Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the session of the Government Operations and Fiscal Policy Committee.

Today we have one of our committee members virtual, Councilmember Evans is virtual today, and we are joined by our Vice President, Councilmember Malcolm.

Thank you.

So we have two items on our agenda today.

First is the report out of the infrastructure funding working group, and then we are going to revisit the report by Davenport and recommendations on AR reserve policy here in the in the county.

So let me just step us back for a second and provide some background.

In the fall of 2024, when the council was working on the growth and infrastructure policy as well as the complementary but separate legislation on impact taxes, the GO committee discussed the need to do a deeper dive into the county's infrastructure needs and funding mechanisms.

Specifically, we agreed there was a need to examine and improve how we fund our schools, transportation, and parks infrastructure.

And there was an acknowledgement that impact taxes, as currently conceived, was not doing the job we needed.

In March of 2025, the council established the infrastructure funding working group.

This working group was tasked with exploring potential solutions to how we fund infrastructure.

We know we need an infrastructure funding system that is equitable, predictable, and sustainable, and does not undermine other county goals such as housing, climate resilience, racial equity, and economic development.

Today we appreciate the chance to hear the report and discuss next steps.

Just to let you know, we are doing the second item today, which is the county's reserve policy.

And I intentionally scheduled both of these items together after seeing the initial findings of the work group, because I believe there are some opportunities we can discuss today of the findings of the work group that we can explore in updating our reserve policy.

And also I think this is a very uh fortuitous time to be do having this conversation because one uh the uh council vice president is able to join us, and she sits also on MCEDC's board, and they're working on their strategic plan for us.

And we do have um a transition happening, and we'll have a next another county uh executive coming in later this fall.

And so setting up uh our county for success on all of these measures uh is gonna be important, and so I think this is a good conversation and time for us to be having it.

Um with that, I'm gonna turn it over to our amazing team, Ms.

Nadu and Mr.

Smith, who helped Shepherd along the uh work the infrastructure funding work group to present the findings.

Thank you, Councilmember Stewart.

I'm gonna share my screen because we have a presentation to go through, and once we get that going, we'll we'll move forward.

All right.

Well, thank you again.

Um appreciate the Chair Stewart's uh background on how we got here and what we're doing.

Um initially I want to want to spend a few minutes just um given our thanks.

So there we go.

Slight delay.

Um so again, Ms.

Nadu and I um as long as as well as Mr.

Lee from Council Central staff have been on a work group for the last year, um, joined by many of our our sister agencies and county government agencies.

Um several of them are here today.

Mr.

Nalvin from Office of Management Budget, Ms.

Gavoni from planning, um, and I've maybe others have joined us since I've looked this way, but um we were a team working for the last year um doing the very things that you were asking for, looking at the county's infrastructure for schools, roads, and parks.

We were also supported by many other members from around the county.

Um, but I want to give a special shout out to our own Mr.

Kenny, who helped us in chapter two doing a lot of the data refinement um and collection from our agencies when we were looking at infrastructure needs and future infrastructure needs, as well as Ms.

Fuentes, who helped to make sure that we stayed on track for our open meeting acts, um, which since we were required to do that.

So for today, um this is a quick overview of the presentation.

Um it'll track a lot of what you see in the final report, which is available online.

It's not attached because it's including dependencies, it's about 170 pages.

Um we encourage people to check it out on the council's infrastructure funding work group website.

Um we will not spend a lot of time on the background because we covered that in February when we did the GEO committee update.

Um, and we also will we'll spend only a little bit of time on the factors that impact funding infrastructure because that also was covered in February.

So we don't want to bury the lead.

Our initial or overall finding is the county does not lack tools to fund infrastructure.

Um we have many tools.

We've used many of them, we've studied many of them, we've implemented many of them.

And we have many tools that other county or jurisdictions are using.

And so it's not a lack of tools of why we are unable to fund infrastructure.

What the work group found is that we need to develop a framework or a strategy to match tools with the needs we have to better address them in a timely manner.

Our group looked at major different or different types of infrastructure funding needs, including maintenance needs, new capacity, and upgrade needs.

We're going to get to more of those in a minute.

And more importantly, the different types of needs have different funding options that we think are appropriate.

So going back to where we were in February and what we've completed as the as the budget was adopted this year, is we looked at three different types of funding infrastructure needs in the county maintenance, upgrades, and new capacity.

And so just to define those again, they're defined in the report, but just to help everyone watching at home as well as the committee understand maintenance is the spending we use to support and replace investments that we've already paid for.

This is the uh planned life cycle asset replacement cost.

Um if we bought a building and we need to replace the roof, that's part of this.