Good afternoon and welcome to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors Personnel Administration and Legislation Committee meeting from Monday, November the 20th, excuse me, November the 17th, 2025.

May I have roll call, please.

Supervisor Coordinato pass.

Present.

Supervisor Town.

Present.

We have a quorum.

Thank you.

The clerk want to make some special announcement about our new format.

For remote participation, please continue to use the raise hand function and the clerk will unmute you when it's your turn to speak for in-person participation.

Please fill out a speaker card in the front and hand it to the clerk.

Thank you.

And we are using MS team, not Zoom as our platform today.

So let's start with the federal legislation update, and the government is reopened, right?

Government is reopened.

Good afternoon.

You've got Emily Bachetasilva here and John Assini.

Yes, uh the House and Senate are both back in session.

The Senate will be in Tuesday through Thursday this week, and the House will be in session uh this evening through Friday.

And then of course they'll both recess um for Thanksgiving, but they're both back this week.

Um, and again, I mean, you all know it was the longest government shutdown in US history.

Um, came to an end last Wednesday night.

Um, you know, I think kind of the the big news associated with it is um, you know, the CR runs through January 30th, uh, but it also uh contained a three-bill minibus providing uh full year appropriations for agriculture, uh, military construction, veterans' affairs, and the legislative branch, um, and a guaranteed Senate vote in December on legislation to extend ACA premium subsidies.

You know, on the Agaprobes front, I know we talked about this last week, but you know, it does include uh a full year of funding for both SNAP and WIC nutrition programs.

Um, you know, one of the things that we talked about kind of throughout the shutdown was that we kept hearing that there was this desire to get kind of the full year FY26 appropriations bills done once they got out of the shutdown.

And um the Senate really does seem to be focused on that.

And so I'll turn it to John now, who can kind of talk about what the Senate is going to be focused on, but they're already trying to tee up kind of the next what they're calling a minibus of appropriations bills that can move through the Senate to kind of force the House to negotiate and really kind of take those Senate bills.

But I'll turn it over to John to talk about kind of those those next bills.

Sure.

Uh so the Senate did pass the three-bill minibus uh to Emily's point.

And now Senate Republicans in particular are looking to continue the momentum on four or five additional bills.

This is the remainder of the appropriations bills that pass out of the appropriations committee full committee level.

Um, all five of these pass with wide bipartisan margins, and this is seen as kind of a response to the action that has been taken on the House level.

Um, of course, the House bills um fund agencies in a significantly lower level with the exception of defense to that of the Senate.

So this is kind of their attempt um to combat the lower funding levels that were established by the House.

So the next five bills that we could see action are defense, labor age, THUD, CJS, and interior environment.

Um now the House or the Senate rather, Republicans sent a hotline to get unanimous consent on their side.

Um that would allow for quick consideration of this five-bill minibus.

Um, they have not yet done this on the Democratic side.

Democrats, by and large, or I won't say by and large, there's a handful of Democrats that are going to oppose the hotline or likely to oppose the hotline to get action on this um sometime this week because they're still annoyed by the eight Senate Democrats that voted to reopen the government last week.

So in sort of this intra-party fight, they are withholding their support for unanimous consent agreement to move forward on the five-bill minibus.

Um so we likely won't see action on that this week.

Of course, they're out next week, so um action on the minibus could take place in December at the earliest.

But also the government is open until January 30th.

So there is a bit of time to get action on the FY26 bills before they move on to other pieces of legislation.

The other piece of the other bill that has not yet seen action on the Senate level is of course the SFOPS, which is a Senate foreign-ops bill that has not passed on the committee level, the Homeland Security Bill, which funds ICE and CBP that has not seen action at the committee level and the energy and water bill, which funds the Army Corps piece of the Army Corps projects.

So those three bills will likely see action last.

But there's still ongoing conversations about passing a Senate bill for those initial five pieces of legislation that will also include ear likely earmarks for those five bills, but only the Senate earmarks.

If they do want to pass sort of the total five-year bills, they will have to ultimately be conference at an informal or formal level, but the House that will incorporate both the Senate earmarks and the House earmarks, very similar to what we saw with the three bill minibus that passed along with the CR last week.

And one thing I want to mention as far as the labor H bill, I mean again, in terms of kind of our priorities, we're focused on getting Transportation HUD and Labor H, you know, across the finish line.

I know one of the programs, I mean there are many, but one of the programs we have talked about is LIHEAP.

And again, there was no funding to states.

Normally it goes out in November, but because of the shutdown, that funding did not flow.

So just one quick note for you guys as far as LIHEAP, there's a bipartisan group of senators that sent a letter to HHS Secretary Kennedy on Friday requesting that the department quickly release kind of the highest amount of LIHEAP funding available.

And then as far as the actual House and Senate FY26 bills, they both have an increase in funding over current levels.

So I believe the House bill was at uh just a little bit north of $4 billion, and the Senate, well, the same.

The Senate was $4,045,000, and the uh the House, I believe, was $4,035.

So right about the same levels.

Um I know that there was some concern because the president's budget request would have zeroed out that program.

Just want you guys to know that both bills uh have even a slight increase over current levels.