuring that regional services remain reliable, connected, and responsive to writer needs is essential. uh and the decisions made in the coming weeks will have a meaningful impact on people who depend on transit every day. Uh we look forward to continuing to work closely with our partners to strengthen service for riders today while laying the groundwork for system expansion that our growing region will need in the years ahead.

We appreciate your support of regional transit that's needed to connect Durham's transit riders with opportunities in the city of Raleigh, town of Chapel Hill, and the greater triangle region. And we would be happy to answer any questions that you have at this time. All right, commissioners. Go ahead.

Well, >> good to see you all. I haven't seen some of you in a long time. Um, thanks so much for being here. Um, I have a few questions. Um, one is, it's my understanding this was submitted

pretty last minute, this these um, requests. So just wondering why in terms of the process. >> So we've uh submitted the requests for uh additional funding for route 800 route DRX um throughout the process both for uh FY26 amendments starting last fall and the FY27 process uh starting last fall. The initial requests were for incremental funding.

I think on one of the slides here shows it's about 500 thou a little under $500,000 of additional funding for this year. So that was the original request. Uh then in January we submitted uh like a a scaledown request uh that eliminated a couple other things that we asked for really focusing in on these two items. Uh and so as the process has continued, as conversations emerged with the city and sort of the um uh decision or upcoming effort to allocate the available capacity in this year's uh work plan uh to the needs for the city,

we've kind of sharpened our pencils, looked at the overall arc of the plan and identified these costneutral reallocations. So, we've done a lot of work throughout the year to take what was a larger request for additional funds to then scale that back and now um be able to accomplish that in a costneutral way that we believe uh is appropriate uh and reasonable to address the needs that we see today, the very specific needs we see today uh while allowing additional time for uh the transit plan to be updated as well as the um vision BRT vision plan that the county is uh working on to be able to be um finalized. So it sounds like the way you're making it costneutral is you're suggesting adjustments to the 700 and 700 705 routes and also changes to future projects. So I'm wondering has that assessment what does that mean adjustments to 700 and 75 >> routes since those sound like those are

important routes going from Durham to RGP. >> Absolutely. Yeah. And I'll ask my colleague Jay Hikis who's our senior manager for uh service planning to come up and provide some additional detail.

Um but in short the changes that are proposed it's really changes in the assumptions about when the expansion dollars will occur in the plan for the 700 and 705. Jay has identified some opportunities actually to rightsize that that we're implementing in August. So there's savings that we're already going to experience in August from uh just replanning that not reducing the amount of service um but uh just some savings from what we've learned as we've implemented that expansion in March. Um, so that's one.

And then there's some assumptions for uh additional dollars allocated to Route 400 um in I think it's 2030 or 2031. Jay can specify um that was assumed to support transitioning that route. Currently that route runs on um 15501 and then Franklin Street to get to Chapel Hill. We plan in

the future to transition that to Route 15501, but there are some capital improvements that will need to occur on the Orange County portion of 15501 for that to actually happen. Um, and that is on track to occur a little bit later in the 2030s. So, this would uh adjust those assumptions about when that expansion can actually happen. And Jay, I would invite Jay um to to add additional detail there.

>> Certainly, Kevin answered it well. >> You just have to press the Katherine, you answered that well. Um, just some additional clarity on the 70075. Um, through some adjustments to scheduling um, by changing how the the routes interact with each other, by changing um, you know, the time designated to layover, the times they departed Durham station, were able to identify a modest cost savings um, that's recurring every year.

So that's the change to the 700. So riders will still experience four buses per hour between um Research Triangle Park and downtown Durham. It's just the cost to do that will be have some savings.

And it sounds like at this time there is an agreement from the Orange County side related to some of the changes I guess related to the route on 15501. Is that >> So we have two components of the request today. the DURM to Raleigh Express component which the the wake component of the funding is moving forward. Um and then the the question of the Durham funding is what we're discussing today.

And then for the route 800 that would in would need funding from both Durham and Orange. Both staff working groups are meeting tomorrow. Um so the uh request in Orange is on the agenda for tomorrow as well. Yeah, I I'll just say I mean I think that I appreciate this process and I really appreciate that you all have worked creatively to um try to you know make this costneutral. I do think that it sounds like there still needs to be time with the process

with staff working group with Orange County. Um, and it just may be that this is something that we need to, you know, implement mid mid year when there's been more time, I know, for our staff to make assessments and just to make sure that everyone understands the full implications of the kind of the changes and what that will really mean. But I I do appreciate that you all are, you know, looking at efficiencies and things like that. Yeah, if I could make one one point of clarification on the timing.

Um, if the changes are not included in the FY27 work plan that moves forward in June and July and are instead considered as an amendment later in the process, it's unlikely just due to the time that it takes to implement a service change. It's unlikely that that would actually be able to be implemented mid year. Um it's likely that it would be later potentially even next summer

before the changes would actually uh be able to benefit writers. >> Thank you. >> So with this um so you all are meeting tomorrow and should it go forward from your from the work group um it comes to us right? Does it go to Orange County or Wake County?

Does it go to any anywhere else or just does it where else does it go from here? From there? >> Yeah. Um, so we have three different work programs in each county, right?

So the Durham work program uh will be recommended by the staff working group tomorrow if all goes according to schedule. >> Um, and then it will come back to you in June and to the Go Triangle board in June. Um, so the changes in Orange County would have to follow the same >> structure. Um, and I guess to clarify, I

think for Orange County, it's in an amendment. Is that right? Not it's they're a little like off they're off schedule, I'd say, a bit. Um, maybe it's an understatement.

Um, so so yeah, I mean, we we need to follow up to that point. like we do need to follow up I think with Orange County to understand the timing of everything and um how they would consider this uh to make sure that we are um aligned as much as possible. Um you know I I will say that that is one of the tricky parts of being go triangle right is aligning things across the three counties. Um I understand that is challenging.

Um, and I think, you know, based on some of the issues and that we've had in the past, there have been issues when we've been when counties have been out of alignment. So, um, we do want to try to reach out to our partners in Orange County, make sure that we, um, are kind of approaching this the same way. Uh

before recommending action, >> do you think um with with if we were to approve it, it would increase the chances of Orange County approving? Well, so if we approve and Orange County doesn't, what impact? >> I I can address that. um commissioner.

Um so orange these changes actually for the 800 did go to the Orange County Board of Commissioners earlier this spring. However, they declined to take action on them at that time because Durham County had not yet taken action. >> Okay. >> Um so this is so similar to the timeline that Katherine laid out for the amendments um submitted to Durham County, we have submitted those to Orange. We have have had those conversations and the only um point of feedback we received from the commissioners was the lack of action in Durham at that time. Um to answer the question about the timing of these two um and you know what happens if one approves and one doesn't um we can answer that on Wake because in Wake um

the um board the governing bodies have not yet taken formal action on the budget but the TAC um the equivalent of the staff working group in Wake County has recommended full approval um of these inclusions including the wake share of the DRX. Um, however, what we've committed to in Wake is is that we would not begin drawing down those funds for the DRX until we had the approval in Durham. Um, so we can make that same um commitment um in Durham as well as in Orange so that you know whoever acts first is not penalized. >> Okay.

Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead. >> Since you're you're the rep to the Gorong board, has this been presented to the Gorang board and basically gotten approved by the board to move?

>> We talked about this quite a bit. Yeah. I'm sorry. >> We've talked about this quite a bit.

>> And has has the board given the go-ahad to this? >> I believe so. Yes. Right.

And >> we we presented to the audit and finance committee of the board last week and they did uh endorse the proposal for moving forward >> going to consent. So yeah. Um

>> I I guess just to clarify like I don't think the full board has received this yet. It goes until the >> work program. That's correct. However, I will say, you know, the prior go triangle's priorities, including the 800, the DRX, and other things that have moved forward this year have been presented to the board multiple times starting back in November.

>> Right. Yes. Okay. Um Okay, I think that's all I had.

Commissioner Burton. >> Yes. Thank you so much. I like simplicity.

I was an elementary school librarian for a long time. So, I'm just if I sound this way, it's because I like things simple and easy. You're wanting you're requesting $216,887 for the route 800, correct? Is that back here? We're yeah for FY27 the request is to allocate $216,000

for that improvement in the Durham plan. It's not additional funding though. It would be offset by um changing assumptions about future year funds. >> Okay.

And the same from Orange and the Durham the Durham the route DRX267115. That's what we're requesting. All right. And so we need the approval from Orange and y'all going to come back to us when when you coming back to us.

>> So this would be included uh well this will be considered by the staff working group tomorrow potentially you know to be included in the FY27 plan. That's go triangle's request is for this uh rebalancing if you will costneutral reallocation to be included in the FY27 uh Durham transit work program. So that overall will come to this board in June. >> Gotcha. And the reason I do that is because when I can only speak for myself, but I know my colleagues when

residents ask us questions, want to be as clear as possible as to what is occurring, right? So I hear you. I think we just need to work this out, figure out, come back to us and things like that. But I appreciate that.

just making it simple, clear, easy because our residents ask, we want to be clear with them so they can fully understand what is happening with their tax dollars. So, thank you so much. >> Um, to your point, Commissioner Burton, I think it's important to highlight that there needs to we need to understand because this is re it's allocating this funding because it's being found by impact to other roots. So understanding clearly like what is it's kind of realigning dollars to really understand what that means which I I don't know Ellen if you want

to elaborate on that. >> Well I I do want to make sure it's understood and I think we've presented this in the past. Um you know this funding source we have a long-term plan right? It goes through 2040 and we model capital and operating projects on a on a future basis out to 240. So um you know this is operating request meaning it is recurring right um and I believe these numbers also are um only partial year so they the FY28 request goes up and then there's a growth rate applied so um so all that to say you know when we consider these things we put them in the model and we look at those long-term implications um and the tradeoffs that might be required and so that's what go triangle is getting at there need to be some tradeoffs in those future year projects to um reassign funding. >> Thank you.

>> Okay. Any other questions, comments? >> Um yes, I I am glad we're having the conversation. Um I have expressed timing uh of the discussions and this is a similar scenario with the city and in that uh this in my opinion should be something that we push for conversations in the fall or or knowing that it may delay what needs to be done only because I need to better understand the the opportunity cost of doing one versus the other. plus the full scope of what's the full impact costwise in general. um because we have had some push back when we've reshuffled one priority versus the other and I I do know uh one of our board members has talked a lot about that and the community push back doesn't

mean a long delay but it this is unique as we've addressed other policy matters that we just need a few more months before we come to some decision. Not saying it's not going to happen. It's just that from where I sit just what what are all of the implications and cost so that in a total picture we can u with confidence know what that is considering the kinds of push backs that have occurred recently. >> May May I speak to that briefly manager?

Um just on the opportunity cost side. So Katherine mentioned um the change to route 400 and 405. Um what we're saying is is that that right now there's funding um for phase two of those improvements um to realign the route from from Franklin Street to 15501 in Chapel Hill. That is dependent on building bus stops and pedestrian crossings um along 15501 from Ephesus Church Road to Manning Drive. Um we'd also hope to get some transit signal

priority, maybe some shoulder running bus, something to mitigate some of the congestion that occurs along that corridor. there's a lot of demand um but there's also a lot of congestion and a lot of access issues. Um what we are saying is is that that is that that infrastructure if we started today um which we're not able to start today because there's still planning and coordination and design that needs to occur in addition to permitting um and then actual construction. If we were to start today we wouldn't be complete with those improvements till 2034 looking at other similarly sized projects occurring in the region including some of Go Triangle's own projects.

So what we're saying is is that um starting in 2030 there are going to be dollars um basically sitting in go that 8% of the Durham County transit plan that's for go triangle operations that we're not able to use. Um so rather than letting those sit umow what we're suggesting is using those to meet priorities now. Um, so really the conversation between that we're having with Durham and with the staff work group in orange is are we

able to make adjustments to those future assumptions for something that's planned in FY30 um or um are we able or are we leaving those the same but that's not going to be that's not really going to change the outcome of whether or not we're able to deliver those services in FY30. Um so just wanted to add that point of clarification. I did also want to note um that the changes in gom that we're discussing um are changes to frequency that were originally planned I believe in fiscal 24 and then carried over to fiscal 25 and 26 to add frequency to routes four and nine those were part of a bucket of projects in the Durham transit plan that were for expanding service in the first 5 years and that was a priority more service now um what has happened is you know due to a variety of reasons operators shortages vehicle availability um additional funding considerations um those projects are being shifted. I think it's very very different to think about those two 15-minute services that were promised in the first five years of the plan. I think those are a different bucket than a phase two of an expansion to RU 400 which Go triangle did deliver the first phase of on schedule um this past fall.

So, thank you for that opportunity. >> Okay. All right. We're good.

All right. Thank you all very much. Appreciate it. >> Okay.

We're right at 12 noon. Well, it's 11:57. 12:00 noon. So, we'll do a a lunch and come back in.

And I think we start back with uh EMS. >> I I know. Yeah. >> We go to risk.

>> Yeah. Risk management is when we come back. >> Okay. >> So, we'll do risk management and then EMS.

Okay. This after after lunch. So, what do we want for lunch? How >> we could do a working lunch?

>> Yeah. >> Okay. Um 20 minutes. >> 20 minutes is good.

>> Okay. 20 minutes and then we'll come back and get started management. Okay. All right. We're at recess.

after risk management um office of emergency services and then board discussion. So let's see attorney Lissa Williamson I will let you have the floor. >> Absolutely. I am happy to introduce our risk manager, Ryan Wilson.

He's been with Durham County now, I believe he said next week will be one year, right? >> Next week. >> Yeah, >> one year. >> Yeah.

It's amazing how fast time flies. >> I know. >> But, um, Ryan has taken some extraordinary steps and made some significant advances for Durham County. And so I'm going to hand it over to him so he can explain the things that he's done and um how he's helped to protect the county.

>> Yes. That well thank you uh commissioners. It's nice to meet you. Uh as she mentioned, I'm Ryan Wilson, the risk manager here at Durham County. and uh thank you for allowing me to have a

conversation with you this afternoon regarding what FY26 looked like for risk management and as we move forward into FY27 and what our wish list and priorities are uh when it comes to that. I'm assuming I can hit the forward button on this. Yes. So, let's just talk a little bit about uh the main question I get is what exactly do you do?

Uh that's the number one question I get when I tell people what I do either for a living or when I talk to employees around the county. So um but we do a lot and it is uh in no particular order uh making sure that we are uh protecting the county through our strategic insurance portfolio. Um, as you know, we have a lot of liabilities both operationally as well as firstparty assets that need to make sure we're transferring that risk to them. Uh, so that includes our insurance portfolio, uh, which, uh, includes kind of what we

have, the big four when it comes to our insurance policies. We have a lot of them. Uh but we'll highlight uh the the major policies that make up about 98% of our insurance costs here at the county. Uh which is our general liability which includes a lot of different functions such as our auto liability, our law enforcement liability, uh your public officials liability is included in that as well.

So we have coverage for you as uh commissioners. uh which also includes our workers compensation liability which is very important uh for us. We'll talk a little bit about that uh in the next few slides. Uh but also our property and our assets uh which we'll also talk a little bit about and our cyber and professional liability policies which uh allow us to make sure that we are covered in our digital space. Um I'm sure you all are well aware of the challenges that we have in the digital space and the cyber space. Uh with

reading the news almost daily we see something uh some organization both public and private has been hit uh and affects us all in one way or the other. We want to make sure that the county is certainly protected that way. Um also making sure that we are working very closely with our broker. Uh, I like to be very aggressive with our broker.

I think in a lot of ways we trust our broker to just say, "This is what you need. " Um, I don't approach it that way. I like to tear it apart and put it back together and determine whether or not it fits the character of what Durham County is, if it's within our risk appetite to pay for coverages that maybe we have somewhere else and really pressure our broker to go back to the market to ensure that we're getting the best products with the best relationships with our insurance carriers that provide us with the best insurance policies and services available to us. Um, and then finally, you know, looking at claims governance,

uh, we want to make sure that our claims data is appropriate, that we're consistent in the information that reporting to our insurance carriers so we can get the best premiums and the best quotes from them as possible, uh, so we ensure that we are protecting our county interests as much as possible. So, that's a a lot of work. Uh usually half of the year is spent looking at our renewals, how that's going to look. We do renew our policies every uh start of every fiscal year on July 1st.

And we spend about half I spend about half the year making sure that all of our renewals, all of our all of our data, all of our applications and communications with our broker is uh consistent and aggressive enough that we can make sure that those renew uh without any lapse of coverage at the beginning of the fiscal year. Uh however, we also uh my job is to review contracts. Uh so that is a large portion

of what I do. uh we want to make sure that we are transferring risk, not just our own liabilities to our insurance carriers, but putting that back on the vendors that we uh contract with with all of the uh contracts that we do. One of the challenges uh with risk is that I have to review them all. So, that is sometimes fun, sometimes not.

uh but we certainly uh want to make sure that we're enforcing insurance requirements as outlined in the insurance uh language and indemnification and limitation of liability language within our contracts. Uh making sure that that aligns again as I mentioned to the risk level that we feel comfortable with with the vendors. Some vendors we feel more comfortable, some vendors we don't. We want to make sure that we're accessing assessing each contract appropriately and uniquely uh based on the scope of what they do. So I can advise that department uh if we feel like we need more insurance requirements in there or if we can make exceptions to

some of the uh requests that they may have when they come back for discussion about uh whether or not if they have the coverage and we can make exceptions for that or lower limits. And then also verifying certificates of insurance. Incredibly important that we stay on top to make sure our vendors stay insured. Uh we do require them to confirm that at the at the beginning of their contract, but we want to make sure that they go through renewals as well and those renewals stay uh in line with our insurance requirements and that we don't have any lapse of coverage or reduction of limits.

Um and we want to flag those to make sure that they are staying compliant throughout the life cycle of the contract. And then finally, you know, really my role here is to manage risk. Uh that is a proactive approach. Uh we want to identify what those operational risks are. I certainly want to advise departments what those mitigation

strategies might be. Uh I live in a worst case scenario world. Uh so I'm getting paid to look at absolutely the worst thing that can happen and go from there. Right?

So uh we want to track those. We want to make sure that we're advising departments. I want to make sure advising departments uh as to what kind of risks are associated with the scopes they do. As you know, we have everything from libraries to law enforcement.

And so those are going to be different. those are going to be unique uh in the scope of what they do and how can we make sure that we're protecting the county accordingly. But additionally, we want to make sure that we're looking at emerging threats. Uh this, as I mentioned earlier, cyber and ransomware is really no longer emerging.

It's living with us. Um I was telling Lissa, even my kids app that we use for their grades was just uh attacked last week, Canvas, right? and there was a ransom payment

made within seven days to make sure that app is still running. Um, we all saw what happened to our gas availability in the in the Colonial Pipeline uh attack a few years back, right? Um, we've seen a significant increase in public agencies additionally be hit with cyber attacks and ransomware demands. Uh, and so uh, but we also have to take into consideration our climate related risks.

This definitely affects our premiums. Uh, and you know, it can affect us whether or not it hits close to home or not. Uh, we saw Helen a few years ago that is now affecting property rates. Uh we've seen other catast catastrophic events going on uh nationally that is having us requiring us to keep the conversation going about how we can afford to ensure our properties when even though it's not our damages, it's other damages that's still affecting whether or not there's availability of

coverage and there's availability of of cost uh for those premiums. We look at regulatory changes. What is North Carolina doing? What are we looking at in our social liability trends, the actions of uh things going on around the country?

How does that affect Durham? What is our perspective on that? And then finally, supporting the business continuity. Um certainly aligning with those other native departments that fit into the risk management role such as emergency management.

Uh that is very important for me to make sure that we're strengthening those relationships and the compliance that we have with them. So, a lot to do. There's certainly a lot more on the list I didn't list, but uh that's kind of a quick breakdown of kind of what my role here is at the county. So, let's talk a little bit about what FY26 looked like. I got here just before the start of the fiscal year, end of May, and had to look really quickly

initially at our insurance portfolio and how that uh aligned with, you know, my immediate uh review of that and and what it looked like for the county. Uh we were I was able to reduce our total premiums by, as I mentioned earlier, tearing that apart and putting it back together again. the broker had come in with some coverages that we had uh duplicate coverages that we didn't need to pay for. There's no need to pay twice.

That always creates a uh disparity between insurance companies when they get to argue who gets to pay for what if you have it somewhere else. Um I increased our cyber liability limit to 10 million. It was at 5 million. that's just not enough in the world that we live in today when we have digital threats and bad actors in the digital space. Uh and able to increase that for a relatively small premium rate increase as well. Um and what does that look like with our

cyber liability? There's a lot of we get we get attacked every day. I talked to Greg about this on a regular basis and we're we're attacked every day. We get emails.

we get people trying to get into our system and we we need that kind of coverage to allow us to have the flexibility should we go down long enough where that amount of loss is going to be that high. Additionally, uh I was able to reduce our auto uh property damage coverage deductible from $50,000 to $10,000 uh which was really key to me. We have a lot of vehicles that are worth a lot of money and we want to make sure that they're protected in the best way possible. Uh that has actually resulted in quite a bit of savings.

Uh we've had some ambulances that have gone out of service with damages as you know. Basically scratching the bumper of one of those is $10,000 or more sometimes. And so, um, with that lower deductible for a very small premium increase, we've

been able to result in at least $120,000 in savings to the county, uh, where we've been able to transfer the cost of those repairs over to the insurance carrier. Uh, so, so looking at this moving forward into FY27, the same thing. we've I've been able to really kind of look at where our insurance portfolio is again and reduce our uh overall premiums even further uh by additionally looking at what the options are and telling our broker to go out and really find and negotiate on our behalf those kinds of savings. Uh we have strengthened our property valuation accuracy.

Uh we just completed a county appraisal uh for the first time in 10 years. Uh industry standards want you to do it every five. Uh but we hadn't done one as a county since 2016. Uh which is good. 2 billion in facilities. This is county

property. This is not including uh the public schools. Uh but this includes all of our facilities, all of the content within those facilities and all of what we call operations out in the open, which is uh maybe artwork or landscaping and things like that. Um which allows us to provide us with what the actual value of those properties are, but also to allow us to tell the carriers if we have a total loss of one of those facilities, how much it's going to cost us to rebuild.

Um our property policy is there to rebuild a facility, not to get a check for the value. Uh which is good. So we will be in line with another full appraisal in 2031. Uh and we will do a market update every year uh in the interim. So we will still have uh a report every year as to what the values and reconstruction costs of those are uh just on a market increase value. Um, additionally, we were able to really take a look at our risk reserving uh,

and align our actuary to our fiscal year. I'm not sure why, and I don't have context about this, but we were aligning our reserving to the calendar year, which makes it difficult for an actuary to make predictive modeling for just 6 months instead of a full year ahead of the the time. So we were able to readjust that and now our loss data and our modeling projections for our claims and our which include workers compensation, auto liability and general liability to really get a better understanding of what we need to have in our risk fund for our total outstanding losses to make sure that we are covering all of our liabilities uh at once uh which needs to sit in the risk fund. So if the county shut down tomorrow, we could still pay those uh out. Um so that's good. So we are going to actually do that again uh after the end of this fiscal year so we have uh

much better loss data and modeling projections for FY28 moving forward. And then finally uh you know the first year here is about developing relationships. Um, and so what I really want to do is make sure that I'm out there, make sure that I'm meeting directors, make sure that I'm understanding the county and the uniqueness of Durham County, uh, and how we can start collaborating together with their needs and their unique needs to ensure that moving forward, especially in FY28 and on, uh, that we can start putting plans together for helping them reduce their cost, reduce their loss, uh, and be able to retain the services and resources that they have. So, I think a good year. Um, I'm pleased with with the I think the accomplishments that we've had so far in the my first year here and I'm looking forward to the next one. Um, let's talk about trends and I'm going to focus mostly now on our claim trends to give you a kind of an idea of really what we

look for and how we can reduce cost. There are direct cost opportunities as well as indirect cost reduction opportunities as well. And I look at claims in two ways. So we look at the frequency of claims and how does what kind of story does this tell you?

Uh so we see here in yellow uh is our workers compensation claims and you can see the one thing about the frequency of claims that I've learned is that the only consistency about them is that they are inconsistent. Uh right and so we see in 2023 we had 119 it jumped way up to 195 jumped back down to 145 and now this uh 2026 we're we're trending at 204. That is a projected number with with the rem uh remainder number of days for the year. So our claims are going up. Uh the number of times someone is telling us I've been injured is going up. Uh we can

see from our auto liability claims that is also going up. Four years ago we had 17. This year we're trending at 31. Not quite 50 or 100% increase but getting there.

General liability has always been a little bit more uh in terms of frequency a little bit more stable. We actually had a good year in 25 with just one and we're trending at four in 26. For the for reference, general liability is any loss that doesn't involve the operation of a county motor vehicle. So this could be a trip and fall on our property uh a claim against law enforcement uh in sheriff's office for say you know wrongful arrest or some sort of you know that kind of thing.

So um any kind of claim it could be a civil claim that's presented to us uh would fall into the general liability category. Um now I can I can outline here in 2024 we said oh my gosh you know there was like 70 plus more claims. Why is that?

Well, what's the story? Well, in 2024, we had a carbon monoxide issue at our DSS building. Um, and we had a lot of employees make claims in the event that they may have to seek medical attention for those claims. That was about 45 of them.

So, kind of gives you that one scenario might result from a frequency perspective in a lot of claims in one situation. uh and then again it jumped back down to 145. But we want to start talking about the narrative why our claims especially in workers compensation going up and that's uh something that we definitely need to start researching and making sure that we can bring that back down. But going to the next portion here, this is the claim payment.

So this is our severity. Uh we know claim is a claim. Not all of them are paid. Uh but what are we paying out? These are dollars out the door uh every year for our claims. Um and as you can see, obviously our workers

compensation is the largest driver of our claim costs at the county. And it's important to see here that in 2023, we had $733,000 in claim costs for workers compensation. 4 million, which is a 100% increase in our claims costs for workers compensation losses. So, while we're seeing our claims frequency go up, we're also seeing our severity go up.

There's a relationship there. Additionally, as you can see in our auto liability, uh, we paid $14,000 in 2023. In 2026, we're projecting at 109,000. So, why is that?

What is going on with the behavior of our drivers behind the wheel? that is requiring us to take a deep dive into that and saying how can we work with departments and identify what those risks are to reduce those losses. It's important to note in 2024 you see this big number for our general liability. That's because we had a

settlement for one of those claims 790,000. General liability claims are very unpredictable. You might have a number of claims that never get paid on. you might have one claim that gets paid on a lot.

Um, as you can see in 2024, we're sitting at zero for 2025, 2026. Hoping that remains the same. But as we ask, what's the story here? We have more employees reporting more injuries that is resulting in more losses for us paying out every year.

Now, keep in mind, these are just medical expenses that are paid to the claim. This is not including lost time, lost resources that departments no longer have with that employee being out. Maybe lost uh time for delay of projects and delay of work, additional costs that an employee or a department might have for bringing in temporary or other hiring uh other employees if others are out. So those diff those numbers are hard to track.

These are easy and we can we can show that there's a significant impact to the county right now and how we can approach our cost savings moving forward. So, let's talk about our goals, what my wish list is and what risk management wants to do moving forward in FY27. Well, the first goal is to add an additional full-time employee. Um, this was recommended by manager Hager and this will allow me to allow the administrative duties of the risk management function at Durham to someone could can manage those while I can actually manage risk.

Um, I'm a one-man shop right now. So, I'm I'm when when they have a risk question, they come to me. And so that includes, as I mentioned earlier, every single contract review. Um I don't have staff to spread it out to departments specifically. Um that

includes all the language and risk can tell you that when someone comes back and they want to make a change to a contract, 99% of the time it involves something involving risk management, insurance, indity, limitations of liability. So I have to review those as well. So, this would allow me to really uh allow me to put those duties onto someone who can can manage that for me because really the demand for the risk management role as a one-man show is outpacing the capacity that I have. Um, we we know that risk management is proactive.

Uh, I do not want the county to approach it from a reactive perspective. That's not risk management. That's just exposure management. And that's just taking care of it as it comes along instead of getting ahead of it and avoiding and and preventing and and mitigating uh the the potential uh claims that we might see. uh we can improve service and

response across the departments now that I can nurture greater relationships to that uh and nurture greater opportunities to have conversations with directors and employees alike to find out what their needs are, what their concerns are, what their what kind of challenges are they dealing with on a day-to-day where we can address safety and we can address risk mitigation uh uniquely to them. Um, and if we look at our comparable agencies, uh, support a larger, they support larger risk teams as well. Our friends over at Durham City have a risk management team of four, uh, with with less population, different services. Um, my friends over at the city of Raleigh, uh, have a risk team of four. Um, and I think Durham is large enough, Durham is worthy enough to have those those risk uh, that risk staff in order to provide those services. I just ask a quick question because in the budget book it says there are seven people in the risk management fund so I'm confused.

>> Yes. No, that is a good question. Uh so uh without understanding a lot of the context uh the risk fund uh does provide the uh funding for positions that are actually housed in the HR department which includes uh three positions in our safety team and two positions in our uh workers compensation team. Um now those positions were priorly were prior housed in the risk management division.

They were prior to my time being here. They were moved to HR. Um it is my opinion that those are native to risk management. Um and those personnel costs stayed in the risk fund. So since you are new coming in um and by the way doing amazing work, do you still believe that those positions are best suited to be in HR versus back

in risk management? >> In my that's why I was confused because I remember when those positions were were in risk management. >> Yes. In my professional opinion, yes.

I believe that those positions are native to risk management and not human resources. Um, and I also believe that because I I feel as though certainly from a workers's compensation standpoint, uh, there's you need a checks and balances opportunity for a department to manage a workers's compensation claim and have a department such as HR to manage if there's an issue with that claim. Right? So right now HR is managing the workers compensation claim and if there's a concern with that the employee has they have to go to the same department to voice that complaint and so >> having that native to risk management allows for that separation >> right >> uh and the administration of that claim where HR can then just be strictly an

advocacy group for the employee uh and where the claim could live out of risk management >> and I I believe the reason that change got made was because we were dealing with staffing issues at that time and so it was like okay let's be creative here and you know we don't have a director >> and so you know I would just say to our deputy manager this may be an opportunity to go back and revisit that based on the fact that now we do have a risk management director so >> certainly a conversation we can have >> okay thank you >> and I appreciate that thank you yeah but yes So to answer your question, we you will see more employees listed under the the risk fund personnel, but uh from the risk functions that I provide, yes, it's just me. Yeah. So um so yeah so and then as we look forward to you know what that FTE's role will be uh certainly would be to help maintain uh and manage the

insurance portfolio work with uh our broker on a regular basis oversee our certificate of insurance process management program um uh manage our recovery efforts. Uh so we certainly want to make sure that we're getting paid if someone hits us like they run into our vehicles. We want to make sure we get that money back, put that into the uh respective budgets of the department that's affected uh and deliver uh just that level of administrative service to the county for our employees. Um as you can see, you know, I' I've highlighted what the proposed salary range would be and what our market comparison is with our uh local uh positions that have positions of similar uh scope and work of what they would do.

um because I think that this would allow us to risk to be proactive. Um that is the way that you can actually make change, right? I think we know that we have to make incremental methodical decisions on how we're going

to make changes over time and uh that this by adding this position would allow me to actually do so as a being a risk manager. And so what do we want to look for in FY27? what is the goals for for me uh and this I think certainly those conversations that we just talked about having those goals would be very much appreciated. Um onboarding that position so we can make sure that we have a um a capacity you know that is that is under control.

Uh find ways to reduce the exposure. You know we reduce cost when we identify the exposure. Those exposures are all over the place and they are unique to every position and we need to understand what those are. Uh and I can't uh you know do that on my own uh without you know the help from this other position and I think that we can really use this to target those high risk trends that we're looking at those

those work comp losses those those auto losses but also strengthen our safety culture. I'm a big subscriber of behavioral safety improvement. I think that we reduce costs, we reduce claims when we improve our behavior. Um, I've always said this, if you are a bad driver in your own car, chances are you're going to be a bad driver in a county vehicle.

Uh, how can we approach uh improving our employees behavior not just on the job, but at home? How can we make sure they're approaching that behavior at home so they're they're healthy enough to come into work? Right? So there's there's a relationship an a direct and an indirect relationship to that.

So you know we have ideas. We want to launch safety engagement initiatives. I plan to have a safety carnival coming up. I will probably be reaching out to you to see if you would be involved in that in some unique ways. We'll have that conversation later. uh but also

quarterly safety challenges. How can we have a rewards and recognition program? Studies do show that that is much more effective than a discipline program. And we want to make our sure our employees are much more aware that uh they can be rewarded for their good behavior.

Um and other ideas that out of the box ideas. Um I've came back to Durham because I like how progressive Durham is. Um, I like that Durham likes to step out of the box and think differently and I agree with that and I think risk management should uh follow that uh that example as well and how we can really get employees to retain this information and think about it all the time. And we've got to be fun.

It's got to be exciting. It's got to be engaging and relatable to our employees. It's one thing to just tell the director, "Here's your losses. " Um, I've been doing this long enough that

that just does not work. So, we really really need to start thinking about how we can engage every employee from every level uh in in this county and and we will see reduction of our of our claims and reduction of our costs. Um, and then finally, we really want to start enhancing how we uh approach our data. um how can we get out to directors real time data and real-time data uh you know dashboard type stuff where they can see what do their departments look like when it comes to their losses.

What do how are their employees reacting to these kinds of things? Um and so that's uh kind of what we have hopefully in line for FY27 and the priorities that we have and how can we continue to build momentum going into FY28 from there. So that's what I've got for you. Um, happy to answer any questions that you might have. >> Commissioner Jacobs, you have any more questions? >> Um, well, again, um, and it's nice to

meet you because, um, you've been here for a year, but I don't think we've >> had the chance to meet you formally, so >> glad you're here. >> Thank you. >> And really appreciate all the work you've been doing. Um, and it's and it is really important because again, we have limited financial resources and we want to be using our money well and we also want to keep people safe.

>> Yes. >> Um, I think I really like um the way you're taking a holistic approach. Uh the one time that I got injured on the job here was one of the bricks outside in front of our building was not even. >> Okay.

>> And I have a habit of injuring my ankle. And so that was one of the times that I twisted my ankle on an a brick that was not in place and ended up in a boot. Um, so I think um I

guess one of the things I wonder about is like I like your idea of engagement because just thinking about that like how can we really get all of the staff engaged in them helping to point out where where they have seen potential risks and certainly general services. Uh but I mean every anybody you know any department um any staff will have suggestions. I'm thinking about EMS >> uh sitting here but you know just getting everyone engaged and and sharing suggestions with you and hopefully you will have more of your team members back with you in the future. Uh but um so that was I I didn't know what you thought thought about that about >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think it's overcoming the uh anxiety of reporting uh information uh you know, and I've seen that certainly throughout my career

that >> um you know, and it's it's hard to gauge where that comes from, but there are employees that might feel anxious to tell me something's going on. And so I think there's got to be that communication that there's confidentiality >> um that there is >> uh that I am open to that communication and it's really also going above beyond just the things that someone sees as wrong. It's those near misses, >> right? We you know in in risk management we think about the butterfly effect, right? So something very very small could eventually lead to something very very catastrophic and that includes reporting hey you know this happened no one got injured >> and you know was it worth reporting? The answer to that is yes because uh you know 10 near misses can lead to a small injury 10 small injuries can lead to a significant injury and and so on the

domino effect or the butterfly effect. And so I think that, you know, that's one thing is really being able to provide employees that opportunity >> and know that risk is interested. You know, know that >> that there is someone out there that >> cares about that and that there's going to be action taken when that information is provided. >> Yeah.

>> So yeah, >> I think what's challenging is that every department has different types of risk. >> Absolutely. For instance, you know, public health, it may be a finger prick. Um, you know, EMS, it may be injuring your back, >> lifting a patient.

Uh, you know, general services, you're using equipment. So, it it's just so diverse. >> Yeah. And the same can be said for our liabilities, right? that that in an injury or damage to a third party that >> there's a lot of um you know a wide broad range of what that liability risk as well that leads to things like

reputational risk >> um you know and other types of losses that you really don't >> think about on the indirect side. Yeah. >> Right. >> Yeah.

And just when I think about our my history here, where we've seen the most claims are things around the jail >> and uh EMS related. Um so I don't are you thinking about like where which areas h are have the most potential and how would you go about for example assessing ris risks in the detention center and things like that? >> Yeah. Uh absolutely the law enforcement side of things is always going to be you know kind of a focal point always. Um you know from from my involvement working you I came from the city of Raleigh and it was very similar you know working I was constantly working with RPD about >> you know the challenges that they had both both from an inside and outside you know we because we have more than just

the jails. got, you know, law enforcement officers >> roaming around, right? And those kinds of things. And they're a lot more active in um you know, calls that are maybe civil minded, right?

They're not pulling over as many vehicles on the side of the road. They're actually getting into homes and they're kind of things like that. So yeah, so absolutely kind of finding out how their approach is. Now, when when we look at the numbers, um, and this was actually a comment that I got more recently from our insurance carrier was the jail does pretty well. You know, we're doing right now, >> you know, >> I don't want to speak for the future, but right now our jails are in good hands and and we're not seeing a lot there. Um so how can the approach then is not necessarily how how we have to fix anything but how can we stay that keep that momentum and even improve it from there because we do see some things

you know from the jail >> and I would say some of that is the investments that we've made because we've been replacing >> all of the grates and the windows for because we had a suicide so you know we we've >> we've made investments in response to situations physically um physical conditions. >> That's good. Um yeah. >> Yeah.

>> Um and I really like your idea of um also a holistic approach with behavior and the rewards and recognition um culture of safety. It makes me think about like it and like the trainings around uh behavior uh to avoid um you know fishing and things. I mean that's definite behavior and then um with our HR process um for our health screening and with our wellness clinic. So there probably opportunities to partner.

>> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely. Yeah.

So, it's been a fun year. I'm looking forward to to many more. >> Thank you so much. >> Yeah.

>> Yeah. And I'm not going to add too much um from what Commissioner Jacobs have saying, but you made risk management sound very exciting. You know, usually it's always okay, you know, like uh but really thinking about the holistic of how of we're protecting our people, we're protecting Durham County, all those things. and in the end looking at ways that we can save revenues money so we can pour back into our residents and things like that.

So >> yeah, no, thank you for that and I agree it's it's revenue and and you know I think about it as an employee satisfaction situation. Well, when you're not injured, >> you're happier, you know, and and how can we just improve the overall employee experience when we're able to reduce those kinds of exposures as well? Yeah,

that's yeah, that's really really good. So, thank you so much for presenting. I'm looking forward to talking with you and meeting with you about okay, how can we better protect Durham County and things like that. So, thank you so much.

>> Can I say a quick word? >> Yes, ma'am. You can. Um, I just want to say that we have um made quite a few additions in the legal department and Ryan has been and I'm proud of all of them, but Ryan has been one of my most exciting addition because of um he said he came from the city of Durham.

He he came from the city of Durham and most recently from Raleigh and then came back to Durham. So, I was very excited to be able to snag him away from Raleigh. and he has brought so many great ideas. His enthusiasm is just like he came to me and said, "Lissa, I have this idea. " And so he is really working hard to make sure that Durham is positioned to be one of the strongest

counties in the state and I I want to do as much as I can to provide the support that he needs. >> Thank you. >> Yeah. Well, I appreciate you saying that.

I made risk management sound fun because sound very >> normally I have to um ask people to get their coffee out you know when when I'm talking about insurance and so uh that I appreciate that comment. >> Yeah, you're making me want to learn more. So >> there you go. >> All right.

Well, thank you for your time today. Thank you. >> So now we have Office of Emergency Services. Come on up. >> And I was wondering how long did you need to present about what 30 minutes 40 30 40

>> I think depending on questions probably 30 minutes is going to be fine. >> Okay cool. Thank you. Well, good afternoon everyone.

Thank you very much for having us here today. My name is Mark Lockhart. I'm the director of the office of emergency services. Uh I'm joined today by uh Tyler Fitz, the chief fire marshall for OES, Seth commands our chief paramedic from EMS, Elizabeth Schrader, our chief emergency manager, and Mark Ferguson, our business operations officer.

So, real briefly, I'll cover the current department highlights and then I know one of the main concerns today is the issue of EMS and I'm going to let Chief Kamanssky uh address some of those more specific areas. Uh and then we'll uh be able to answer any questions that you may have. Uh this has been a very productive uh and busy year for the Office of Emergency Services. uh in our

business operations division. Uh we did add a third mechanic which has gone a long way to helping us out in caring for our fleet and keeping our fleet on the road. Uh we have a new facility or at least new to us that has been upfitted and will be ready for movein on June 1st on East Gear Street. As you recall, the Stone Park Court uh facility is right in the middle of a railroad uh relocation and so we'll need to be out of there by June 15th.

Uh and so that move is again planned for June 1st. We have 11 new ambulances that are due in uh in June and July. Uh Mark Ferguson and some of our EMS team will be going to the factory next week to inspect uh the first part of that uh shipment. Uh and again, those should be coming in in June.

Uh and then some again in July. Uh we worked with the finance department on our ambulance revenue cycle. uh been having some issues completing contracts for payment primarily on the uh Medicare Medicaid side uh but have been able to

get some of those done. We've got one pending with Trillium right now uh that we hope to have resolved very shortly. Uh and then finally implementing a new inventory tracking system that uh will help increase our efficiency in our logistics um function. Emergency management, as you are well aware, had a busy year uh managing both uh tropical storm Chantel last summer and then we had two winter weather events uh over the wintertime. Uh they've also been involved with the joint city county crisis communications plan and getting our countywide radio project uh off the ground and uh thankfully we are nearing the end of that project and about to uh have that fully implemented. EM also conducted a full-scale mass casualty uh drill uh conducted an integrated preparedness planning workshop and then also brought several classes uh into Durham for not only our staff but also for our stakeholders

uh in emergency medical services. Uh this has been extremely busy and it's no secret to anyone that our call volume is going up and our uh resources are being stretched thin. Uh we have completed a gap analysis identifying areas of vulnerability and also developing a plan to assist us in meeting the community need. We've implemented work plans and started the initial phases to integrate uh an upgraded service delivery model using data uh from the system and also developing and implementing a formal tiered EMS uh response system using both basic life support and advanced life support resources. We have 15 new hires who are starting with uh the the department on June 1st and that brings to a total of 43 individuals hired in the current fiscal year. Uh in the fire marshall's office, uh we have our inspectable properties list that has been reviewed, revised, updated, and uh finally, we believe probably the most comprehensive list that the office uh

has had to date. All of our hazardous occupancies and all of our schools have been inspected uh per ordinance and statutory requirement. We've managed to create the formal fire marshal position for the office. We have filled two new positions and implemented our community risk reduction program that included smoke detector installs in the community.

Uh this year uh we have two new uh software platforms that we have utilized or or have implemented in order to utilize to aid both in investigations and inspections uh in the office. Our workload continues to increase across all four divisions uh and business operations. Uh obviously budget is an ongoing uh concern with increased costs and trying to maximize and leverage the most that we can uh for our dollars. Uh our fleet uh is continuing to present us with some challenges uh in that the aging of the fleet uh has become more of an issue. We have

received new vehicles that have been put on the road. they are doing quite well, but we have some vehicles that have been on the road for a little less around a year and already have about 50,000 miles on them. Uh ambulance revenue has been also a bit of a challenge as we've navigated some of those insurance contracts, but we have made progress in that regard uh and are hopeful that with uh our proposed rate increase for the new fiscal year, we'll see an increase uh in our revenue as well. and emergency management staff retention and capacity uh has become a bit of a concern.

Uh we've also seen a decrease in our available grant funding uh in this last year. Uh and EMS the workload as I mentioned earlier the has increased significantly and we're still dealing with limited resources uh to manage those responses. We have an annual increase in call volume of about 2 to 3% each year, but we've averaged right around 21% from FY21 to FY25.

For the last year or two, we have managed uh to hold some lower acuity calls, our alpha level responses. Those again go through a call triage process at the dispatch center and once they are triaged, if they are in an alpha level, uh they may be held. Right now we are averaging about 11% of our calls being held uh each day and uh those calls are answered then once units become available and can respond. We do that so that we can keep units available to handle our higher acuity or life-threatening emergency calls.

In looking at the data that we've generated over this last uh year to twoyear cycle, um we have seen where the call volume in the system exceeds the number of available units 16 hours out of the day. Uh obviously that's an indicator that the system is stressed. It is overburdened and for those 16 hours a day, it's a safe bet that we are holding those alpha level calls.

in the fire marshall area. Uh staffing has been the primary challenge for us. We have those two new positions that we just filled. That's the good news.

Uh the bad news is that they were filled from internal personnel. So we now still have two vacancies that are available and we'll be working to fill those uh as quickly as we can. On the recommended budget, uh manager Hager has recommended the addition of 10 full-time equivalents uh to EMS. uh five replacement ambulances and one expansion or new ambulance and then one uh replacement SUV or quick response vehicle. Uh we are exploring right now a new ambulance platform that will be a little less expensive about $40,000 roughly in savings and also a 12 to 14month delivery versus the current 30 to 36-month delivery that we've been dealing with since 2021 I believe.

and I'm going to turn it over to Chief Kamansky to talk about some of the challenges facing EMS. >> Thank you, Director Alikart. How's everybody doing today? >> Um, so to talk through some of the challenges we've identified over this past year, um, as we reviewed and did our gap analysis, we identified that the deployment model for Durham County EMS is about 10 years old in terms of units on the streets versus the call volume.

Um FY26 was the first year that there were new FTEEs added since FY28 uh 2018. Um and uh there had not been an ambulance added to the street since 10 years ago or maybe even a little bit longer. Compensa compensation still continues to be a little bit of a challenge for us when we evaluate our our competition and our surrounding counties. Uh and limited depth to our bench also is a challenge for us. We do not overhire and so truly it is a one-to-one relationship in terms of personnel to seats uh in in a shift. Um our vehicles historically have been taking 36 months to build and get delivery um which obviously has had

challenges for for the the ability for our units to respond to calls. Uh and there is no currently a a reliable reserve fleet. Um, and so, uh, when we have multiple units, uh, out of service because of the decreased reliability and they're at dealerships, we have a, uh, difficult time keeping units on the road. Uh, as we mentioned, call volume continues to rise both in number of calls, uh, as well as in, uh, the intensity of those calls, meaning those hours of the day where those calls are occurring.

We have identified uh demand hours uh related to the call volume growth. But but we haven't just sat there to allow problems to fester. We've we've worked on solutions. Uh I mentioned that gap analysis uh and initiated uh our tiered response uh to that program.

Historically, uh Durham County as well as North Carolina as a whole has placed emphasis on paramedic only ambulances. Um we have moved into an environment where we are now looking at non-paramedic units. uh and and on every shift you usually see now two to three of those non-p paramedic ambulance

and as we continue to explore those delivery models that will expand. Um we have worked through some of our application and hiring process which allow us to explore greater numbers of candidates. Um we've interviewed close to 400 people uh this year alone um and onboarded quite a few. Um so we are still maintaining standards.

We're not just hiring anybody, but we are making sure that we are evaluating all of the candidates that are out there that are available for us to interview. Um, as mentioned, we added that third mechanic, which has helped tremendously in uh keeping ambulance on the road and that uh evaluating that different model of ambulance uh short delivery, less expensive, maintains the same standards both safety and environmentally, and uh a quicker delivery to us is a big deal. Um again, we evaluate uh alternate response options. We're looking at different ways to get patients uh the help they need and get those patients to the hospitals. uh actively reviewing our call volume uh in terms of response

plans uh using a deep dive to our data where we are looking at the 911 dispatch data versus the outcome data from the hospitals and evaluating which of those units can receive non-paramedics, which need a paramedic, which need a first responder, and which calls really do need lights and sirens and which don't. and we are building those response plans in partnership with our first responder agencies and 911 centers uh to make sure that we have the right resource going to that right patient at the right time. So some additional topics for discussion. We have uh the system as mentioned is overloaded and and quite frankly not sustainable as it continues to move forward.

Increased call holding is not just in numbers of calls that are held but also in duration. Um higher staff burnout is a concern for us. Uh you know our folks are on the streets and gone for pretty much the entire 12 hours running from call to call to call. Uh that will result in burnout. Uh and then reduced unit reliability. And so that

unit reliability if you look at that uh that chart shows the uh increase in the percent of volume held uh or the numbers of volume held versus the call volume in general. And so it is a pretty substantial increase in just a few years. Um and and we are no longer just holding lower priority calls. We are starting to get into periods of time where we're holding mid-priority calls.

We have not gotten to a time where we had to evaluate holding highest priority of calls or critical naturatured calls. But but all calls are on the table at this point because of the unit availability. As we look at the uh response times, I wanted to share that there's this new phase of response continuum. Um, and so it's that calls held period.

And so from the time you hang up the phone with 911 to the time an ambulance is dispatched, as mentioned, we have greater quantity and duration of those calls that are held. What this chart shows is that each year that time duration is increasing in each of those categories. And we have calls that are being held sometimes

greater than an hour, sometimes greater than two hours, sometimes greater than three. Um, and uh, you know, again, we're hitting in those mid-priority calls for some of our Charlie level responses. Um, and so all of this requires active management of our system. And in order to do that, we've we've essentially taken our shift commander off of the streets from supervising our personnel and have them actively watching the the the computer system.

And so they are managing the calls in real time. Uh we did put a request in this year for for a uh a position to actively manage the calls, especially during those demand hours. Um, but this is something that now has become an ancillary responsibility of one of our frontline responders. >> I have a quick question.

Yes, ma'am. How does when the fire department responds to an AMS call factor into all of this? >> So, on a lower priority calls, the fire department is not responding. Um, on our mid to higher priority calls, they are responding. Um,

in the cases of a Charlie level call, which is our true midlevel response, they may be on scene with that patient for a longer period of time um until we can get an ambulance over to them. Is there any way that we have some way of kind of showing that like merging your data with the fire department data so we can actually see what is happening in terms of who was responding when and like the whole because it's it it I think it's very confusing because on one hand you can think oh no there is no response at all when sometimes there is but it's just not EMS until you don't understand what I'm saying like I don't know if if in the future is there some way to show this whole big picture of how we are not saying it is I mean just showing what is happening right now

in Durham >> sure we we absolutely can work on that um you know and even in in the fire departments there is some prioritization going on where if the first due company is no longer longer in their primary area on these Charlie level responses. The engine company's not crossing over into another district. And so there are times where you will get a first responder and there are times you will not get a first responder. And so there the this impact of this demand is is not just an EMS.

This is public safetywide. um we feel it more significantly because we have far less units than a single jurisdictional area of Durham City or uh the Baham area for example where they have far more utilization of resources. So I did want to share um as I mentioned looking at the intensity uh on this on this graph the the bars are reflecting the calls per hour per day. The lines that are crossing over are uh a combination of our currently staffed model uh what the recommended budget

will satisfy uh what would happen if we were to add an additional peak unit to that and then what an additional two units would add to that. Um our plan would be for those uh units that we would receive, we would split them into peak units to put them in the appropriately demanded areas uh of the hours of the day. um anytime that line crosses below one of the the bar graph lines, we are less units than calls on the board. Um and so um none of these solutions quite frankly fix the problem, but some of these solutions make it a lot better.

Um the the uh ask that we made originally uh we assessed would drop from 16 hours a day to 5 hours of the day where we had less units um than calls. So this is this is just some of the data work that we did with our gap analysis to understand truly where our hours of the day were impacted and where that demand truly is needed. So again related to this chart the plus

one full staffed or the plus one peak staffed what what is the cost of those? >> So the plus one full staff would have been double of what we've asked what we were recommended for. So that would have added two new ambulance expansions, 20 FTEEs, and then um we would have been working to find ambulances that were mechanically sound from the the units that we would be cycling out to retain to put front line or keep front line to add four peak units throughout the course of the day. m.

m. spread on 12-h hour shifts. 6 to double >> I believe so. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> And so compensation I know that's something that we speak about uh

year-over-year. Um, you know, while while the compensation and benefits are really great in Durham, um, it does remain lower than some of our more competitive counties, uh, and we see people going to those counties. Um, for those areas in Durham that in the region that we are, uh, great we we have a stronger compensation plan. Um, we are noticeably seeing those employees or candidates going to those slower, less demand agencies because of the impacts that it has on on the staff.

Um, most recently we lost a a really great paramedic candidate who ended up going to one of our neighboring counties because the call volume quite frankly is far less. Uh, it's much easier in their body in their home life. Their days off are much easier to less recovery. Um, and uh, quite honestly, it was an incredibly close pay offer that that he was made by comparison. >> I just want to make sure I'm reading this right. It says so when it says started 30 and then completed 20 29 I'm just trying to make

sure I understand what that's trying to com the salary range. >> So no that is our onboarding process and so I we wanted to be able to reflect how many uh employees we've hired and completed our academy and hiring process uh year-over-year. And so reflecting this year uh with the 15 additional that we have starting in June um we will be hiring 43 this year and uh hopefully all of those will complete our academy. Um again we will we are import it's important to maintain those standards.

3% vacancy rate um which is substantially better than it's been in many years. Um and so we've made a lot of effort to ensure that we are hiring people, we are accessing the the areas where we can recruit from uh and making sure that this is the place that people want to make their careers. >> So what's the starting pay for a EMS? >> So for uh an EMT in Durham County, it's

90. Uh it's 2409 for an AMT and 2925 for paramedics. 70 less for paramedics. I guess my question would be for um deputy county manager. Uh, if you could provide us with information, what would it what would be the cost, estimated cost to get our salaries to be competitive for the positions that we currently have plus the 10 additional that are, you know, included in the manager's recommended budget because, you know, if we expect to the whole goal is to get the positions filled. So if we're not going to be successful

in actually filling the positions, then we're not going to be able to address the the problem that we have. >> We can pull it together that information for you. >> And that's what we got. >> All right.

Thank you, Chief. Uh I know we spent quite a bit of time on EMS, but obviously business operations, fire marshall, and emergency management are here as well. if you all have any questions for us about any one of those areas. >> Yeah, I'm just going to ask this quick question then I'll turn it over to my colleagues.

I wanted to know of the you 400 people applied or interviewed, right? And 43 got accepted. I wanted to know about okay what does it take the educational requirements how we are helping with this pipeline of people wanting to do EMT paramedic you know what is this started in high school do they have to go to Durham Tech like what

are the educational requirements so all of those programs are available through the community college system um additionally we've worked with our employees internally for a pathway way to to promote up through the ranks uh EMT, AMT, and paramedic by offering some semblance of a a flexible schedule. The demand, especially for paramedic school, is is incredible. Um 4 days a week, many clinicals and so on. Um and so they do that in a 10-month period.

And so realistically, our schedule would not allow for them to our traditional schedule would not allow them for to go to school. And so we've worked with any of our employees going to paramedic school to provide that flexible schedule so we can kind of balance that. Um there are a lot of municipalities looking at internal paramedic programs, but there is a pretty significant cost to doing that, especially with the staffing model we currently have. Um a lot of the applicants that do apply are not certified yet. They do not have their credential and their hopes so that we would be able to provide that for

them. Uh we are just not in that place today. Um and so we do refer them out to the community colleges for those programs. Uh we do have a good relationship with Durham Tech.

>> Yeah. And thinking about Durham public schools and their CTE program and trying to get young people to go to, you know, become EMTs, paramedics, AMTs, etc. And what we will have to do at that level to help them with the pipeline, things like that. So, thank you so much.

And I think city of medicine they have is it the ENT program? >> Yes ma'am. >> Okay. So that's a fantastic pipeline.

Are you working with city of medicine? >> We have we've been to their career day uh that they do each year and then we have actually hired city medicine graduates in the past. >> Okay. Awesome. thinking about maybe at other schools because I know the city of medicine is small compared to other um like the larger comprehensive high

schools just thinking how do we get more young people to start thinking about this as a career. So thank you and I'll turn it over to my colleagues if you have any more questions. >> Director Lockhart. >> Yes sir.

>> So a number of weeks ago I asked for an update regarding the the fire marshall and said that there some information that was forthcoming. Do you have an update today >> on are you referring to the positions? >> Yes. >> Yes sir.

So we the two positions that we were given a year ago uh were created uh we underwent recruitment for that and those positions have been filled by internal candidates. Those were assistant fire marshall 2 positions. Uh they've been filled by internal candidates which has now given us two vacancies at the assistant fire marshall one level. And so we're in the process of uh submitting the information for the hiring freeze exemption and we'll then move forward with recruitment for those two positions. >> Thank you. >> U well I just want to say thank you so

much for this presentation and for the work you do. Um, and the great job, fire marshall, for completing all of the schools inspections and catching up on that is fantastic. Um, and also the data that you have provided um, here in the report but in our budget book and the companion document. Um this is very alarming.

The the response times, the call volumes is very very concerning. And you know, we talked about this at joint city county planning committee, but this data absolutely needs to be connected to decisions that are made about resonings. It is irresponsible to not look at this information and not

include it in the assessment. And we also we really need you all to come up with some way of somehow I know you said that it's hard because there aren't standards but we really need to understand that with increased population growth how to connect the number of people to the response time call volume you know number of staff um and vehicles and buildings because there is a concrete number. You know, the Durham City Council, they have their budget office do a costbenefit analysis of what will be the impact to the city of Durham's budget with a resoning application. There must be there must be

a number that is associated with resonings also about the equivalent cost impact to Durham County government EMS for that same project. And you know, I have to say that I think that, you know, you're doing this in 10 years. We haven't done the kinds of upgrades and things like that, but we also haven't been engaging in that type of assessment process. And it has not been included in the, you know, again, the due diligence around the costs of growth and development.

And so we we ha have to be able to provide proper EMS response. That that that chart you showed us that some people are waiting literally for 3 hours. I just can't even imagine how horrifying that would be if you're somebody who's

called 911 and you're literally waiting, you know, one, two, three hours to get a call back or get somebody to come. because for you in that moment that is your you know moment of need um even though I know there's some process of assessing the risk still um that is is really really concerning and we we really have to address this. Um >> we do agree it's concerning and alarming for us as well. Um and and we when we did submit on the one case we were consulted on, we did provide a financial number um related to personnel costs and equipment costs and so on.

The one item that was not submitted for was for the facilities. We don't have any position currently on the east side of the county in terms of a county EMS station. And that is what we told them that we were not able to provide an update in terms of the number of facilities we would need because of the difference in the

way the fire department deploys compared to an EMS department deploy uh deploys resources. But we did provide a financial number to the planning department in terms of that increased cost over that 10-year period for that case. Well, I hope that we can look at what people are doing in other places and try to come do the best we can. And I know um Chief Kamanssky, you also said that there are no national um standards about some of these issues like what is considered a target response time.

But, you know, if we it would be good to come up with some type of a benchmark or a standard as best we can. >> Often communities uh especially those with contracts in place to find those numbers in those contracts. Um the fire department does have specific standards for specifically structure fire responses and that is where it differs.

There is not a standard across communities for medical response time and in actuality we look more at the outcomes of those patients and how they how they did at the hospitals and there just like an emergency department will triage patients and unfortunately find yourself sitting in an ER waiting room for a very extended period of time. We have to prioritize patients in the streets in the situation in the case of of how we are how we are at demand uh in peak times in EMS as well. Commissioner Jacobs, I uh Dwayne Brenson, assistant county manager. Do want to emphasize that while we're we're waiting on staffing, we're waiting on ambulances, but Mark and I talk a lot about options for improving the situation. Uh there are a number of options that we're working through, some of them better than others. Um but we are actively looking at options, looking at best practices across the nation and

seeing how we can improve things now while we're waiting on staffing models, while we're waiting on the tiered system, while we're waiting on ambulances. I Mark knows I I'm a a huge fan of getting somebody to the scene quickly, whether that is an ambulance or not, right? having a quick response vehicle get to the scene. Uh having a scooter get to the scene doesn't matter to me.

Get getting somebody to the scene quickly is a priority for us. And I I you know have personal experiences, but uh when I was in a dire situation with my 2-year-old little girl who was having a food allergy uh situation there, my wife's a pharmacist. All I wanted at that point was to get a paramedic to the scene, right? Because we were too emotional. So, I I understand that comment. Uh I I think when we when we consider that uh the advantage of getting somebody to a scene with a 10-minute bag who can provide basic care

until an ambulance can get there, I think that's powerful. You know, Mark and I, we had a one-on-one last week, and there are a uh a s a significant number of our calls, a significant number of our responses that don't result in a transport. We don't need an ambulance for was it 42% of our calls that don't result they don't result in a transport. So, if we can figure out ways to get to the scene and provide uh 105 minute care or if it's a situation that doesn't it's a treat to no transport, right?

Requires very little care. We're looking at those things. Those are on our radar and hopefully those sorts of things will provide a more immediate impact on response time and getting somebody out there to help these folks even if they don't need to be transported. So, we are actively looking at half a dozen ideas at at this very moment right now

in addition to staffing and ambulances. >> Well, I really appreciate that because I think that really makes sense. you know, how can we be creative and um you know, innovative at this point? Because you're right, it's just people want somebody there.

Um and having a triage approach that that makes sense. Could you explain because you mentioned this, I guess, when you said non-paramed ambulance. So could you could you talk a little bit more about like what does that look like and what are people doing in other places around that? >> Sure.

So the there are three levels of credential. There's the EMT which is our basic level provider. There's the AMT which an advanced EMT which has a little bit more uh ability certain IVs, drugs, medications. Uh and then the paramedic which is the highest level credential that we have. Um, and so, uh, again,

historically in North Carolina, almost exclusively, paramedic ambulances are on the road. Um, sometimes with a partner who is an EMT, uh, sometimes double medic. Um, and the reality is is that there just aren't as enough paramedics to continue to do that in the way communities have grown. And so moving to a tiered system, a formalized tiered system where we have EMT EMT ambulances or EMTAM ambulances and then paramedic level ambulances um or some semblance of uh an EMT ambulance and a paramedic and a QRV.

Um being able to uh supplement that. Um all those are are options that many other communities use. Um and so uh you know if you look at larger cities, New York City for example, um you had basic ambulances and you had paramedic ambulances and the EMTs went to certain call types, paramedics went to certain call types. Um, and that's part of what we did, the reason we did this recent response plan modernization where we are evaluating which of those calls could

receive safely EMTON or AMT EMT uh, ambulances versus paramedic ambulances so that we can reserve those paramedic ambulances or paramedic resources for the more critical nature calls, the higher acuity calls. And then following up with um what assistant county manager Bris Princeton said, is there a model where the EMT may not even be in an ambulance but in a different kind of vehicle? So >> if they're if they're just, you know, trying to get there quickly and want to stabilize or it's not an as urgent or whatever, I I don't know what how to say it, but is there a model that even looks at that like a van rather than >> So we we cannot transport outside of an ambulance, but for those calls that we are not transporting um and those are hard to identify through the 911 calls, but we can work on those characteristics. Um, we can have paramedic levels, paramedics in fly cars

or QRVS, the quick response vehicles or EMTs even. And there's three approaches to it. There's either focusing on those high acuity calls where you have a paramedic that arrives to the most critical nature calls as quickly as possible. You have EMT, AMT or paramedic level uh, fly cars or QRVS that respond to lift assist or some of these small the lower priority calls potentially to provide the services.

they're not going to transport likely and and do the refusal. Uh and then there's the true tiered gold standard model where you have uh AMT, EMT, ambulances and paramedics and cars. They respond together if the paramedic is needed. They drive the SUV to the hospital and the ambulance returns to service as quickly as possible. The paramedic remains to complete the paperwork and it just turns the hospital time over a lot quicker for that ambulance. um that middle one which is the gold standard obviously doesn't have it's not in lie of it's an adjacent two um and so it does

require some additional staffing for that and which is why we're looking at some of the alternative options maybe some of the lower priority calls or lift assists or or the paramedics and QRVS to respond uh and take the burden off the fire departments >> and I think it it's important to also point out to you that that's when the fire department is going those units are arriving with either EMT or AMT staff and equipment. >> So, I just want to say thank you for this presentation. Um, when we get emails, we there's I put them in like um tranches. We get the emails around taxes.

Now, it's data centers and it's EMS. The the response times have EMS. And I know you all are working really really hard and we just have to figure out how do we get this straight because so many you know we're just growing so fast and all these new neighborhoods that are sprouting out particularly in southeastern Durham County that's where

I live and all these new homes and um you know trying to make sure we have you know EMS to go out and service. So thank you so much for this and um that's all we have. So, I guess we're just gonna have to go into discussion about it. So, thank you.

>> Thank you. >> All right. Now, we're at the end of our agenda. It's now board discussion.

I don't know if we need to discuss anything. My colleagues, I guess one I guess there were a few follow-up items from today. Um I just want to make sure maybe anyone who um you know just just to follow up go over some of the things that we had mentioned today. I mean one was we just came up was about the increased what would be the cost to

bring our compensation up to the fact up to the being competitive because it was noted that we're also losing people so it's impacting retention as well as hiring. Um so that was one >> I have that on my list. >> Okay. I'm just that just related to the budget right for this year.

Um, just thinking about that and I don't know if anyone else had any other followup, but I know you just have you've been busy teaching. >> So, yes, I apologize for my my tardiness today. I had other uh obligations, but I would like to uh agree with a lot of comments that you made with regards to EMS and the importance of uh um that information being relayed in some of the development projects and how important that is particularly as we grow um that we sort of keep pace with our our growth uh with our infrastructure which is important uh to me. One of the things that uh I didn't hear from the last briefing with respect to operational

sort of gaps, I don't want to be lost on anyone that EMS works crossjurisdictionally and so Wake County, Orange County, Person County, and some of the other sort of uh counties in this area worked with us extensively on our response times. uh Director Lockheart and myself were part of a discussion with a representative who who thought uh that it was important enough to come over to Dorma County to discuss uh us actually helping them and uh being very grateful for the support that we provide. So even in our deficiencies, we're able to help some of our neighboring uh counties. And so, uh, this be one of the things that we probably should look a little closer at to ensure that, uh, our infrastructure needs keeps pace with the growth here in Durham County. I will say this, um, Commissioner Jacobs, I really like what you said about when these resoning cases go before the city council having this information go

to to them because we're building all these developments, but then it's the strain of providing the services and there's really no discussion around that. , you need the services to go along with them and it is causing a strain on our EMS. So I don't know how that information can be a part of those presentations, things like that. Yeah, I think what we what we talked about at Joint City County last meeting was just making sure that they are included in the report that goes to both the planning commission and then to the um city council. um because we have a joint we have a joint department and um so we should have our impacts included as well and you know I've I've

also asked I would also like to request um deputy manager that we get at least some type of um narrative I have this I asked for this at the last joint city county it may be more in a narrative form, but um also make sure that our open space and real estate and um soil and water and um has um departments also review impacts because um of our farmland investments and our and our open space, you know, those types of investments that we've made. making sure that um there at least is some assessment um that that is there they have the opportunity to at least review formally review um resonings that um impact you know changes to the urban growth

boundary >> specifically >> we'll follow up with planning and those departments as well >> um but the EMS should be with any type of resonings any type of resonings because I think that's why we see the situation that we're in right now. We have not been doing that. Um the other thing I was going to ask is that our next budget work session we're focusing on justice services and public schools and I forget what else do you remember? >> I think that was >> that was it.

>> Enter fund. Sewer utility fund >> and what else? >> Sewer utility fund. >> Okay. No enterprise fund >> and maybe we can all think about what other areas or um presentations that we information that we want. If we could email the county manager and our budget director what other information that we would

like to have presentations on in the future budget work sessions. Um, if we could do that at least over the next day or two, >> the next day or two it we'd like to give the departments enough time to respond and develop presentations as y'all request. So >> yes, >> by Thursday would be great so we could get it out before the weekend to let departments know next week on May the 28th, potentially June the 2nd. >> Okay.

And I also would say like questions that we have because I know I already emailed >> sent questions to us and we will route them to the right people or answer them ourselves. >> I do want to point out on the that question about EMS salaries is a is a big question because we'll turn around and ask um our HR department to do some work. But do we just want to compare against neighboring counties that are pulling people away? Do we want to compare against Meckllinmberg County and some other counties? Do we want to include pay the full pay package health benefits 401k that's uh 5% there there

there are different ways to think about pay and support for employees and just going is it just salary and then there's um compression issues and issues with other pay public safety folks once you go down that road I understand the question's reasonable but the question becomes really complicated when experts get in there and go what exactly are we asking for? So, we'll try to work some of that out, but it may or may not be as specific as you all want. We shall see. Or it may take a little longer than getting back to you in two days with an answer to that.

>> Yeah, I think most likely it'll be next week. >> Okay, that's fine. That's fine. Um, I also wanted to point out that pages um we're missing some pages in the budget book. 8 the the um tax administration

in my book and ends with um let's see oh actually I do sorry okay sorry take that back I just I see it's just just let us know if you need us to print any we can. >> I just saw it >> as well. The document is linked probably in 75 different places. >> So if you are missing something, it should always be available.

>> I just found that >> but let us know if we can print that. >> Okay. Thank you. And could you send us a link to the budget comments that we have gotten from the survey or you've had some way for people to provide comments online, right?

>> Certainly, we uh I think the last time we updated and attached it was to the manager's recommended budget, which may have been last Monday. >> Okay. >> But we can resend that. We can uh rerun an update and send you the latest comments. Okay.

>> Um and get that to you um probably today. >> Okay. Great. Thank you so much.

>> All right. So, I think that's it. Okay. m. So, thanks everybody. >> Thank you all.