The Board of Commissioners held a work session on June 9, 2026, at 5:30 PM to review the FY2025 audit, discuss data center regulations, hear public testimony on justice-impacted protections, examine public safety salary competitiveness, consider FIFA World Cup programming, and explore a local homestead option sales tax. No formal votes were taken; discussions will inform the June 16 board meeting.
Is now called to order. The time is 5 30 p.m. And we will get started. Board members, are there any preliminary items for the next BLC meeting that you would like to discuss? I'll know Commissioner Hamburg and Commissioner Davis. Come on, look. Again, are there any preliminary items for the June 16, 2026 board meeting that you guys would like to discuss at this time? Okay. All right, we'll move on to our items the item three agenda items. Our first one will be the FY2025 audit presentation by Meredith Lipson. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. I want to apologize for last month's skipping out real quick there, had a family emergency, but I appreciate you having me back. Again, I'm here to present the fiscal year 2025 audit for the county. We do have a PowerPoint presentation. I'll go through. Just a quick run through of what we'll talk about, the engagement team, the overview of the audit opinion, the statements and footnotes, and the compliance reports. There are certain things we're required to communicate to you all as auditors. Talk about some financial trends and then some of the accounting recommendations that we have as a result of our audit. First off, again, my Meredith Lipson, I'm the partner in charge of the annual audit. Ryan Jones, also a partner, works on the audit with me. And then we also have an additional partner that served as a quality assurance partner along with an engagement manager and several team members. Molden and Jenkins does an enormous amount of governmental auditing all across the state, all across the Southeast. We now have 19 offices in eight states, and so we're very proud of the practice that we have for our governmental auditing and feel that we can bring a lot of information to you all because of our experience in June said. Most important thing, our audit opinion. We did issue well, first off, our responsibilities as part of as auditors are to perform the audit in accordance with government, excuse me, generally accepted auditing standards and government auditing standards. The objective is to provide reasonable but not absolute assurance that the basic financial statements are free from material misstatement. And the rest the financial statements as always are the responsibility of county's management, and our responsibility is to express an opinion based on our audit procedures. We did issue an unmodified clean opinion on the financial statements. So let's talk about the financial statements and the footnotes first off. Total assets, um, deferred outflows of resources increased from approximately approximately 1.35 billion to approximately 1.382 billion over the previous fiscal year. Um there were increases in both capital and in your um cash and cash equivalents for the fiscal year uh 25. Your liabilities and deferred inflows decreased from approximately 762 million to approximately 741 million. The majority of that decrease was due to decreases in your pension and OPEB liabilities. Those um fluctuate year to year depending on actuarial assumptions and market returns. The county's net position increased by approximately uh 57 million from the prior year's restated balance of 579 million. Um the end of the year net position totaled approximately 636 million. Um that amount, 321 million of the county's net position is restricted by outside um by outside parties, meaning that the special purpose local options sales tax funds, those are restricted. A lot of the special revenue funds that you have, those amounts are restricted as well. So that's not a that's not a liquid asset, of course. That's the property and equipment and furniture infrastructure and those items. Your unrestricted net position at June 30, 2025 is a deficit of approximately 443 million. However, that 400 for 443 million dollar deficit, it is a deficit because of your net pension liability and your net OPEB liability. Those amounts are significant. They are significant for every government we work with, and many times because of the significance of those liabilities, it dips your net position down into a negative amount. I think the thing that you all should be most be focused on, we'll talk about in a minute is your general fund. What we've just talked about encompasses all your funds together and also includes those pension and OPEB liabilities. So when we look at the operations of the county as a whole, your total program revenues increased from approximately 95 million to 120 million. That increase was approximately 26% and was the result of a number of different grant revenues that were higher than they had been in the previous year. Your total program expenses increased from approximately $451 million to $480 million, about a 6% increase.