This meeting, held on May 5, 2026, was the second work session for the FY2027 operating budget. The council reviewed budgets for Circuit Court, Police, Fire and Rescue, Corrections, Planning and Zoning, Public Works, General Services, Inspections, Soil Conservation, Recreation and Parks, Transportation, Health, and Social Services. Discussions focused on workload increases, staffing, chargebacks, and impacts of state and federal policy changes.
This webinar is being recorded and summarized. Good morning. This is the council's second FY 2027 operating budget work session. The proceeding this morning is a hybrid meeting, which is being conducted in person and via WebEx teleconference. The public may view through live stream available through the county council website. At this moment, I'm going to do a roll call to council members. Ms. Young? Here. Ms. Walsh. Here. Mr. Youngman. Here. And Dr. Jones will be joining us later. Our agenda today includes the following departments for their FY2027 operating budget. Circuit court, police, fire and rescue, corrections, planning and zoning, public works, general services, inspections, licenses, and permits, soil conservation, recreation and parks, transportation, health department, and social services. So to do all that, we're gonna proceed with our agenda. First up, we have our circuit court. Please join us. Welcome, welcome, Judge Docker. What should welcome Jennifer? Good morning. Good morning. If you just want to start with a brief, you know, one to two minute overview how caseloads are going, how um you're responding to to the world in 2026. Sure. Um as you all know, we are the main court, the trial court of general jurisdiction. We only hear these serious matters between all jury trials, family law cases, complex civil uh litigation cases, serious criminal cases. We have um had a number of what I call highlights. Uh we've had a number of jury trials, we've had um our murder trials have increased. We currently actually have 15 pending murder trials and five pending attempted murder trials, and those cases are normally specially assigned to to judges. Uh and that that includes uh all of the other complex civil litigation cases that we what that we specially assign. We try to keep the what we call the normal maintenance of effort budget. However, uh we have had the increases. Our jury trials for this fiscal year alone, we've had 52 jury trials year to date. Last fiscal year we had 69 jury trials, 50 of which were criminal, 19 were civil. We have five judges that handle these matters in addition to three magistrates that handle our juvenile and family law matters. So we've seen an increase of our of our workload, so we also use senior or retired judges to us to assist us. So when we've looked at and analyzed our our work, our workload, we realized we need another court reporter. And the county exec approved that to start in January. As I said, we have five judges and three magistrates. We have five and the senior judges. We all sit pretty much on a daily basis. So we have five full-time court reporters. We had three contingent court reporters, now we have two. So what we've done is we've cross-trained our some of our staff members to help assist, but that takes away from their normal normal general duties. So we need that court reporter, uh, additional court reporter to help with our daily dockets. And in addition, we've seen a dramatic increase in our juvenile cases.