Budget work 9 a.m.

And if we could, I'd like to ask Mr.

Bowden if you could lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Yep.

I pledge us to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands.

One nation under God, indivisible and liberty and justice as well.

Thank you.

Like to call roll call, please.

Chair Andreola.

Present.

Vice Chair Garcia.

Yeah.

Commissioner Hill.

Commissioner Clark.

Present.

Commissioner Herman.

Here.

County Manager Kate Thomas.

And our DA today is Mr.

Larch.

And I'm Jan Galluscenior County Clerk.

Madam, you have a quorum.

Thank you so much.

Well, it's an exciting day, uh, budget workshop, and we certainly appreciate everyone coming today with lots of great information and the time to actually hear a lot of detail.

So I'd like to call on the county manager, please.

What was a test to make sure that I was paying attention?

Um, I'd like to go ahead and ask for public comment, please.

Let's see.

Thank you, madam chair.

This is public comment and comment heard under this item will be limited to three minutes per person.

It may pertain to matters both on and off the commission agenda.

A news time may not be allocated to other speakers.

And we would like you to please make your comments to the commission as a whole.

We don't have virtual public comment today because this is a workshop setting.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Pam Darr, if you'll come up here to this podium.

Good morning, commissioners and everybody else coming on.

Hit the little button on the right there.

Oh, there it goes.

I didn't see a light go on.

Sorry, it's early, even though the three.

Okay, this is a workshop, and I guess you're taking ideas, so I thought I'd bring some ideas.

Nationally, there's a conversation about getting rid of property taxes.

And I don't know, I think it sounds great.

Don't you wouldn't everybody love to get rid of property taxes.

In reality, I know that's not going to be easily done, but looking at ideas to pass on responsibilities to corporations.

Everybody wants to tax the millionaire and billionaires.

But let's be honest, it always ends up on the middle classes' backs.

It all always does.

But if we can offer programs for them, like with the homeless, have them sponsor homeless, get them off the streets.

I personally can't take it anymore.

I find it heartbreaking.

I really do, and it's everywhere.

So if we can stop, get them off the streets and give these corporations a benefit to help them and maybe get them jobs, a reason to live.

This is horrible.

Every day they stay on the streets is another chance for them to die on the streets.

And every dollar a person gives them is an opportunity to buy drugs and die.

So I mean it to my heart since I was 12 years old.

This is not something that is acceptable in our community.

It's an idea to look at and chip away at some of the burden on the taxpayers, which we see it getting worse, and maybe this will make things better.

It's worth a shot, it's worth a discussion.

That's one idea.

Now they're putting it on the taxpayers.

The corporations are getting away from health care and all kinds of perks that's being put on our backs.

Middle class is shrinking.

So I'll ask you our representatives to look outside the box and see what you can do to help the future generations.

I'm done.

I got two cats and a turtle, and but I see them, and I'd like them to have the opportunity that I had the benefits I had.

And I saw them leaving near my end of my working thing.

For them to make the numbers, the businesses they took away from us.

Maybe put us first for a little bit.

That's it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Got a lot of work.

Got a lot of work to do.

I'll leave you alone.

Thank you.

Uh Janet Butcher is up next.

There's no overhead.

Okay.

Thank you.

Good morning, Janet Butcher for the record.

Sorry.

I had to drive pyramid.

Sat through uh several green lights.

Anyway, Janet Butcher for the record.

Um I'm handing in a list of similar sized counties throughout the U.S.

I've talked about this before.

We are twice as much, if not three times more than those other counties.

Why?

I don't understand.

There's gotta be a lot of waste.

Um so only a few of them come close to even what our budget is.

Um I started to take the time to do a comparison.

I did one or two of them that uh, and then I go, it's a waste of time because you guys don't care, you don't listen.

I've presented this to you before.

But anyway, my time is better spent elsewhere.

Um county expenditures must be reduced across the board.

Time to be physically prudent.

Um it it makes absolutely no uh sense and why we cannot take a look at where is the extra money going.

Um are we importing people?

Um are we paying for things that we don't need to?

I I've heard people talk about the CARES campus and the fact that um there are people coming in from other counties.

I and I fear that for um this new facility that we're doing for uh over here across the street for mental health.

Are we going to be bringing other pe other counties in, other states in?

Um what are we paying for?

Um anyway, um just wanted to say I wish you good luck.

You gotta take a good look across the board and and rein it in.

Other people do it to their home budgets, the county can do it for us.

Um put the people before the developers.

Thank you.

There's nobody else signed in.

Thank you.

I'll go ahead and close public comment because I was so excited about the budget workshop.

I apologize for jumping into that first, but we're now going to move to that item on the budget workshop and updates to the board.

So manager Thomas.

Thank you.

We're on item number four on our agenda, which is budget workshop and updates to the board.

And this is a workshop item.

And I just wanted to welcome everyone to this new concept.

Um, this is our first of a new series of workshop meetings.

And if you'll recall, as part of the Office of the County Manager assessment, a new format was recommended whereby we will do a deep dive into key topics.

So this format, which is recommended to be quarterly, it allows for an educational and immersive process for the board and the staff and the public to learn about key topics such as budget and strategic planning.

We're also moving towards the recommended two BCC meetings a month instead of three.

I'll note that other large governmental organizations such as Cork County, the city of Las Vegas, City of Reno, they also have twice monthly meetings.

So this workshop is a compliment to that.

It's not policy setting, but rather, as I mentioned, it's a deep dive into topics and it's meant to be educational and immersive.

So let's jump right in.

I wanted to first of all thank the chair.

She had a great suggestion that we start with a national level overview of the economy with our investment partners.

And so with that, I'd love to turn the workshop over to our treasurer Justin Taylor.

Good morning, Justin Taylor.

I'm your friendly tax collector.

Okay.

I'm pleased to uh introduce Matt Bowden with Buckhead Capital.

He's the uh county investment advisor.

Uh he'll be giving a briefing uh on the broad uh national economic trends.

BCM fixed income is an institutional uh fixed income management team focused primarily on serving public sector and health care clients with approximately 90% of the assets under management for public entities.

The team has extensive experience managing the assets for clients throughout Nevada and a certain Nevada entities for more than 25 years.

And maintains offices in Atlanta and Reno.

Now with that, I will give it to Matt for his presentation.

Good morning.

There we go.

All right.

Uh I'm Matt Bowden as Justin mentioned, and I'm joined today by Kathy Stratton, and we're from BCM Fixed Income, and we're part of the team as Joseph mentioned that manages the county's investment pool.

And we're very appreciative of the opportunity today to come here and give you a little bit of our perspective on markets and economies as we see things in the world.

As I go through this, one of the things that I start out with here, and it's one of the first things that we always start with.

One of our partners, uh, Rick Nelson, I've worked with Rick for over 20 years.

And every time that he sits down to kind of think about the economy, he starts with creating this sort of tea ledger, if you will, like an accountant would use.

And he kind of puts on one side the things that he thinks could lead towards higher growth and faster rates in the economy.

And then he puts on the other side things that he thinks could lead towards lower rates and slower growth in the economy and weighs these all out.

And then after he goes through this kind of mental exercise, right, you effectively end up with a scale, right?

And you look and you see which side do I feel more convicted about in terms of where I think things are going to go.

Um, or in you know, cases like today, in the environment that we're in now, we're gonna say that we think that these scales are fairly balanced, right?

And that there's a lot of risks on both sides of the ledger at this point.

Um, you know, and that makes for right now the Federal Reserve has a very, very difficult job in this country.

They have a dual mandate um to balance the risk to unemployment and the risk to inflation.

Um and it's becoming increasingly more difficult as there's so many different unprecedented things hitting the economy all at once.

Um, and it's really making uh jobs for people like us, market strategists or economists to read the tea leaves, if you will, in terms of where the economy is going to go, because there are so many unprecedented and really kind of you know confluence of conflicting factors that are really driving things in in different ways.

Um, you know, for example, there are a lot of things that are potentially impacting the labor market, right?

Um AI, for one, is one that we're talking about, you know, what is the impact on jobs going to be and what is that going to do for both growth and employment in this country.

Um but you know, we also look at you know what is uh immigration policies, right?

And what does that have to do right now in terms of its impacts on you know potential supply uh to labor and what does that do to wages in this country and to the potential for growth?

Um and then we also have the changing makeup of the Federal Reserve Board itself.

This year we're gonna have a change.

The Federal Reserve Chair Powell's term is up in May.

Um, and it is very, very clear that he is not going to be reappointed to that position.

And so we're down to you know, a smaller list of four candidates who are going to, you know, potentially um, you know, fill that role.

But what we do know, um, you know, no matter what, is one of the prerequisites for that job is clearly uh a desire or propensity for lower rates, right?

And and so clearly the political shift in the makeup of the Federal Reserve Board itself is uh one towards um towards moving towards um you know potentially lower rates.

But you know, interest rates are set by the 12 members of the FOMC who vote um at their meetings, and um, you know, it's a committee, and members of that committee have become a lot more vocal uh recently.

And I think as the the Fed has become a little more political.

Fed's always been somewhat of a political entity, even though it's always supposed to be apolitical, it's always been um you know fairly political.

But um, as we look at, you know, the the it becoming more political, we've seen more and more members of the Federal Reserve um who are being more vocal about kind of uh expressing dissenting opinions, right?

And and so we get to this idea that you're going to have a Fed chair come in who is going to have to coalesce this committee around the idea of lower rates.

And and you know, so far the the committee has been, you know, somewhat um uh has pushed back on that, right?

And and you're hearing a lot of different you know uh variations amongst the uh the committee in terms of you know where growth is gonna go.

And I think that gets to again just the what I led this off with is just the amount of uncertainty um that is out there in in the economy today and makes it very, very difficult um, you know, for people to uh to make a decision in terms of which way they see these scales uh going.

Uh one of the things I'd like to say as I go through this um is that you know we're gonna talk, I'm gonna talk about some politically sensitive topics uh as we go through this.

Our job as market strategists and investment professionals are not to opine on policy in any way.

It is simply to uh give do our job to interpret it and understand what we think its impacts are going to be for the market um and ultimately for your investment portfolio.

So when we talk about things like immigration, for example, there are lots of facets to that argument, obviously the very human side of it and so forth.

Um, you know, we are just again not trying to make any kind of political statement on just making statements about how we think it will ultimately impact the economy um and ultimately your portfolios.

Um so this is I think one of the things that we look at when we talk about the outlook for the Federal Reserve.

The the top chart here is what we call the dot plot, which is where the 19 members of the FOMC give their opinion on where they think um Fed funds rates will be at the end of various years, you know, coming up, uh in this case uh three uh the next three years, and then also the longer term measure, which is essentially their uh assessment of where they think the neutral rate is, you know, for the longer term uh rate for Fed funds.

And each one of these dots represents a a um vote from the 19 members that sit on the FOMC committee.

And I think the biggest thing that we can take from this uh from this chart is the amount of dispersion that we see there and the amount of variation in in the opinions um amongst the committee in terms of where we think interest rates are gonna go.

If we even look at it at 2026 here on the left-hand side of this, um, we have seven members of the eight members of the committee that see, you know, little to no change in interest rates over the next coming years, and where we have some members of the committee that see, you know, very, very aggressive uh, you know, policy cutting.

Um, the the one dot that is the outlier away down there at the bottom.

Um, we don't they don't tell you whose votes those are, but that is a pretty obvious to us who that is, that um Stephen Miran was appointed by uh the administration to take a temporary um uh position on the FOMC.

And when he came on to that position this summer, that dot all of a sudden appeared down there at the bottom.

So it's pretty obvious that that is Stephen Miren's vote.

And again, that's the idea that you know he was put on to the committee by the administration.

And the the political push is going to put be to put more dots on this chart that look like that that lower um realm.

But what you can see is there's 19 people here, and we have a really big dispersion about where um you know that those opinions are gonna go.

Um, and then as we look further out too, I think one of the other things that's really important to look at is on the the far right hand side there, what we call the longer term um range of opinions, people throw around this number that the Federal Reserve uses 3% as their longer term neutral rate of uh uh of interest.

And where that comes from is it's what we call the central tendency of the opinion.

So of the 19 uh votes, you can see the orange line there in the longer term is is through 3%, and that is the the central tendency.

But right now, that only represents five out of the 19 members' opinions in terms of where interest rates are ultimately going to go.

And we have a very large range of opinions, with some members thinking that we're now currently within the realm of what is you know longer term neutral and that there really isn't a whole lot more accommodation that's needed to again, you know, other members that that think that the you know the longer term rate of interest is significantly lower than where it is today.

But I I think that the one thing that you can take from this, despite you see a big divergence of opinions, is that the general consensus is for a shift lower in interest rates you know over the the coming time.

Um, you know, again, it's a pretty big range of opinions, but clearly the the center of these dots, the central tendency of these dots is to move towards lower rates over the next couple of years.

And the bottom chart there is the uh is where the market is saying that the Fed funds rate is going to go over the next couple of years.

And the market hasn't always agreed with the Fed in what the Fed has been saying over the last couple of years.

We've seen pretty big divergence in opinions between what the market says the Fed was going to do and what the Fed said the Fed was going to do.

Um, but right now we see that that that has come very much into line now with the market really projecting, just like the Fed is that we're going to drift over the next year or so into kind of a you know a lower three percent type environment.

I will move ahead uh one here.

How are we doing?

Um so when we look at growth right now, the U.S.

economy has been doing really well.

Um surprisingly well uh in the first quarter.

And I mean that literally, because if you look at this chart here, this is put out by the Atlanta Federal Reserve, and it's an estimate of GDP.

It's called the Atlanta Fed GDP now.

Um and if you look down there at the bottom section, the the blue line uh there at the bottom, that is the blue chip consensus.

So that is the estimate of all the so-called experts on Wall Street, where they were thinking that fourth quarter GS GDP was going to come in in the United States.

And you can see the consensus estimate was below 1%, uh, with a range should be anywhere from negative growth to to under 2%.

And what we've seen is that right now, again, this Atlanta GDP now, what this is is it's as real data comes into the economy.

Um, it gets updated, and the Atlanta Fed updates their model um to track where GDP is is on pace for um for that quarter.

So I always kind of liken it to a runner running a marathon, right?

If you're running a five minute mile on the first mile, that doesn't mean that you're gonna run all 26 miles at a five minute mile, but that's the pace that you're on.

Um now at this point, we're pretty you know, far along into the quarter in terms of getting uh that fourth quarter data.

And it's really showing that you know the the economy is really surprising to the upside with you know running above five percent uh type of growth here for the fourth quarter, again, well above um, you know, what uh expectations were.

And but it's where that growth is coming from that is gonna create a little bit of a problem uh for the Federal Reserve and make things very difficult.

And we put this formula up at the top here, and we're talking fixed income in the economy.

I can't promise you that there's not going to be any math.

Um, but this right here, when we talk about the growth of the economy, in its simplest form, it can really come down to the growth of our economy is how much does your labor force grow?

How many people do you add to the economy?

And then how much more productive is each person in the economy at producing things?

And you put those two together, and that's what you get is the rate of growth in the economy.

And it's how this growth is coming, is what is making the economist job and and and market strategist jobs really difficult.

Um, and we put this quote down here on the bottom to kind of highlight this, but it's from a strategist named David Zervos, who I like to follow, and he he's talking about this idea of what if we see growth of you know three and a half, four percent in the economy, um, but we we're we're losing jobs, and we continue to see the unemployment rate tick up.

And he's speaking specifically about AI and productivity here, and he's you know, talking about I go to a lot of meetings, I talk to a lot of people, and they're telling you that that you know we could lose three, four, five million jobs over the next couple of years, you know, if not faster.

And and what does that do potentially um to how do markets respond?

How does the Federal Reserve respond if you have jobless growth, right?

And and you have um you have you have growing um pressures in the economy on the growth side and on the inflation side, but but the jobs are not coming along with it.

And it makes, again, as I keep saying, it makes the Federal Reserve's job very difficult because they have one tool and that primary tool, and that's interest rates, right?

And they they don't impact inflation and jobs in the same way.

And when they start moving in one direction, they really can't fight both those battles of rising unemployment and rising inflation at the same time.

So it makes it you know a very difficult job for for the Fed to you know respond to that situation.

Um so talking about jobs a little bit, uh it's one of these things in terms of when I came into this business years and years ago, right?

I was told that every month when we get the employment report the first Friday of the month, um, 150,000 jobs is what the economy has to produce to be that was the breakeven rate or the equilibrium rate, just to keep up with population growth.

You had to keep 150,000 jobs every month just in nationally just to keep up with population growth.

And but as population growth has changed over the last couple of years, we've had massive swings in population growth when we had a big influx of population growth in 22 and 23.

And now we're having you know very, very low levels of population growth in this country um this year.

And those types of swings are something that you know economic models weren't really built to address, right?

The population growth in this country had always been some form of a constant.

Um, and so that's where, you know, again, I started this, and for much of my career, I was going through this idea that 150,000 jobs a month was the neutral that we had to keep.

Well, the Dallas Fed put this uh survey out in the fall um and showed a little bit about how changing population dynamics have impacted that number.

And so if you look at the orange line, that is their estimate of what the number, that break-even number is.

And if you look over at the left-hand side there, you can see that 150,000 number in 2022 was right about where we were.

That was kind of what I, again, my norm that I had always you know come to know.

Well, during 23 and 24, when we saw massive influx of immigration into this country, right?

The blue bars down here are the actual monthly job numbers that we were generating during that, the non-farm payroll jobs that we were generating during that time.

So during 2023 and 2024, we were generating roughly 150,000 jobs a month.

And people in the market, participants, strategists, economists were all looking at it, saying, hey, we're doing exactly what we need to be doing, right?

Everything's going great.

But in actuality, according to the Dallas Fed estimate, we really needed to be creating not 150,000 jobs any month, but because of the increase in population growth, we really need to be creating, you know, 250,000 jobs a month.

And so during this time, we were seeing the unemployment rate tick up, even though job creation was by historical standards very healthy, the unemployment rate was going up simply because we had more people coming into the country.

So you were changing the denominator and the ratio.

Um, because the immigration shifts and and population shifts have changed very, very dramatically to where this year we're gonna be, you know, pretty close to zero in terms of net population growth in this country for the first time ever, right?

The Dallas Fed now estimates what that new number is, and and they're talking about you know something closer to 30 to 40,000 jobs a month is where we are based on you know new levels of population flows.

And so we've seen recently that we've had over the past you know four or five, six months job gains in this country around 40,000 jobs a month.

And and you know, economists, Mark Dispenser talking about you know, anemic job growth, you know, we're really weakening the labor market, but really you know, it's imbalance.

It's because that 30 to 40,000 jobs is really more in line with exactly what we need right now, based on again the the shifts in in population dynamics.

So, you know, it's one of these things.

I think again, it's it's making economist jobs really hard to kind of wrap their heads around this new normal, if you will, but you know, at least for right now, the economy has kind of settled into this new equilibrium, if you will, at just a much lower level of hiring and employment.

Um, the you know, the question is, and then the concern is is does it stop stabilize here, right?

Does the labor market weakening just happen to fall to stabilize it, this kind of new normal that's consistent with you know the population dynamics, the realities of population growth that we have today?

Probably not, right?

The concern is that that it just continues to get weaker and and and that we continue to see that weakness in the labor market.

So that's the argument, you know, on the um uh on the the side of why Fed officials are talking about hey, we need to get more out in front of um, you know, reducing interest rates with the idea that we see weakness and weakening in the labor market that doesn't usually stop, right?

It continues to get weaker and weaker.

And so they want to get ahead of that.

Um, you know, as we talked about going back to our really simple equation um, you know, from before when we talked about uh the GDP growth, right?

If population growth is effectively zero, right on that equation, but we're generating five percent GDP growth, where is that coming from?

And the answer is productivity, right?

And we can see this here, you know, third and fourth quarter productivity has been running up around five percent.

Um we haven't seen first quarter numbers yet, but they're expected to be really, really big.

Um, and and so you know, when we look at you know, the the five percent productivity side is effectively driving all of that five percent GDP, right?

Um, and so that's where we're seeing this growth.

And and again, what we're really thinking with this um with um the productivity, at least to date that we've seen, we don't necessarily think yet that that is AI driven.

It's really to this point, it's just been more of a function of we've been in a low higher, low fire um type of environment, and corporations have been doing more with less.

Public governments have been doing more with less, right?

Um, and and so as people have been doing more with less and product production remains high, um, you know, primarily driven by exports.

Um, but you know, as we see the production remain high and people are doing more with less, you see these, you know, these productivity numbers really ramp up.

Um, you know, how sustainable is that in the long term, right?

Now that's where you get to kind of that secondary question, which is you know, and we put this quote down here at the bottom from Alan Greenspan in the 90s, where he was talking about you know, the potential, you know, AI or I'm sorry, the internet um advances and what that would potentially do um to productivity and and jobs and the concerns about that, right?

And everybody was worried the internet was gonna put a bunch of people out of work, and what it really did was create a bunch of you know Google programmers and so forth.

So, you know, there's a lot of things on on this in terms of how it's gonna impact jobs that you know, we're still kind of waiting to see.

Um then transitioning a little bit about where we are in the economy, too.

I I think you know what we've ended up with here is we're seeing really high growth levels in the economy on the aggregate level.

But we're seeing an economy that is got different outcomes for different folks, and and we call that really a K-shaped economy where it's really working for some people and not working for others as well.

Um, and that's certainly you know the situation that we've been in, and it's really been driven by how much how much do you own in financial assets really determines how well you are doing in this environment.

If you own your home, right, your your home uh prices up 110% over the last 10 years, right?

That's the largest financial asset that most people own.

And then people in this country are extremely house wealthy.

Um, the SP 500, again, up 265% over the past 10 years.

People who own stocks are doing really, really well and feeling very, very, you know, uh feeling very wealthy.

Uh with interest rates being higher, savings rates and interest and earnings on saving rates is is a material um you know source of income for again people who own financial assets.

But the problem is if you look at the right hand side of this chart, you know, the bottom 50% uh of income or households by wealth in this country own almost none of the financial assets.

And you know, the majority of the financial assets in this country are owned by the top you know 10% um, you know, from a wealth perspective.

So again, as we see, you know, these wealth effects really drive incomes, right?

Because incomes aren't keeping up with with wages, aren't keeping up with uh inflation, but asset prices certainly are.

You know, again, you're having that kind of divergence between you know winners and losers in the economy a little bit.

Um and then when we look at the consumer, we definitely see you know more signs of stress.

I know there's a lot going on on these charts here.

Um, but if you look at the the left-hand side there, we have um 90-day delinquencies by loan type, and you can see uh the light blue line is credit card delinquencies.

Those are you know continuing to go up and and are are you know reaching up towards you know uh uh financial crisis, uh great you know, recession type of type of levels.

Um the one that we really watch the most is the green line down there is the auto.

Um you're seeing, you know, usually people that's the last thing that people will go delinquent on is their car.

Um, and you know, we're seeing definitely an uptick uh, you know, in auto delinquencies.

Um, you know, again, now they're nowhere near what we saw during the great financial crisis, but you know, certainly you know, back above you know the pandemic uh uh peaks and and and well above, you know, more normalized environments for that.

And then as we look at the right hand side there, um, you know, again, the the top and the bottom uh charts kind of tell the same thing, but you know, really looking at the top one in terms of focusing on autos, it breaks it down by age.

And so you can see the light blue and the red lines there are really shooting up.

Um, and those are our younger demographics in society who just quite frankly haven't had the time to build the financial wealth and the financial assets to benefit from the stuff I was just talking about on the last slide, right?

Um and so they're the ones that have clearly become you know, are showing more signs of stress um from these financial pressures.

Um looking at CPI and and inflation, right?

And again, there's we have a wide range of of thoughts amongst the committee in terms of where the economy is going uh and where interest rate is policy is going.

And a lot of it comes down to well, the thought on on jobs, are we in a new equilibrium or are things going to continue to get worse?

But really on the CPI side, there's a big range of opinions in terms of where uh inflation is gonna go.

And so uh we we have way too many blues on this chart, but um the dark blue section, uh if you will, is uh is goods inflation.

So this is broken CPI into various components.

The dark blue section is goods inflation, and that's the part of inflation that is most easily impacted by tariffs.

Um, and you can see in 2024, right?

We actually were having negative deflationary pressures in goods, right?

We are all living through this.

We've never in this economy again gone from zero to minimum levels of tariffs to you know 10, 15, 20 percent effective tariff rates.

And and so everybody has been trying to live through this and understand what the actual impacts on growth and inflation will ultimately be.

And you know, you heard some people talk about in you know, last year when this was getting implemented that we would potentially see 10, 15% price jumps almost immediately as a result of tariffs.

What we've actually seen is we've seen a lot of the prices get absorbed throughout the supply chain to this point, but we are definitely seeing some building pressures in in goods that driving up um you know, inflation a little bit on the margin um in goods.

And the the argument from those that are more hawkish on inflation and interest rates and think that we need to be more careful about bringing interest rates lower is the idea that look, if the light blue bars, which I'm gonna talk about in a second, kind of settle in here where they are, but the dark blue bars continue to tick up, we're at 3% inflation.

The committee's goal is 2%, right?

And we want to be on a path at least to getting inflation back down towards our 2% goal over the longer term.

And the concern is if we do see an uptick in um in the goods inflation, that that won't allow the headline number to come back towards 3%, and we're never gonna trend back that way.

And we have, we've seen a little bit of upward pressure here in the last couple of uh of CPI readings.

Now, the counterargument to that is in the light blue bars.

And the light blue bars represent services inflation.

Services inflation has been what has been really sticky uh in this uh country, and it's been you know, obviously you can see the biggest uh driver and contributor to to inflationary pressures.

And by far the biggest part of services inflation is housing.

Um the shelter component of CPI is right about 35, 36% of the total number.

And how we collect housing data in this country is far from uh very scientific um uh uh process.

Uh there's a lot of surveys that go into it, a lot of things.

Um, but also when we talk about rents, right, there's a significant lag um in terms of how that gets caught up.

So the argument for lower rates and more accommodation is this idea that there is going to be significant deflation in housing prices in the shelter component of CPI that is really out there already in the real world and just has not come through into the CPI numbers yet.

Um, again, because of those kind of lag effects.

So when we talk about um, you know, the the leases really only get reset when the lease gets reset, right?

So you know, there's a lag from where those hit versus you know kind of real-time rent.

So if you look at the the orange uh chart here, the line on the chart here, that's put out by the BLS, and that's a measure of real-time rental indices.

Um, and the blue and the black lines are the uh the numbers that go into the CPI components to calculate shelter.

And this chart actually puts the blue and the black lines forward nine months because there's a lag, like we talked about.

Um, but what we can see is that those blue and black lines with a nine-month lag follow real-time measures very, very closely.

And what we've seen is real-time measures of housing have fallen off a cliff recently.

You know, we I'm old enough to remember last year when we had a very significant shortage of housing uh in this country.

We've had a tremendous amount of you know, multifamily supply come online nationally, obviously changes in in population growth changing on the demand side a little bit.

And so you have this fall-off in rents.

Um, and so I talked about you know, Governor Stephen Miren earlier, uh, and his one outline dot that he was talking about having to bring rates way down, right?

His point is this, that we he thinks that the he's on the argument, the side of the argument that the labor market is not going to settle into this new lower normal.

It's going to continue to weaken.

And that we know, in his opinion, that housing prices, as far as shelter is concerned, is going to come down significantly because the blue and the black lines are eventually going to catch up to the ore line, orange line is his point.

And so that those going back to the previous chart, those light blue shaded areas are going to come down, and that is naturally going to bring the uh uh inflation back towards the the Fed's goal.

And so his point is is we should be moving closer to our 3% target, knowing that these things are taking place and that this is really just kind of the funky math of how we calculate uh CPI.

All right, we'll start display.

Um there we go.

Um so moving on one, affordability and and staying with housing, but you know, uh general affordability in general is is going to be the buzzword for this year uh going into the the elections uh in the back half of the year.

Um, you know, we we've heard you know the administration announced policies around capping credit card interest rates, so forth, um, but you know, specifically also really attacking housing, right?

And um, there's a couple of things about housing that are you know a little scary.

Um, you know, if you look at the top chart there, right, that orange line represents the the income that it takes to purchase the median income in this house.

Sorry, the income that it takes to purchase the medium priced home in this country.

The blue line represents the actual median income in this country.

You can see that we have gotten to a point where there is a very large disconnect between what it takes to actually buy a house in this country and what people can afford.

The really scary part is the only time that we've seen this the lower the last time that we've seen this big a disconnect was 06, 07, right?

08.

And we know how that ended um for housing and prices, right?

This has to come back into line.

And you're hearing the administration talk about getting housing affordability and how can we bring this down?

And you know, President Trump in his Davos speech uh last week at the World Economic Forum, you know, bigger version of this, right?

Uh, you know, talked about um, you know, the idea of getting housing affordability and back into line, and how do we do that without hurting home values?

Because you know, the home value is the you know most people's largest financial asset, right?

And you don't want to have that negative impact because we saw what happens when you have a correction in home prices and you know, the during the the last financial crisis.

Um, you know, we we know that that has lots of other implications, you know, throughout the economy.

So what they want to really try and do is bring this orange line down by correcting the mortgage side of it or the interest rate side of it.

And you can see on the bottom there, we have um, you know, you broken this in into the the two components that drive affordability.

So immediately after the start of the pandemic, when everybody really valued their house a lot more, right?

We had the blue line, which is home values really kind of start to disconnect from incomes, right?

But we also had interest rates going down.

So that was kind of keeping things in check for a while as we went back to a zero interest rate policy.

And then, but then we've had you know interest rates obviously shot up starting in 2022.

So that's compounded the affordability issue.

Um, you know, and now you have both the valuations of the homes and the the interest rate cost to finance them significantly above you know levels of affordability.

So, you know, it's gonna be a really interesting balancing act to try and bring that back down into some kind of because the orange line has to come back into realm uh into the line with the with the incomes, right?

We can't have that big a disconnect between valuations and incomes.

And how do we get that back down without hurting home values?

That's gonna be hard to see happening.

I you know, you can't, the math doesn't work just on the interest rate side.

Um so, and then I think one of the other things when we talk about you know, consumers, and I and I always talk about this in terms of inflation, is you know, when the consumer looks at inflation and how an economist looks at inflation are two very different things, right?

To an economist, if we had 10% price appreciations, um, and then things renormalize and we're back at 2%, that's not inflation.

That's kind of a one-time price jump, right?

To the consumers, things are just more expensive, right?

And that's what we're seeing here is you know, the the economists look at this number coming back down the orange line, you know, renormalizing and getting us back down to to the two percent inflation level.

The problem is is what the consumer feels is the blue line, right?

The consumer goes to the store and knows that everything is just significantly more expensive um than it was a couple of years ago.

And again, this has a disproportionate impact on um the on the lower end segments uh uh of the economy and and the consumer.

All right, I was gonna uh transition, just spend the last couple of minutes just telling you all a little bit about you know how we uh then transition all of that kind of information in into uh your investment portfolio and a strategy.

And so when we look at investment portfolios, we look at the four facets that make up investment portfolio's returns.

And the first one there is duration.

So how long are we investing for, right?

If we would have looked at this chart um back in 2022 when we had 8% inflation and we had 0% interest rates, um, we it would seem pretty obvious to us that interest rates had to go up.

So we were very, very short in our duration position, keeping things you know, very, very short term.

So when interest rates went up, we had more flexibility to go out and kind of lock things in.

Now we've been in an environment where clearly the Fed has been telling you that we were at five and a quarter percent, we're not gonna stay in that five percent type you know, interest rate environment.

Interest rates were going to come down, right?

And they were very, very clear about that that the rates were going to come down.

They've cut rates 175 basis points.

Again, now the the trend, both the market and the Fed are telling you that you know, rates are gonna come down a little bit more from here, not nearly as much as they have, but you know, we so that's why when we went to that 5% environment, we got much, much longer and locked things in for as long as we could because the Fed's telling you this aren't these rates aren't going to be here forever.

So lock them in while you can, and that's what we did.

And we went out and locked things in for as long as we could.

Now that things have gotten a lot closer to neutral, right?

Again, we have we're kind of within the range of where the Fed tells you interest rates are going to be in the longer term, but still, you know, a little bit lower from here, most likely.

Um, and and we are on the camp side of the argument that the labor market's probably not gonna settle into this kind of new equilibrium that we'll continue to see more weakness in the labor market.

And so we do think that you'll see the the Fed continue to cut rates a little bit from here, um, which is why we're still on the little bit on the long side, but not nearly as long as we were, because now things are much more in balance.

Um, and then the second thing that we look at is curb position.

So, where do you get your duration?

How long do you invest for, or where across the yield curve do you invest?

Um not to get too bond technical on you, but when when what what we expect is, and what we've seen is we've seen is the Federal Reserve has cut interest rates, right?

Longer term interest rates have stayed pretty much uh steady, right?

They really haven't come down much.

Tenure is basically you know where it was when they started cutting rates a year and a half ago.

Um, and anytime you expect short-term rates to come down relative to longer term rates, you want to position yourself in the middle of the yield curve in what's called a bulleted fashion.

So that's that's why we're implementing that from a strategy because we still expect to see short-term rates continue to come down, longer term rates not so much.

And again, that's where it's you know interesting that the the administration's push is on mortgage rates, really, right?

You know, and and bringing home affordability down, and they're pushing the Fed to do that.

Well, the Fed only controls the overnight rates, and we've seen them bring rates down 175 basis points and tenures gone, maybe even gone up a little bit during that period, right?

I mean, the first time when they were cutting rates, it actually went up 125 basis points while they were cutting rates 100.

So um, they don't necessarily control you know that that longer end of the curve, and that thing makes things a little bit difficult.

And then at the bottom sector uh uh rotation, we we invest in look at all the sectors that are allowable under NRS and your investment policy um and security selection, we do all of our bottoms up fundamental um individual individual uh credit research um you know on each of the individual securities that go into the portfolio that kind of help us implement our duration and curve positioning.

And one thing that I would say about both of those is um well, in over 20 years of doing this, I we've never listed governments first as the thing that we would overweight, right?

Usually you want to get more corporates and things that offer more yield in there.

But as we see the world right now, you know, the um you look at the stock market, for example, right?

I mean, it seems impervious to the idea that I mean, there's so much going on in the world and the stock market just continues to make new highs.

Well, it's the same thing in fixed income assets, right?

The valuations for those assets are really high relative to where we see the perceived risk out there right now.

So we think that it's a much better time to be very, very defensive and conservative in our sector allocation and in our security selection, you know, focusing on securities that are very, very high quality.

I mean, again, we always are very, very high quality, but but even more so up in quality and up in stability and structure, just making sure that you know we we do think that there's gonna be a period of volatility here at some point.

But it's again the market for a while now has seemed pretty impervious to a lot of things being thrown at it.

Um and then I'll I'll finish with this.

This is a budget meeting, so talk about um, you know, the investment returns and the investment performance, because it does translate you know directly uh, you know, into uh you know real money for the county.

And it as I mentioned, um, you know, when we started working with the portfolio a little over a year ago in October of 24, one of the first things we did was look at the idea of hey, the portfolio is um you know shorter than its duration position, and and and we've got you know this 5% interest rate environment that again, the Fed is telling us it's not going to be here forever.

So we wanna go out and lock that in while we can.

So we you know aggressively moved to extend the duration of the portfolio, locked in a lot of those 5% type of yields.

And as interest rates have come down by 175 basis points, right?

The the portfolio has really benefited for that.

And so you can see, you know, on the calendar year um, you know, for the year with almost a six percent um uh return uh you know for the calendar year, you know, 35 basis points ahead of the benchmark that the uh Justin's team has charged us um with managing against.

Um and so you know, obviously a really big absolute return as interest rates have come down, the value of the securities that we locked in, you know, last year, you know, went up in value.

And and so, you know, now we're in a lower interest rate environment, right?

And in a lower return environment.

So, you know, if you look at the last quarter, right, that was 1.16%.

That's not annualized, that's just for the quarter.

But you if you do carry that out, right?

We're we're more into like a four and a half, four and three quarters, you know, type of return environment, speaking for budgeting purposes, right?

You know, going forward, the you know, that that's you know, where we would be looking now, uh, and particularly as we start looking into your next fiscal year, um, right, you know, you should probably be thinking more about four percent type of range um for investment returns.

So that is everything that I had for uh uh uh canned presentation.

If there are any questions, thank you, uh Mr.

Bowden.

And I think now everyone has uh got to uh visit the investment committee.

That's what what the investment I said on the investment committee.

So I'm really appreciative for the county manager um for arranging, but more importantly, I'm wanting to thank um Treasurer Taylor for um all of the hard work that he and his team does.

And also really looking at the RFP and then um having um Buckhead Capital uh be the awardee of that of that contract, I think uh has really shown um the leadership uh just really treasure taylor.

So thank you.

Um I do uh want to open it up uh to questions for everyone, but I do want to share a couple things.

Um I love economics and I hate economics, but I love economics in the sense of it really is trying to look in the crystal ball.

And I can't imagine what you do every day and those in your profession do every day.

But um it really is a new frontier.

We are in a new frontier.

And um, just for clarification, the reason that I thought it would be great to have this economic overview of what this looks like in the nation, if you will, is because we're not immune from it from Washoe County.

We're not immune from some of these trends.

We're not immune, and we'll hear um from um Dr.

Lamore in a minute.

But the reality is is this this new frontier is either, and and this is just my opinion.

I'm not an economist, but you know, financial journalists, for instance, like Andrew Sorkin, you know, has indicated that there are some trends, especially with AI, and you touched upon it, where it looks like the um comparisons of what we could be faced with 1929 could be real.

Not that we want to scare everyone into that type of thinking, but I think we, in terms of looking at moving forward and looking at a sustainable model and being very prudent, and we're we're really blessed to have a lot of great people in the uh budget team.

Uh be very fiscally prudent and looking at things.

But the reality is I think that we really need to understand what kind of possibility we have and their predictions of what the uh FMOC does and that dial of balance between interest rates and how things move in the economy is as was shown by just the dots of the disparity of how people think that are controlling this.

That also creates uncertainty.

And so I just want to share that.

I hope that none of us actually learn what stagflation means.

And you can look that up yourself.

Um I'm not going to take time away from the board um having the opportunity, but I do think that having uh interest rates lower as a target is intended to stimulate the economy, but having essentially, and it's supposed to be job creation, right?

Right?

That's the model of how the economics works, but it shows this significant decrease and and essentially a zero net population growth that we haven't seen, should give one pause on how we move forward on this and these decisions that that we are facing.

No one wants to live through the 2008 for those of us that were here during that time.

Um, but housing is on the tip of everyone's tongue.

I'm really proud to share that and reiterate that it is the board's number one priority, how we balance that and then all the other essential services are really the task of the overall budget as a whole.

So I just wanted to share that I really did, and I I lived at a time when Alan Greenspan, I was watching every move, but I love the quote about bracing for a still developing shift on the economic landscape is I think what we should be thinking about as we move forward.

So I'll open it up to questions from the board for Mr.

Bowden.

Commissioner Hill.

Madam Chair, I wanted to just say thank you for the great presentation.

I think that I can't wait to hear from uh Dr.

Larimore because I know that we have specific things in our region that are affecting us differently on the housing front.

I'm I am so glad to hear that we think we'll we'll see housing go down or multifamily go down.

But with our income levels in Nevada being so low, and people um we're taught we talk to our constituents every day, people are struggling to stay in their housing.

So yeah, when those um and leases are just continuing to increase.

So I'm I'm curious when that will finally hit.

I'm like, oh my gosh, I would love to see that we have um reduction in costs for housing for folks.

Um yeah, you're you're saying like we're out potentially a year out on that with well again, you know, housing is one of those things that is, you know, and I was speaking from a national level, and it's certainly housing is very different in a regional basis, right?

Much more so than really kind of anything in our economy.

Housing is very, very regional, right?

And so obviously um, Dr.

Larmore will talk about that a little bit more from a you know regional perspective here in in a second.

But no, I mean those those BLS numbers that we showed on that orange chart again, nationally, those are those are real time numbers, right?

And we're seeing that the that reduction.

The lag is how it actually hits, you know, in terms of the CPI calculations and in terms of coming through, but the the numbers that we're seeing again on a national aggregate level are showing that that real-time rents are coming down.

Okay.

Um, you know, again, but that may not be the case regionally.

Yeah, but I I really appreciate this, madam chair.

Thank you so much for helping us kind of wrap our heads around the national picture because how can we make decisions here if we don't have an idea on the that big scale.

So um, I I just got a lot from the presentation.

So thank you so much.

And thank you, Treasurer.

I appreciate your leadership on this as well.

Absolutely.

Anyone else have any questions?

Vice Chair Good morning, thank you for being here.

I am not part of the investment investment committee, and I feel like we're all part of so many regional boards and meetings, and um, I always remember like the first time you sit on like a RTC meeting, you're hit in the face with all this technical language and all this like jargon.

And um, I always remember like the first time you sit on like RTC meeting, you're hit in the face with all this technical language and all this like jargon.

And I feel like I'm on my first day on the investment committee.

So thank you for the heavy dose there.

Uh I was my gerbil was running as fast as it could try to keep up and you know.

I I appreciate the presentation because it it takes this high level, which I think we we need to start with.

So thank you, madam chair, for kicking it off like that.

Um, but it's I feel like there's something ominous.

I know you're saying this is good, this is good, this is productive, this is trending in the right way.

And it's just like as you were talking about consumers, I'd flip the language in my language, it's families, right?

We're talking about households and families.

And you know, you're you said at one point, you know, the economy's working for some, but not working for others.

We see we're seeing that play out every single day.

Um, we know that people who are owning homes and stocks are doing really, really well.

But as a county, we're interacting and interfacing with people who are vulnerable uh from you know, cradle to grave, as we say, and there's just so much variation on on who is doing well.

And I look around at the county and the services we provide, and it seems like less and less people are doing well, and that wealth disparity is really what is the most concerning to me.

And so um your presentation, kind of another area of stress for me was the stress on the consumers, you know, the mortgages, the cars, the student loans that people are are worried about, of course, the uh housing afford affordability and uh I think when there's something great and unknown like AI and how that's gonna impact the job market, you know.

As I'm looking at my uh seventh grade daughter, what is you know, job, what's the job market gonna look like when she graduates high school?

Like what is she gonna study?

Is she gonna need to study?

All those questions from a parenting perspective.

You're just like, what is this world gonna look like in five years?

Um, so that feels daunting in in a way because it's unpredictable.

We don't know.

We're like you said, it's a new frontier.

And so I just wanted to ask you back to the wealth disparity.

If you can kind of you had a slide on there about the K-shaped economy, what conversations at the national level are helping to address that specifically?

Is there anything being done or said specifically about the wealth disparity?

Well, I mean, you know, it's a really really difficult issue, right?

Um, in terms of uh, you know, how you get about that.

And again, our our job is not to set policy, right?

Or to you know, to really kind of open on policies just to kind of interpret what we see going on, right?

And and what we see going on again is an economy that is working for some, and but you you know, the bottom 50 percent, right?

I mean, it's 50 percent.

That's a lot of people.

Right.

Um, and and so yeah, it's it's you know, it's a lot of people that it's not working for.

Um, you know, I mean, clearly, you know, some of the things, and again, I mentioned you know, affordability being the the buzzword of 2026, right?

You know, capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent, right?

Is something that you know now, the feasibility of that's one thing, but you know, that that's something that is clearly designed to you know target the the lower 50 percent who use their credit cards more than that interest rate, you know, carry a balance more than that interest rate is more of a you know a burden for them.

Uh same on you know on the housing and the mortgage side, right?

Um, trying to get those things down, but you know, I mean the the problem is it's a really difficult issue to solve, right?

Uh, I mean, you can't just take someone's financial assets and give them away, and right.

So uh, you know, it's how do you and if those financial assets continue to go up in value, and the people who don't, you know, that gap is only going to continue to what, right?

And and I, you know, I don't know that I have a great answer or really have anything that that's going to kind of wealth redistribution, right?

Yeah, you know, outside of that, um, which I don't think is you know on the table in this country.

Um, but there's not there's not a lot of great answers to solve those.

Yeah, thank you.

Commissioner Clark, do you have any questions?

Thank you.

Thank you, madam chair.

Um, I've got a few comments that I like to make about this specific area, and I hear my fellow commissioners worrying about uh wealth disparity, and and I'm interested in the working poor.

Um talked about uh having to do more with less a lot of places.

That's not a fact in this county, but with your good work and the treasurer's good work, the county's probably got a bigger return on investment than we've ever had since 1861 here.

So congratulations for for that good work for both of you, and that needs to be acknowledged.

We've got the assessor sitting in the uh audience.

He tells us uh that there's uh more uh assessed value now in this county than ever happened before.

New construction coming on at full full uh cap, but without a cap, though there's no cap on it, so it's full 100%.

So the income is here, we're just spending more than than we bring in, and and that's the problem.

So when we talk about the working poor and the disparity, and what are we gonna do?

Uh raising taxes doesn't help the working poor.

I interviewed a car dealership uh uh last week.

We have the highest sales tax, some of the highest sales tax in the state.

Uh car dealers have to struggle to get people to buy cars here when they can go across the county line and buy a car cheaper, a major purchase.

One of the major purchases in life is is transportation.

So that happens.

Then we've got some of the highest gas taxes in in the state here.

So I do some quick calculations.

Somebody's in the construction world as it fill up their pet pickup truck once a week.

It's an extra 40 dollars a week times 52 weeks.

We're looking at an extra couple of thousand dollars for that.

I'm a mortgage broker.

I I make real estate loans, have for 50 years.

And uh in this particular market, entry-level house used to be about 450 for 450,000.

When the interest rates went from three, two and a half, three, three and a half, whatever it was, up until the sixes and and above six here in the in this county, the actual cost for the monthly payment went up about 14 to 1,500 per month.

If you annualize that and look at what $1,500 a month is, that's $18,000 a year that somebody had to increase their salary to qualify for that loan.

So, how many people do we know in our community that got an $18,000 raise in the last several years?

So those are things that affect us.

It's nice to hear what's happening on a national level, but we need to look at local local issues here.

We're we're an island.

If you'll uh get up in the and look at this this community and from the satellite, we've got the Sierra Mountains here, and we're surrounded by desert.

We're we're we're an outpost out here.

And so this is a good opportunity to really study the economy in our area because it isn't affected so much by other things other than here.

We've we've got a we've got a housing shortage here, and that and that's not changing.

We can't seem to build our way out of it.

And uh, with the price of materials, the lumber, the labor, everything's involved.

Uh builders don't want to build entry-level houses.

I mean, they want to sell with all the bells and whistles.

That's where you make the profit.

So those are things that take place in our community, and and I think the public needs to know more about those actual, what what really is taking place?

A little bit of deeper dive and and finances here and and what it would cost to to live here.

And and some of these taxes uh affect the working poor.

And that's that's a big issue around here.

Uh people are worried about uh uh income disparity.

We taxing them more doesn't help the disparity, it just creates a bigger, bigger problem for folks that are struggling as it is.

But we we've heard other commissioners talk about people they're worried about people struggling.

Well, I am worried about it too.

I don't I don't want to add to their burden and make their uh make them run a marathon with uh an extra hundred pounds on their back by by doing this this type of thing.

So I just wanted to get those comments on the on the record.

So thank you for your presentation.

Okay.

Thank you.

And um I I love that you've now said uh three times throughout your presentation that you don't do policy, but uh you know, I think you're well equipped actually to help with that, by the way.

But I won't put you on the spot.

Um, but I do appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Um I really am appreciative of looking at this um, you know, 30,000 um high level, because we are now going to look at our local and what happens at a high level nationally does impact our community, and I think understanding that and the haves and the have nots and the disparity.

The bottom line is that job creation helps with that as well.

Job creation allows people to have that ability to purchase a home, for instance, which is usually the greatest acquisition of wealth that can hopefully be passed on through generations as well.

So it every county, just to kind of let I mean I sit on the NACO board, every single county in the entire state of Nevada, 17 of them are all looking at housing as being a number one goal in their own jurisdiction.

So it is impactful here, and so we appreciate again you coming.

I guess our investment committee tomorrow will be short because we just did it.

Um maybe it might be a short meeting, but I don't know if anybody else has anything.

Yes, just commissioner Kishmischer Herman, do you have any questions?

I I just would like to thank him for um coming today.

And I wanted to say that my crystal ball kind of collides or not collides, but um, you know, goes together with what he has said for the national level.

And so I I feel very a little more secure and a little probably a little more worried, but um anyhow.

Um thank you very much for being here today.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Treasurer Taylor, yes.

Thanks.

Up next, we have Dr.

Eugenie Lairmore.

Dr.

Eugenia specializes in economic and fiscal impact analysis, market feasibility studies, economic development consulting, demographic and economic modeling and projections, real estate analysis, and other economic research.

Comes with a long list of accolades.

Eugenia graduated from uh University of Nevada Arena with a doctorate in philosophy, degree in economics from the University of Reno.

Her doctor, her doctoral dissertation focused on the topic of public finance, specifically forecasting revenues, leading in coincident indices, and fiscal impact studies.

She also received a master's in business uh business business administration degree and a bachelor of science degree in uh international business and marketing with a minor in economics from you and our drink of water after you're gonna be able to do exactly welcome.

Thank you for coming and giving us a snapshot of our community.

Appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

Um let me know if you can't hear me.

I tend to lean away from the microphone.

Um, so the goal is to take what Mr.

Bowden told us about the national um indicators and bring it regionally, and as you all mentioned, this is very important because we are different.

We love to say we're different, but we truly are.

And so let's see what national impact or what national occurrences how how those occurrences must be first in in the morning, um, how those occurrences have impacted our regional performance.

So which one there you go.

This was a collaboration between myself and Chad GPT.

This is about the best as it's going to get, not to any kind of scale.

But the idea here is to show that we've come a long way.

We've had significant growth in our economy.

We had the post-recession Tesla growth, we had the post-COVID period of growth, about 15 years of double-digit growth and most of our indicators, and it's really have has become a new normal to many of us.

And the idea here to show that it's not the new normal, it's not going to continue.

And so if you take one thing away from this presentation, is that you know things may not be dire, they may not be horrible, but that double-digit growth that we experienced over the last about 15 years is not going to happen, at least not consistently, not every year the way we have experienced it.

And so what we like to call where we are now is increasing at a decreasing rate.

It's a economist love economists, I tell you.

So our car's been driving about 60 miles an hour.

We are driving, let's say 30 miles an hour.

We are not stopped, we are not going backwards, but we're not growing at the speed to which we have become accustomed.

And we need to realize that that you know, spending and growing at those levels is not sustainable.

So where wherever we go from here, as Mr.

Bowden mentioned, you know, there's a potential we may have some declines going forward nationally.

There's a lot of uncertainty.

We as economists love to base our numbers on averages.

Our averages are broken, our history, averages are only as valid as they are represented by what's going to happen in the future.

Our future is going to be completely different than what has happened in the past.

So it's it's difficult to predict where we are going.

We may have some slow growth.

Thank you, Chad GPT, for those wonderful lines.

Um, or we may have some decline.

Again, not to scale, not to scare you with the the declining number, but again, not that uh um that slope of growth that we've experienced.

So this is our population.

It's one of our most important components.

Population creates demand for housing, housing creates property tax.

Uh body spend money creates sales tax.

They gamble, they drink, um gaming revenues, things that are important to the county.

Um the county is this is kind of a silly comparison as a shark.

It needs to continue swimming, it needs to continue growing and to bring bodies into the county to continue to grow and be successful.

So again, to show this the tremendous success and growth that we've experienced over the last about 15 years.

We've had we grew by 6.3% between 2015 and 2020.

We added almost 30,000 people.

We added almost 30,000 people again in the last five years.

We're going to add, according to the demography, about 17,000 people.

So instead of over 5,000 people a year, we're going to add about 3,500.

Again, that increase and at a decreasing rate.

We're still growing.

Things are still great, but slower than we did in the past and more sustainably than we did in the past.

This allows us to take a step back and provide the infrastructure and provide the spending.

We're just not scrambling the way we have over the last few years, two decades.

This is really reflecting the national information.

Washoe County, this is 2024 data, a little bit dated.

Fell asleep.

I tend to do that too.

As with the national data, our natural growth is very low.

Our verse basically averaged out with our deaths in our county.

So without an inflow of people, 180 people, I mean, that that's a margin error at that point.

So we are not naturally growing.

So what we need is that net migration.

We have people who leave the county and people who come in.

We need that net number to stay high.

We and the majority in 2024, the majority of that number, I mean, two times the domestic, we had international in migration.

Um, that's obviously going forward is going to be impacted by policies, not even getting into that, but we're we're going to see the the international numbers drop.

And on the domestic side, we've seen a drop over the last few years because of affordability.

It's more difficult.

We are still very attractive to people.

We're creating wonderful jobs.

We'll talk about wages, our wages are great, but it's affordability and it's also just the basic availability of supply.

You can't bring bodies into a county where if they had nowhere to live.

We need the rooftops to accommodate those bodies.

Um, just kind of an interesting um slide that I took from um Brian Bonapon from UNR Center for Regional Studies, I'm sure you're all familiar with him.

Um, there's a lot of information from his presentations in here.

This is very dated data, but and while the numbers on the in migration have changed, the the regions have remained the same.

The majority of our population of our in migration is coming from Northern California, followed by the balance of the US, followed by the balance of Nevada, and then Southern California.

So with the the in with the California in migration with the balance of states, which is primarily from the South, comes an expectation of service provision that they had when they were at home.

And so that they move here, and those expectations move with them.

So we need to be aware of where there's just pressures on you guys, and I'm sure you're seeing this every day that, well, we had where I came from, we had best service.

And so we were getting into the potential scope creep of um of that, just those expectations.

So we need to be aware of that, as well as our not only are they coming from different places with maybe different ideas, their demographics are different from what we had in the past.

We're attracting because we are primarily attracting employees to the area, they are younger.

So we're getting the 18 to 39 year olds, whereas in the past we've had some older population growth.

So our Washoe County percent of population in 2024 that was 18 to 39 years old was 55% of our total population.

USA, US wide, it's 30%.

So we're almost double.

We have so many younger people moving to the area, which is wonderful, but it all again, it also comes with changes in demand for services.

You need maybe parks instead of social services or health care services.

So those demands, as our demographics change, we need to be aware of those demands.

And so what brings them here, as I mentioned, is our employment.

Again, these are average five-year average numbers, and you can see obviously there was the Great Recession that impact impacted us significantly.

We were just one of the most impacted states in the air in the US during the Great Recession.

We've had a tremendous recovery.

We've had the Tesla announcement in 2013, and things just grew from there, and you can see that really reflected in the numbers.

We grew by about almost 7,000 jobs on average per year over the last seven years.

Of course, a little bit of that is the post-res uh post-COVID decline and growth, but still, those numbers were just significant.

Last year we grew by 2200 people.

Again, great growth, almost 1%, but lower than we have in the past.

And where is that employment happening?

Educational and health services, we are seeing quite a bit of that primarily on the health services side.

Our health services is understaffed.

There's a lot of demand.

We'll talk about the job openings in that industry.

Professional business services actually experienced over the last couple of years, they experienced a decline in employment in the temporarily employment services industry.

And they're now catching up.

Government is the third highest growing.

And note the wages that come with those jobs, they're at or above the 3594 wage as of the fourth quarter 2024.

That data is very lagging, but they are the growth that we're experienced is in the higher wage jobs until you get to the leisure hospitality.

And we we just desperately need those jobs.

Those are the service jobs that we need to continue to grow.

On the decline, a bit surprisingly, is the transportation transportation warehousing, wholesale and construction.

Those were the industries that really have grown significantly over the last decade.

And they're now finally just tapering off.

We're not seeing huge declines, but we are seeing declines in those jobs.

But overall, again, about 2200 jobs gained in the last year.

Jobs really are only as important as the wages they pay and the impact of those wages.

So we talk quite a bit about CPI.

Wages are not really as important as it is what can they purchase.

So we're looking at the purchasing power, which means we're taking the wages and we're bringing them down.

We're taking the CPI out and we're bringing them all to 2002 level to provide that comparability.

So the gray kind of the background is the nominal wages, that's the actual paycheck numbers.

The blue line is adjusted for inflation.

So we were doing actually relatively well, some steady growth since the last 20 years until we hit that high inflation levels of well, first of all, post-COVID, you can see the line jumps.

2020, 2021, we were doing really great post-COVID wages just chopped through the roof.

That was really great to see.

And then we saw the decline, and that's because we're adjusting by CPI, and CPI went into 9% mode in 2022.

The good news is by 2024, and again, we don't have the 2025 data, but 2024, we're recovering.

So again, we're getting back on that trend where wages are increasing slightly above the CPI levels, and that's what we really want to see.

We're not growing tremendously, but we are not declining.

And you can see that that you know uh since 2022, since those high CPI levels, we are not declining in that purchasing power number.

So that's that's good news.

And unemployment rate, we've seen unemployment rates tick up.

We talked about that, but 4.3% is about the natural unemployment rate.

We are right as of um, I can't believe this is September.

I think this is November numbers, but we were right at national unemployment levels.

And I think I put this thing to sleep again.

Um, we were doing very well statewide.

We keep hearing in November we were uh statewide, we were the third highest unemployment state, and that's primarily you can see that that's primarily from the biggest numbers.

And so when you hear that as you know, Nevada has the highest unemployment rate or one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, that's primarily Vegas.

We are doing much better than that.

And mostly because of that uh high level diversification that we experienced.

I mean, the Muppets are no longer making fun of us.

We were had some tremendous growth, and we did a great job creating that growth, and we should all be proud of us of that.

Um, it carried us through COVID and it's going to continue to carry us going forward.

Just kind of an interesting example of what is happening in the market.

I did these little screenshots from this is employee and B through um Department of Employment.

And so I usually do a presentation every April, so I had the April numbers for in the past, but this is the current January number.

You can see we have more candidates for job openings.

Great for businesses, um, maybe some downward pressure on wages, depending on where the what the mismatch is between what we want in the jobs and what the people who are looking for jobs, what their skills may be.

And we do have a mismatch in this area.

As I promised, we were talking about healthcare growth.

There's about a thousand open positions between I want to renown and united health services.

So in the health industry, there's according to employee NB, there's over a thousand open jobs in the Hill CIP services.

Do we have the people locally who can fill those jobs?

And that's the mismatch.

So moving away from employment and into other economic indicator, taxable gaming revenue, and you will see this for taxable gaming revenue, taxable sales, C tax overall.

We are again increasing at a decreasing rate.

We the numbers are increasing, but not as health or as high as they did in the past.

So we look at the actual numbers, November to November of last year, year to date, we increased from 957 million to 995.

So good increase.

The better news is that if we seasonally adjust, that's the SA and take the real, so we adjust to exclude inflation.

In real terms, those numbers still increased.

And again, as with wages, that's what we want to see.

We want to see that we're outpacing inflation in these in these indicators.

Consolidated tax actually again, actual numbers grew, but adjusted for inflation, we declined.

Um not significantly, not panic mode, but there was a decline in our consolidated tax.

A lot of it there historically has been a lot of decline in the cigarette tax, surprisingly post-COVID.

It I think there one of the benefits of COVID is people got healthy more healthy, but we are seeing a little bit of a decline adjusted for inflation.

Taxable sales, same thing.

We increased in real terms, but and taxable sales, as you obviously know, are part of C tax.

So that number is reflected in the overall C tax number.

But again, if we take inflation out of it, those numbers again declined.

On the bright side is our passengers and visitors.

Those numbers, the airport continued to grow.

Um, they grow passenger every year, almost every month, adjusted for seasonality.

So we are seeing quite a few more people continue to come to the area.

And then getting to housing, I borrowed these um how these slides from Brian Bonifont's most recent presentation.

And so this is the supply of housing.

I think the most important part of this graph is the red lines.

That's multifamily.

If you look in the past, the blue lines are single family.

The percentage of our new supply that was made up of single family was it was more than it was two-thirds single family, one-third multifamily.

That has sweet switched, and we are seeing that single family is more expensive, affordability issues.

So we are providing more multifamily supply than we have ever in the past.

And you know, that that's very important for that affordability issue.

So we created, except for in 2025, where that multifamily dropped off, and that was because we added just thousands of units in the previous few years of multifamily, and we needed time to absorb that.

And you will see that on the multifamily uh rental chart, the impact of that.

But we added about 2,000 units in 2025.

Um that really kind of corresponds to the 5,000 people that we added in that year.

2.2.5 people per unit.

New home sales.

The interesting about new home sales is you see the impact of the increase in the federal funds rate starting in 23, 24, 25, those numbers are very steady on the sales.

Um, things have dropped off steadily.

This is as much as an issue of demand as it is of supply.

Developers are more reluctant to spend the money on development while the rates are so high.

Um, interesting note on the prices, you can see the price, which is the red line, fluctuates significantly.

But if you take it to us per square foot level, it's 282 dollars per square foot in 2023, 282 dollars per square foot in 2024, and 287 dollars per square foot in 2025.

So the difference in the prices are the sizes of the units which are being offered because your population of new or your sample of new homes is so low.

If you add a one large village of 3,500 square foot homes, that's going to pop your new home sales price to a higher level.

So for new home sales, we prefer to look at per square foot numbers, and those have not, those have been very steady over the last three years.

Where the change did happen is in those existing home sales.

Now we added about 150 sales in the last year.

So again, very steady growth, but significantly below the pre-high interest rate levels.

The home prices, and there it's a little more difficult, but the home prices for existing homes have been increasing.

But what's interesting is we when we look at it this way, we had 11% growth in home prices between 2012 and 2020.

Between 2020, 22, we were 22% per year, 11% per year.

So we had tremendous increases in our home prices last since between 2022 and 25, 2% per year.

This is what we need for our home prices.

This is a steady week, we don't want, I mean, it would basically be stagflation.

We don't want home prices to decline, but the 2% increase, our wages over the last few years have grown by 5% per year.

This is that opportunity.

We're not going to make up this giant leap in home sales that we've had in the past, but this is our opportunity to just slow things down a little bit and to at least catch up to some point.

And just kind of interesting with talking about investors and driving up prices and regulating investor purchased homes, you know, this is kind of the market creating its own regulation.

We've had when the the interest rates increased, the number of cash purchases, investor purchases in the area increased, right?

There is less less competition for those investors.

They were able to come in.

If you had the cash, you could just buy the home.

In 2025, and the home prices started increasing by 2%, that rate of return made it less desirable for those investor properties or investor purchases.

We saw a decline from 27% in 24 to 26% in 20.

Wait, 27% in 2024 to 26% in 2025.

That's you know, one data set.

It's obviously not the creation of a trend, but we would love for this to be a creation of a trend that the market self corrects to the point where it's no longer desirable for investors to come in and compete in the market and without us having to do any adjustments, as Mr.

Bowden was saying, we're we're afraid to come in and we're afraid to start playing with the market with the housing market, and we may break something else as we're trying to fix it.

So this is hopefully the beginning of that natural trend where the market attempts to correct itself.

And just some the health of our the housing market.

What's really interesting in this is we saw active listings increase.

And so there was a lot of excitement in the in the community about our active listings are finally going up.

What happened was our days to contract increased at the same time.

So if we looked at new listings, it actually they actually did not increase.

So we are still the point of all of this is we are still very low in our housing supply.

And our supply, again, as we be, we are very attractive.

People want to move here.

Our supply is going to be a huge impact on our uh our prices going forward.

And just another interesting piece of information, just the comparison of our prices, we have to look at ourselves as a region.

And we are obviously we're the highest prices of the developed areas of the metropolitan area.

But if you look at Douglas County and the prices that they have and this level of sales that they've experienced that has exceeded the Fernley and Dayton and Carson City numbers, where the prices are even significantly lower, we are seeing a lot of that higher end purchase activity, but with a different demographic.

These are not employer, employees moving to the area.

This is retirees.

So there is definitely room for higher end pricing.

There is a lot of affordability.

There's also a lot of affordability, or not a lot of affordability, there's a lot of options.

There is affordability in some of the other regional areas, such as Fernley.

And then last slide, I promise this is the apartment vacancy.

And this is what we talked about in the last few years.

And you can tell from the red line that as those apartments were absorbing, we were relatively steady on our apartment prices.

We were able to continue to add supply to keep those prices steady.

Still being able to not be able to afford single family housing, especially with the mortgage rates not coming down the way people expected that they would by now.

Pop those numbers up in 2025, as you saw in 2025, we did not build very much multifamily supply.

So again, this shows that that very close relationship that we have between supply and prices.

So there is affordability at the middle median wage.

Well, the definition of median is 50% of your population is below.

So from an economic standpoint, that's a great number.

From more social that we we have 50% of our population that's having a difficult time.

And that's it.

Thank you for bringing this down to a local level and then tying it in to how important it is to look at the national level because it does set a trend in terms of the inflation and various other things.

And I would just say that you know, fundamental economics is that supply and demand.

So if you have scarcity, prices go up.

If there's not scarcity and there's plenty of supply, prices go down.

And that's just very simple.

I am not uh a PhD in economics, certainly, but I uh do think that it's important that we do understand that there is these balances of um treasure tailor and the team and budget and leadership and the experts that we bring in to help guide us in making these in some cases some pretty tough decisions.

I feel like you know, there's these dials, right?

Unemployment and inflation, and you're always trying to get to this balance.

And if someone could figure that out, I guess we'd all not be here.

But the reality is is that we are, I'm gonna just gonna bring it back again.

I'm just gonna remind everyone from my perspective, we are in a new frontier.

We have to think about things, I think, differently than we've ever really thought about them, at least from my perspective.

And I think your point about from an economic standpoint on the 50% from housing, that actually half of the folks can't afford it.

But I do think we have to be very careful of trying to falsely in adjust the market as well.

So there goes those those levers of balance.

So I can't thank you enough.

I think I'm gonna walk away, probably saying increasing at a decreasing rate all day.

So if you all hear me talking about that, it's going to be the that averages are broken.

I think that is concerning to me, and that certainly um it's interesting to me when you were talking um about the uh the lower ages or I I consider them very young folks that are making up the majority of the folks that are coming here, but then the growth rate, the natural growth rate isn't there.

So I don't know if we want to give them a book on that, but um, I'm hoping that we can um you know be appreciative of the fact that as Douglas County you showed, for instance, Douglas County retirees are going there, and although they're benefiting economically, the fact is is that how do I say this?

The multiplier effect of their contributions of um employment is negligible to that of a younger folk person who's working and contributing and creating that economic engine in our economy, how did I do from an economic standpoint?

So I think that that's an important thing to think about as we're balancing again our priority number one is housing, along with the governor's office, along with all the other jurisdictions.

So I do appreciate the diversification that you've shown as well.

And I'm hoping that we have an opportunity to continue to get a pulse read on this, not only from a national level, but a local level, because although the folks that are well informed about all of this are doing great work as staff with, for instance, Treasurer Taylor and Miss Yacobin and Lori Cook and Kathy Hill and all the team.

The reality is that I think the more that we can share that with everybody and the public, the better they'll understand as we navigate these waters of looking at the budget and looking at keeping expenses in check while not raising taxes, and then also trying to get at least uh uh uh what would we want to call that a forecast of the best we can as you guys are looking at this all the time.

So I appreciate it.

Thank you for giving me a moment to talk.

I'm actually going to go to Commissioner Herman and see if you have any questions for Dr.

Lermore.

Um, no questions, just to thank you very much.

Thank you.

Any questions?

Commissioner Hill.

Thank you, madam chair, and great presentation as usual.

Thank you.

It's so good to see you.

And you also serve, don't you serve on another county board?

A couple board of equalization.

And dead commissioner.

And thank you for your service to the county.

We really appreciate it.

Um I am looking at the folks moving to Washoe County, and no wonder we're in a child care crisis.

And uh I think that we we just haven't seen that before.

We are what we have typically had in the region, which just we're not able to keep up.

So um, because these are the people that are having children.

And then on the education and health services, um, page nine, you've got it at 35, 21 an hour.

Um, but many of these jobs are not paying that.

Like they're would you put like teacher aids, child care workers, um, in-home uh care for seniors, like they're not making this much, or would they be in a different category?

No, they would absolutely be in that category, and again, as we were talking about with affordability and wages.

Yeah, it's a median, it's a 50-50.

So you have the doctors and the healthcare.

Yes, okay.

And they're skewing it.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Well, they're they're less skewing it than if we used an average.

Yeah, okay.

With an average, you have the outliers and you move towards the the higher numbers.

In this case, it it the way you look at it is 50 percent or below and 50 percent or above.

And we need workers in those fields, but we don't like my perspective.

We don't pay them enough, so there's that's why there's a lot of those jobs available um in the community.

So that's interesting.

Um other questions, it's just uh thank you for this and um great perspective on the region.

Um we appreciate it.

Okay, Commissioner Clark, do you have a question?

Couple of comments.

Thank you for your service.

Uh I first met you on the uh Board of Equalization years ago, and and you you've done a great job with uh with that and great leadership on on that board.

Very important board for uh for a lot of reasons, but uh that's my first method, and I appreciate your work.

I've got a few comments uh uh board of about the first of all, the board of equalization, but uh Miss Butcher on public comment brought up uh issues about budget here versus other communities our size.

I'd like to see a copy of that.

I think she gave that to the clerk, and I also like to find out why we didn't have the overhead projector available at this at this meeting for whatever reason.

It's nice to have our meetings here in the chamber with all the all the technology that we have, but then we can't use it for public comment.

It's it's just uh uh just a little bit off, I think.

Next, uh I want to talk about sales tax here.

And uh you said uh the C taxes are still uh down, but uh they're not moving as fast.

Is that a correct statement?

How exactly would you award that?

They are growing, but they are not growing faster than inflation, at least in the last year, inflation grew a little bit faster than RC tax.

So the C C tax isn't growing as fast as it we'd like to see it as is fair statement, I think is yes.

Okay.

So with our county having higher sales tax than the surrounding counties, do we is there any way to track the how much sales tax is escaping?

Uh I talked to car dealers here uh and and people who sell large appliances, big purchase items when you can go to another county 10, 15, 20 miles away, and and then on a car you can save several thousand dollars.

How is that affecting our our growth of and uh and uh of seed taxes?

Do you think?

Just and then is there any way to track what might be escaping to surrounding counties?

Yes, there is a way uh they're called leakage studies.

Uh I've seen them done, I've done them primarily the data is based on survey data.

And so you start looking at if businesses are keeping track, for example, car dealerships.

If you can get data from them on you go to Lyon County and say how many of your purchasers are from 89521.

Sure.

So we look at zip codes, and so we can there is quite a bit of ability to track that those leakages, but it all depends on data.

Sure, sure.

How would we as a county commissioners uh get that data?

Is there a way that would we have to commission a study to do that?

I mean, how how what do you think is uh the easiest, fastest, quickest way for county commissioners to have an understanding of what might be escaping across county lines based on the difference in in sales tax?

I I think a study um a issue really is, and I don't know if the county would have more power of this is do the businesses want to release the information.

The confidentiality is typically one of the biggest issues that when we try to do studies like this that have to get into the business's operations, is having access to that data.

Sure, and I understand people's concern for privacy, but on the other hand, everybody wants to talk about shop local, shop local.

Oh, let's shop local.

And my first question is why if if you have to pay more to shop local, do you have it's a premium to shop local?

That doesn't uh induce people to want to shop local.

I mean, people are are struggling.

There's a lot of financial uh uh disparities out there, and folks are trying to stretch their dollar.

So if we try and encourage shopping local, but our sales taxes is higher, it's it's it was sending a mixed mixed message to the public, I think.

Douglas County, you brought up Douglas County, and uh and I'm from there, so I I really appreciate that.

Uh Douglas County's got some some different things down there that that help draw people to that that area, and one of them is the senior center down there, and so you know I've I've talked about this more than once, the senior center in Douglas County, and also the great food they serve down there.

So again, those are reasons why uh these are unintended consequences.

People don't realize that if you have other amenities, they bring in other other folks and and and are able to spend more for for uh houses, which equals uh uh you know property tax.

So uh those are just things that we should be looking at if we're talking about budgets in our county.

Uh talking about chamber of commerce and the jobs.

It's one thing to look at deater's numbers, it's another thing to look at the local chamber of commerce who I talk to on a regular basis, and and they have a number of jobs, thousands of jobs, and and they say they're not jobs, they're not entry-level jobs, they're careers.

So that's an opportunity for for folks that uh, you know, if we've got some uh declining employment around here, folks should check in with the Chamber of Commerce and look at that.

I just want to get that on the record, but and make you aware of it as well.

I don't know if you ever get a chance to chat with Ann Silver at the Chamber of Commerce, but she's got some good information on a local level.

So all right, thank you.

Thanks for your help.

Thank you, Vice Chair Garcia.

Thank you, madam chair.

Well, welcome, Dr.

Larmar.

I wanted to draw our attention to slide number seven, and then I have a question about slide number 17.

So, first on slide number seven, these are the movers to Washoe County.

Um, this was very eye-opening to me, and um recognizing that this is almost double the national average, and I really like that you drew our attention to the fact that this population is gonna demand different types of services and hold the count, you know, the accountability on us as a local government is gonna look and feel a lot different, especially it'll be interesting to see what folks are saying during an election year.

I think that um some of those priorities will rise to the top uh this year any election year for that matter.

But um, I see it shows for 2024.

My first question on this slide is this is this a relatively new trend to see this younger demographic moving, and if so, when did you see that start happening?

I could not give you it's not a new trend.

Okay.

We've seen that that was basically after the Tesla effect when we started creating the jobs at the rate that you know at six five, six thousand dollars or five or six thousand jobs a year.

Most of those jobs were younger people, and that's really what's attracted people to this area.

In the past, we've had just uh a very broad range of ages, and people move to Reno for different um reasons.

This is this has been this this past growth has been employment generated growth, and so we're seeing that in the younger jobs or in the younger persons.

And on the bottom part of that table, uh 7.6%, 75 years or older have been moving.

So there's obviously draws to that segment of the population as well to move to Washoe County for I assume quality of life, um outdoors, those types of amenities.

Yes, but they represent 7% of the people who moved here and 18% of the total US population, which means we're drawing them at a lot lesser rate than they represent in the in the US.

Okay, thank you.

And then on the go into Douglas County apparently.

Yeah, they're going to Douglas County.

Um on slide number 17.

Um, the the flip-flop of the single family versus a multifamily is just very apparent.

Um I was curious how multifamily is defined on this slide.

Are you taking in account uh diverse housing types, or is it just uh the traditional apartment, what we would perceive as multifamily?

Typically, we look at multifamily as rental product.

Okay, and so single family would include condos and town homes, multifamilies really just apartments.

Um it would include anything that is senior apartment, you you know, like specific low low income or senior designated apartments, so that would be included in that.

Um I'm sorry, there's another part of your question.

No, I think let me just clarify.

So the multifamily is more encompassing of rentals, correct.

But but rentals when they are designed and really we use assessor data to collect this information, so they're designated as apartment style homes.

Okay, so they are not rentals in I own a single family home and I rent it to somebody else type of rentals.

They are apartment style rentals.

Okay, maybe duplexes, but not single family homes.

Okay.

Do we track um I I'm very interested in seeing a more diversification of the housing types we have in our region.

I think as we look at our aging population, we have a growing segment of our seniors who are living in large square foot homes that you know are not interested in taking care of and maintaining that that big of a property anymore.

And I I think as they look at options within the county, it's very limited.

They don't necessarily want to move into an apartment.

Um, but if there was a cottage court or a duplex or fourplex, that might be more appealing to to help people transition out of those single family homes, which would then you know increase the availability for some of these younger families to move into those homes.

So I just feel like we've we've gotten locked into these two types really, and it's really limiting to um what the needs of our families and our our diverse community needs.

So um that's why I was just curious of of how it was defined.

And and actually to your point, we have recently we've had a lot of drop in the persons per household numbers.

We're seeing quite a few single single persons living in single family housing.

And so there is quite a bit of mismatch between number of people per space, and especially as supply becomes an issue.

That's definitely an issue.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner Hill.

I know we're over time.

I'm so sorry.

Um, but I was just thinking about what um Commissioner Clark was talking about about sales tax revenues coming in lower, and a lot of that's gotta be on lack of disposable income, but also that we don't tax as much.

We're we've become more of a service-based economy.

We don't tax services, obviously, in the state.

I'm just curious what's your perspective on that.

And I know it's a tiny dip, it's not you're not freaking out yet.

But well, we're absolutely not freaking out because we're comparing to 2024 numbers.

Right.

And 2024 numbers was still the tail end of the COVID budget.

We're we're through those money by now.

Um, so we are seeing just you know, we we we had this just hangover where people after COVID were spending like crazy.

We're now that money has run out.

25 was the first year of this kind of the more new normal of we don't have the excess cash that we had in the past.

So that is not a concern in and of itself as a it is to you guys to us because we're yeah, we just may not have the revenues.

But from an economic standpoint, it doesn't mean that things are broken.

It just means that we had this inflow of cash that got spent through the economy.

We're kind of back to a new normal.

But it's you were doing this based on actual sales tax revenues, correct?

Taxable sales taxable sales.

Because we've also reduced as a state, and I'm sure that board members probably are fine with it, but you know, it also does reduce our revenues.

We reduce, you know, you're not paying for uh feminine hygiene products and sales tax and so and other things that you know policy-wise, we're probably fine with, but you know, they're affecting the counties real time as well and revenues as well.

So absolutely that would be reflected in okay.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Thank you.

I I think to your point, Commissioner Hill, it's like interesting that we have um I'm a little older than you, so I've lived through the whole message of smoking as an example.

And so to see the decrease is great from a health perspective for longevity for mortality, which actually has a longer curve of cost over time to government because people are living long.

So it's great that not that I'm against anybody smoking.

I'm a person that believes in freedom of making choices.

But the reality economically then allows folks having a message here, there's a balance there.

So that's interesting, right?

And the fact is is that folks will go where prices are lower.

That is a proven fact.

Depending on your own personal spending power and your purchasing power, you will go where it's lower in terms of savings, whether it is not only based on an income, but also based on you as a person in terms of how you make purchases and decision making.

So it's very, very wonderful to have you take and extrapolate all of this information, correlate it to national, and to allow us to um even I think I'll talk about it later, but that demographic, too, that Vice Chair Garcia brought up on page seven really was surprising to me as well.

Um we all use the Tesla effect, whatever we want to call it.

But the reality is is that that is I think a promising factor in terms of economic engine and growth.

So I see that as a positive as well.

So if there aren't any other questions, we will thank you again for your service and thank you, Treasurer Taylor, for all your leadership.

Thank you for everything and your team does.

I think we're gonna move now to manager Thomas.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We are going to dive a little deeper now into our um review of an audited year-end financial results.

And so we're inviting our comp troler, Kathy Hill to join us, and then our budget director, Lori Cook can also come on up and get comfortable at the table as we dive deeper into the audited financials and the status of our organization as a whole now that we've seen national local, now we'll go organizational.

So welcome, comptroller Hill.

Yeah, I don't know what the slides.

Yeah, that's right.

Shall we start I'm just making sure you're all ready.

You're ready to go.

All ready to go.

Well, welcome.

Thank you so much.

The floor is yours, ma'am.

Good morning for the record, Kathy Hill Washoe County Comptroller.

So, with all the projections that we've gone through with the previous presenters, it's here, it's not there.

It's there.

Magic.

Um, we'll talk about where we ended up in June 30th, 2025 with the audit financials of Washville County and with the presentations that have previously be given to the board and to county management, and where we saw that the county put in financially.

As you know, uh from the auditors being here previously from the audit, we did successfully complete FY25 with a clean audit opinion.

Washoe County did end up with 2.5 million dollars net added to its fund balance.

I say net because we did not take into consideration the unrealized gains that are that that come to the county as they're not realized.

But we did that was where we were we thought we were agending, that's where we ended up.

What we are looking at going into FY26 is we have some concerns, the general fund being the main fund for the the county, but the general fund also funds some other internal service funds and a special revenue fund, the roads fund with the roads fund budget has come to the board of county commissioners before for uh funding assistance on that.

That is something that the county continues to stay sensitive to and aware of.

The other two funds I'd like to bring you attention your attention to is the first one is the risk fund with the legislative change out there on the claims that are allowable for loan claims going back to 1985.

We're anticipating a financial effect and economic effect on that that may require some additional funds from the general fund, and also the health benefits from the environment out there for health premiums and health care.

That is a big wild card, as well as those costs tend to go up.

We'll stay sensitive to that and work with budget should additional funds be needed for those from the general fund.

Any questions on the the where we ended up for FY25?

I will pass it on to division director of budget, Lori Cookie saw no okay.

I'm trying here.

Okay, now it's on.

All righty.

Now that Matt's taken care of, usually it's this part of the technical, not this.

So uh for the record, um division director of budget for Washoe County.

When we're looking at information, and there's a lot of information on this slide, I'm not gonna read everything word for word.

But when we talk about um uh Dr.

Larmore talked about the pace of growth, right?

So we have growth at a decreasing rate, right?

Um, we've had uh these you know discussions or or data points or our or whatnot before.

So when we look at 21 through 25, when we look at those growth rates, uh we see, and this is a general fund right now, obviously the largest fund that also supports um quite a few other funds.

Uh, we've seen total revenue growth average increase 7.1% while salaries and wages at uh 7.3%, and that is a portion of our budget, and then um retirement or PERS, and we've brought this forward, but these their data points, their information points.

Uh we've seen a growth average of 10.3% with group insurance at 5.3.

Uh, within the CPIU, which we know the western region is a little bit different, but to stay consistent with comparators, uh, we've seen about a 4.5% average increase pre-COVID, which should not be as surprise.

And again, it's a longer time frame than five years, but about 2.3.

So what we saw over the COVID or post-COVID is about double.

Um, and then this population growth, my numbers are coming, uh have different time parameters than Dr.

Larmore's, but um, just getting back to the point that not only are we seeing growth, but what we've seen in this growth is higher than national averages, right?

And so it's not a one-for-one, it's not if we have a one percent growth in population in Washoe County.

Now we have a one percent increase in in service requirements, right?

So it's the type of uh to several points made it, it's the demographics of the folks that are moving here and expected services and um comparative services and all of those different um impacting uh impacts, I guess is the better word to say it.

So this is the the picture.

So what we've seen is if we look at revenue, we see this 21, 22, 23, right?

So we see this revenue almost double digit in 2122.

So we see the tail end did this, and now we're seeing this growth rate do this.

When we're looking at major personnel, it's our largest expenditure type.

There are some other items in here that are not made, but we're talking salaries, so our sellers and wages, PERS and group insurance.

We can see that, right?

So this is what we're seeing.

I was told to do this physically.

So um top of my hands, right?

So what we're seeing.

So we're seeing almost double digit growth in revenue in in the in the prior years, and we're seeing this tail end come down, right?

So we're still seeing growth, but it's not the same growth percentage or the same growth level.

We're seeing the opposite when we're looking at some of our largest, or when we're looking at our our largest expenditure.

So that when we say it's inverted, or we say it's you know contrary, that's what we mean.

What we would like to see are these right, the these data points, these growth rates be similar, right?

So if we had a uh structurally balanced budget, you would see revenues and expenditures, and then you know, make decisions if there's access or make decisions if there's not enough.

Um, so um this just compounds issues of uh policy decisions and how to allocate resources.

Um just like to also remind the public, but also remind the board that when it comes to salaries and when it comes to personnel that we follow the board's policy of being at the 50%.

So when our staff is maxed out, when our when our jobs are our uh positions are maxed out, they're at the 50% of our comparables.

So um just as a as the different data point.

So we've seen this over the past three years, right?

Average sources that includes transfers in.

We don't have a lot of transfers in in the general fund, but we do have some, the majority of its revenue.

Um increased 7.6% while average uses have increased 10.5%.

And that's removing the settlement payments and other one-time material.

If we had a one-time transfer to CIP for something, it excludes those.

So what we're seeing here are really those those baseline trends.

Uh personnel costs have increased in average 11.2, those PERS, salaries, group insurance because of the outstand, or not outstanding, I guess it's it's signed legislation now related to risk management.

We are going to see what we have to recoup or what we have as uh risk rates.

We're gonna have to see that that's gonna have to increase.

Um, so it's gonna it's gonna show in in those budget data and through those uh payroll expenditures.

Services and supplies, we've seen an increase of 10.3 and transfers out, we've seen an increase of 8.6.

Um last year, the largest increase, they're the biggest impact to the last year for the current year, fiscal year 26 was that increase for the roads fund.

This is the what we're looking at from a forecast perspective.

So what we're forecasting continues to be this structural imbalance.

So this thing continuing.

Um, so when we're looking at property tax and C tax, we're expecting that, and again, these numbers are, and I'll go into you know, right, all forecasts have soft spots, they have weaknesses because again, we just don't know what we don't know.

But we're looking at that um largest percentage of of averaging about 5% personnel averaging about a 6.3% services and supplies.

See, we're seeing that normalize a little bit.

Um, and so we're gonna anticipate that continuing and not seeing across the board these 10 and 15 and 20% increases, and then transfers out.

So this on the bottom is a scale from the National Weather Service that somebody on the executive team provided to me.

And it's freak outness, but I would probably say freak outedness.

I'd probably add another syllable in there just because I I don't know, I probably would.

Um what we're seeing are unsustainable structural deficits.

Um this is the same information that was presented when the budget was adopted.

However, it's updated for how we finished out 25, right?

So this looks like okay, how we finished out fiscal year 25.

That's that actual in that actual column.

The estimate of where we think we're gonna be at the end of this year, which of course uh we will we are doing another uh we call them cost plans, but their personnel forecasts, we're doing another one on Thursday.

So that gives us, okay, where do we where are we going to be at the end of or close to, or do we think we're gonna be at the end of this year, June 30th, 2026, and all of next year.

So fiscal year 27.

So June, July 1st, 2026 through June 30th, 27.

So we see these, right?

These colors, what are these colors mean?

When we look at fund balance, the fund balance numbers, they don't, you know, they're not terrible.

Um, but the declining of them is um from a freak outness person, that right, that that's the concern.

So we see these outer years of these declining fund balances being out of the board's policy or getting close, very close to the board's policy, and then getting very close to our legal requirement.

We're legally required in the general fund to have four percent fund balance, which from a cash flow perspective, we would have different problems.

We we would be talking about different different things.

But when we look at the total revenue or over under uses, so if you see a negative there, that would be what we're using more than what we think we're going to have.

And you see it accelerates a little bit because once we see those those deficits build on themselves and not really become one time, so then um the the color um the way that they line up is just slightly different.

Uh there's not a no worries on here, just because we do have these forecasts of um structural deficits.

So this obviously gets um we're still finalizing base, which means you know, contracts, other increases as well as the cost plan that we're gonna post on while we're gonna work on posting Thursday, and um this will continue to be updated.

But right now, what we see and what we talked about a little bit last week was the better than anticipated 25 that right that shifted that changed this forecast if those are the only things that changed, but other things are changing at the same time.

So what are some of the uh variables, limitations, soft spots, weaknesses?

I've I've looked it up in Chat GPT and stuff, and there's just whatever you want to call it, um, unknowns, right?

So we do have some fairly optimistic P tax and C tax estimates, uh, nothing crazy, um, but not as um perhaps conservative as maybe in prior uh forecasts.

Uh no above base or ongoing enhancements, that's not necessarily a reality, but what does that look like?

Right, is is that more of a reallocation perspective?

What does that look like?

Uh 1.5% contingency in that forecast, the statutory maximum is 3% and 1.5%.

Um makes me nervous, but um it is what it is.

Salary savings are reflected in there, so natural seller savings are reflected as um negatives or contra expenditures, that's already reflected in there.

One-time investments are also not reflected.

So if we had um additional for whatever, um say it's a major technology implementation or a major project uh that is for priority, that's not reflected in there as a use.

Additional costs outside of the current forecast, and that just kind of goes without saying, but for the public or anybody who you know might not have been involved or interested in these, right?

We have PERS, so we will find out next November what our PERS rate will be for the next two years, the next biennium, so 28 and 29.

Uh, what's going on with group insurance, what's going on with legislative impacts.

So we did have, we obviously almost always have impacts, but but what are those impacts and how do we have to implement anything related to the legislation legislative session, which of course we'll have another one of those next year.

Uh insufficient CIP transfers for current infrastructure.

This is just important to remind that we're probably between an 18 and a 20 million dollars just for what we have now to invest in infrastructure, right?

So we we don't have roofs caving in and whatnot, and we are not there.

We're about 13, so not quite half, but not there.

That doesn't take into consideration funding for new projects, and that's the last um bullet point or weakness or you know, identified soft spot is the funding mechanisms for major capital or infrastructure projects, and that's both within the world of our capital improvement and things people think about, you know, buildings or major rehabilitation, but also our roads fund.

Those are those are capital, though the roads are not inexpensive.

Um, so those are uh major considerations.

So going back to the messaging from last week, just re re-emphasizing the conversations and messaging that you know it's a prioritization if we can for net zero and reallocation requests, uh, continued resource sharing, leveraging resources, one-time investments.

Um there's some I won't, I know Dave's gonna have some stuff to talk about, but I think there are some really interesting uh investments being made, some of those within future of work and different things and how we do business, and um so I think we're making progress in many different areas, but um obviously we need to look at well, how can we continue to that be more efficient?

And um, we are not alone.

So we are not uh local governments in general.

This this is not uh unique to Washoe County.

Um, this is information from a the October local government budgeting and planning outlook by ClearGov.

So they uh did a survey of 196 local governments across the United States.

50% of those respondents were uh people that represent the organizations from financial, the other 50% were executive management, so it's not just a uh finance perspective, it's really an organizational perspective.

60%.

So they they wanted they told them to rate the top two investments that they look at going for the next year.

60% of those talk about modernizing inefficient systems.

That is very, very telling.

Uh the next was 47% choose advancing construction or capital projects, right?

We're not alone.

Very, very telling.

Uh so strategic planning is an important process that allows local governments to learn resources with their priorities to better serve their communities.

There's a link on the bottom.

You can get this, you can get this report.

I can send it.

Um, I downloaded it, but um, it's available to the public.

You can you do have to give them your email.

So if you don't want to be getting pinged, maybe you have a separate email for your I don't know, your department store stuff or something.

I don't know.

Um, but it will ask for your email.

So just very interesting.

But if you look, you know, increasing financial transparency, but what you see at the bottom, increasing local funding, adding or expanding community programs, and that's unfortunate, but it is the reality, at least short term.

So that was um, I was gonna then hand it over and um kind of have that segue, but obviously, if there's any questions or um additional information we're we're here too.

Does anyone have any questions?

I am hoping that we could have an opportunity if something comes up as other presentations um are brought up that we have uh access to these two wonderful folks.

Um is that okay?

And and I just want to make sure okay, thank you.

Commissioner Hill.

I know I talk about this a lot, but with the state controlling all potential revenue sources for our community except for SGST, which would bring in 20 million dollars a year if we chose to do that as a board, and obviously that's a policy discussion we need to have, but they control how much revenue comes in, they tell us how much we need to have for fund balance, and then they just threw on this heart and lung, and hey, we can dispute the policy discussion on that.

But my understanding is Clark County's looking at like a 50 million dollar hit to their budget.

I don't know what have we looked at that and done an estimate on that for the heart money.

I don't know if Michael, I apologize.

Uh yeah, we looked at it.

It's there's a lot of factors that go into the heart lung, not just only for medical factors, but age, disability payments, and surviving spouse payments.

If I remember correctly, we were looking at a possible hit of in the two million dollar range.

Okay.

But we have to annually annually, you have to go back, it goes back to 1985.

So looking at any lung claims that came through COVID being the biggest biggest history there right now, it hasn't hit us yet, but we the the opportunities there.

And then, you know, looking at 2030, which um potentially uh could that's like midway between if I were to elect be elected to a third term, we're in like serious trouble as a region.

Um I'm just wondering, and this is just a thing for us to think about and not necessarily like action needs to be done, but how can the how can the state do this to our region?

I'm just wondering how that I mean what what are we going to do if there's no changes for our communities?

I mean, we we might as well brand if we have to make giant cuts, these are state required cuts that the county must do because the state will not allow us to run the business of the county.

So I just want to throw that out there that we um I I think it's really important that we as a county talk about how we are not in control over many of these factors, and we are doing the best we can delivering services, trying to take care of people who are our responsibility to take care of, and we don't have the resources to do so.

And um we need to discuss that as a county and be very transparent be to the public because I think the public is wondering why this is happening, and they're they're like uh we're growing.

How are we how are we not able to keep up with you know how our revenues not able to keep up with our expenses, and it's not necessarily a county issue.

Um it's a state issue.

So that's just I wanted to note that.

Thank you, madam chair.

Thank you.

Uh Commissioner Herman, do you have any questions?

Not at this time.

Thanks.

Um I I would just add uh and clarify that the October 2025 local government budgeting and planning outlook where the 196 local government respondents across the US actually face similar situations.

So I think um thank you for providing the link.

Uh that would probably take a good 10 minutes to type in.

So uh I'm hoping that you might be able to share that uh with us.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

Um in the spirit of um having a workshop and giving the opportunity for everyone to get into a deep dive, which is really exciting, and I apologize.

I was so excited.

I I skipped public comment, but this is really exciting to be able to dive in, not so exciting for some of the information.

But how do we make decisions if we don't understand the detail?

That's the bottom line.

And I think we have an obligation to also share this from a transparent standpoint and our commitment to always be transparent and in terms of uh serving um Washoe County.

So having said that, we are going to take a break for 15 minutes.

To order back out of recess at 11 30.

So we'll let everyone get settled for a moment.

Certainly appreciate everyone's patience as we go through this stimulating conversation about the budget.

And more to come.

Everybody here.

We're going to connect manager Thomas.

Assistant County Manager Dave Solero to talk a little bit for us about mandated county services.

I know that's something that the board has wondered, you know, when you look at the structural deficit that we're in, what are we required to do versus what we are doing in addition to that?

So we'll turn over to manager assistant manager Silero.

Good morning.

Uh as Manager Thomas mentioned, I'm Dave Solero, Assistant County Manager, uh, here to walk through an overview of mandated services and some that are not so mandated.

Um and so as Dr.

Larimore mentioned earlier, uh, we do have an influx of our population that expects different things than potentially we have the ability to serve.

And so some of that shows up in the services that we that we provide, and more importantly, the levels of those service, like really how do we how do we do what we do?

So I have some numbers here on the slide 823, 116 and one, and I'd be super impressed if anybody could tell me what these numbers mean without looking at the next slide.

And since um I took the time to to do a bunch of counting, I wouldn't expect you all to do that.

And we lost it again, so waiting for the drum roll.

823 distinct chapters of Nevada state law.

Of those chapters, um, you know, we refer to them as NRS, that's the Nevada revised statutes.

Those are the laws that govern uh the state of Nevada, essentially, all the way down to the counties and the cities within the and uh all the other districts.

So we've got general improvement districts as well.

Of those 823, 116 of them actually mandate that Washoe County provide a service.

So they're mandated that Washoe County, one form or another, whether it's the county itself or other elected officials within the county, uh, have to provide services to our residents, sometimes with funding, sometimes without.

Uh just really depends on on kind of how we get there.

Now, I say 116, but in reality, Washoe County is a government, we have to follow all the laws of the state of Nevada, whether they're mandated or not.

Uh so for instance, if we choose to own property, uh, we have to follow all of the laws set out as far as what we can do and how we dispose of and how we buy that property.

Those are you know, mandated ways we do business.

So the service level is set kind of a little bit in that realm from the state law if we choose to provide services or if we are mandated to do them.

And then finally, one strategic plan.

So that is your plan uh that we do uh you know, really to follow and make sure we are forecasting future impacts and outlining the priorities with specific actions, resources, and timelines necessary for us to be successful.

Uh the plan bridges the high-level aspirations of the community and the county uh with the day-to-day work of the organization focused on a common defined future.

And this is where many of our non-mandated services come from.

The work we do uh because we are actually trying to alleviate future impacts.

Um here's this little book that is published every year for Washoe County, and it uh it is our bubble our budget book.

It contains eng information related to the mandated services.

So every department has a little section in here, and it talks about the department and what the department does and why.

So it talks about all of those state laws that they follow that are mandating that the service be provided.

Um in addition, uh, you know, this little 400 page plus book uh really contains many of the financial policies of the board of county commissioners.

So since this is a budget discussion, it's important that the public understand how decisions are made from a budgetary standpoint, and that information starts uh about page 380 in this book, uh goes on for 10 or 11 pages, uh, really outlining all of the budgeting strategies, the fiscal uh policies of the Board of County Commissioners.

So I went ahead and threw the through the link there at the bottom of this slide.

Uh so anybody can go in there and take a look.

There's a gold mine of information for anybody that really wants to know where the money is being spent and why, right?

It is contained in this book.

I don't think enough people read this.

And I'm I'm not a I'm not a fiscal nerd, uh, but I'm a data nerd.

And so, you know, uh, this is an area where uh, you know, I I think there's some really good information for our community uh in this document, as well as our uh department heads and our employees.

If our employees are really questioning what's really going on, that this uh the budget book's got a lot of that information.

So how do we do it, right?

This is really how we provide those services.

There are additionally 29 chapters of Washoe County Code.

Those are the essentially the laws that this body puts into effect on how we operate as a county, what services we provide, uh, some of the levels of service that we do that.

But more importantly, uh what I show here are 200 or 2,855.

Those are the current day filled positions within Washoe County.

Uh but if you really want to get down into it, uh we have 3,060 full-time approved positions and 63 part-time employee positions.

Uh, they're the ones that really understand what's in this book, what policies we implement on your behalf, how we do the services we do.

Those are the those are the people that really make things happen.

And so when we talk about our budget and the costs of employee employment and and those things, it's really because we are serving the public through people rather than I'll say widgets.

Um we are really we need the expertise of our people to provide the services that are outlined uh in state law and outlined in the 29 chapters of county code.

So since this is a budget workshop, I'm hoping to get a little bit of interaction uh with you all.

Um but I'm gonna I'm gonna go through uh a little bit of dialogue about the service levels because this is really where we can all impact the level of service that we provide based on the mandated service that we have to provide.

So the law necessarily doesn't um set the this the service level.

Um in some instances it does, and I'll I'll cover that uh here a little bit.

But really, the board of county commissioners sets the level of service for the services that we provide.

Now, this is important because as we work towards the Washa County's managers uh budget presentation on April 14th, or the proposed budget, you know, we may have to make some shifts and adjustments to the service level that we actually provide to our search to our citizens based on priorities, right?

Priorities of the board.

Uh master planning is one of those one of those areas where we grab that priority of the board.

These workshops are another area where we hear the little tidbits around uh kind of your thoughts and how we put that into the into the budget making process.

Um but as an example, uh I mentioned NRS sets some policy.

Um, uh, an example of a policy that you all set.

So Nevada revised statutes requires that if Washoe County accepts a roadway, for example, um, we have to own and maintain that roadway.

But the Nevada revised statutes are silent on how we go about maintaining that roadway or the level that we maintain that roadway to.

So this board has created in some of the financial policies that the pavement condition index, the way we measure the health of the pavement, the pavement condition index number is 71.

That's kind of been the sweet spot that we've determined, and that's part of the infrastructure scorecard that I'll get to.

Um, but that is that is an area where this board has set that policy level of how we maintain that roadway.

Um the the day-to-day operation, however, of how we maintain our roadway network is a little bit different.

So it's winter season.

Believe it or not, we've had to plow at least once or twice.

Um it's it's not snowing, so it'll be a good year for the roads uh roads budget uh for overtime uh as of as far as not having to pay out a bunch so far.

Um, but you know, it's not there's not a written policy on on when we determine when to plow, right?

That's set on safety limits and some of these other sorts of things.

I will let you know, however, that uh some of our vocal citizens expect really that the streets are clean, like clear of snow, even sometimes during a snowfall.

So we'll get phone calls like when when are you gonna come plow?

I've got to go to an appointment and there's snow on the ground.

And so I think there's an expectation sometimes of our citizens that we are superheroes, and I tell you our roads crews are superheroes.

Uh, but they, you know, we we live in an environment where that's just an unrealistic expectation.

Um so we've got to understand that.

But that's not a written policy.

That's we do that for the safety, and uh I've spoken with others um, you know, that Washoe County does a really good job with our with our road clearing uh and and and things along those lines.

But that's a service level, sometimes even that our employees set that might be higher bar than the average citizen wants us to provide.

So uh there's some work that needs to be done as we set baselines across all departments.

Um so I mentioned NRS.

Um, so the law sets uh uh um some of our service levels, but they're generally in terms of time frames.

So the example here is the uh the county assessor shall reappraise all all real property at least once every five years.

So that sets the baseline service level that we've got to do it at least every five years.

Uh we also have service levels set by industry standard or accreditation.

So that's either how many cases per attorney that can handle, or potentially how quickly an autopsy needs to be performed for us to be uh accredited.

Uh and then finally we have uh policy by practice.

So nearly all of our departments, our department heads, our elected officials, uh, can take and set the time that it takes to return a phone call or an email within their department.

Those all have ramifications on the staffing levels associated with providing those services and providing information to our community.

So, you know, the there's there's not a set thou shalt, you know, uh in anywhere uh that says uh you know you should re return a phone call within two hours uh or 24 hours.

Uh but I do know that our citizenry really uh with the advent of cell phones and instantaneous to information, uh the expectation is we re we respond to phone calls very quickly or emails.

It's like we're just waiting for these emails to come in to be responded to.

So uh again, a service level that many department heads have set, whether that's 24 hours, 12 hours, whatever that might be.

Um so that's really kind of how the how the policies and those things are are set across the bottom the departments.

So I'm not sure at this point if there's any feedback that the board wants to give just anecdotally or things you've been thinking of potentially around uh you know, levels of service that we that we deal with here at Washoe County, um, just from your experiences.

I'm you know I know you hear from citizens all of the time.

Um we uh haven't done a citizen survey, so to speak, to understand like really how are we doing to meet your expectations.

I can tell you that uh a lot of times our employees actually want to provide a higher level of service than the community expects.

We've seen that in areas um uh across the organization, and it's hard to you know get out of that mindset with our uh uh employees that it's okay to do a little bit less, let's call it uh, you know, take a few extra minutes to respond to something rather than getting on it and and doing it right away, because sometimes our community expects a little bit less than we're actually providing.

But those are all adjustments that we can make through the budgeting process to understand what that cost of service actually is.

So vice chair.

So thank you.

On the first bullet there, Board of County Commission sets many uh service levels.

It doesn't say sets all service levels.

Uh, we have an example where our library board of trustees have recently set uh service level.

Um, can you just for the sake of those listening, can you talk to us about any other examples in the county where another board or another entity is kind of set in the level of service?

Sure.

Service uh service levels are set in many ways, but uh for that example, um the open space and parks commission is another one that comes to mind where um this board has given them the authority to um set some service levels associated with some of the policies that uh occur within our parks.

Uh certainly not to the level of how we operate the parks, but certainly giving you know ideas around what that looks like, um some of the master planning and and those sorts of things.

That's another example.

Um certainly uh the way others in the region set service levels also impacts the work that we do.

Um so um an example around we can go back to to snow plowing, you know, if if the city of Reno or the City of Sparks did something differently for a specific reason, we may change our service levels to re-responsive to that, so that it seems a little bit more equal across uh the or you know the organizations.

Um let's see, um other boards and commission.

That I think the the biggest piece is really around you all have the ability by setting the the budget for each department to help define, help that department head define what services they can actually provide.

The budget is a pretty powerful policy tool.

Uh and so uh I I think that that you know, work the way we work through with departments the services that they provide and then the request for providing that service, I think is really kind of that that piece that are departments that set those policies as well.

Uh and so I think we can, you know, my hope is we are all talking in the same language and and talking the same direction.

I will let you know uh from a department perspective, and we will talk a little bit about this at the budget Congress.

Uh sometimes we feel um stymied by uh actually making a decision to lessen a service level uh just because of the pressures of community and others.

All it takes is uh a phone call, an email, a comment from someone uh, you know, at the Board of County Commissioners level, and that you know, kind of stymies our ability to do things.

And so, you know, we while we try to work for you all as a board, we also do listen individually, and sometimes that impacts uh the way we provide services as well.

Thank you.

Commissioner Herman, do you have anything for Mr.

Solero at this point, anyway?

No, thank you.

Um I have a question, or maybe it's a questionslash comment.

But I do think that um you brought up a couple points that I think are helpful.

The alignment of expectations is certainly um, I think a multifaceted uh approach.

And what I mean by that is I think as um as a body, in terms of setting what you're looking at for feedback um for service levels, I think is is not necessarily such an easy ask because the departments itself are in the trenches and doing great work, and they're the ones that can look at, in my opinion, what that um possible adjustment and then what the impact, but where I believe it's also multifaceted is I think we need to, and I think this workshop is a great example of being transparent, but I do think that we need to look at feedback and through that the awareness of what those decisions are and what kind of impact that would have as we're faced with um the budget that we've seen from Ms.

Cook, for instance.

And I know there'll be more discussions, but I do think at this point it's uh it's uh if we're going to look at this from an approach of how we look at the budget and what those impacts are to everyone, it infects everyone.

I think that we have to bring in the public as part of that.

I think that we need to look at that again as an opportunity for awareness of what that means.

So, for instance, roads is a perfect example, and you've brought it up.

The fact is, and I don't want to get to your next slide, but um it's not surprising that we have seen the um the F mark and the index for roads and the expectation, and we even heard this.

We heard this from Dr.

Lairmore in terms of the expectations when people are moving here, they're moving from another place, and those expectations are being set.

I'm here now in wonderful Washoe County, and when I left whatever state that starts with the CNA, um, that that expectation is to be delivered.

But I think that the community has uh opportunity to to weigh in on at least what the reality of what we're looking at.

Road roads is I've only been here for a short period of time, and that has been continued to be read in an F failure um capacity for funding, but one has to look at the balance of all of that.

So I'm just saying that I don't think it's just and I and I say this with all due respect to my colleagues.

I don't think it's only just the Board of County Commissioners that are looking at what the expectations are.

I think it's a collaborative effort, including the community engagement that is really necessary, and those decisions and priorities of allowing them to understand what whatever those tightenings are and what what that expectation then can be recalibrated for them.

So when they and I'm using roads as an example, so to your point, it's snowing.

Maybe you just moved here, it's the first time you've seen snow.

You you're waiting when are you coming for those that have been here?

Um, you know, we know we're gonna wait a little bit until maybe it stops, and maybe we'll get a shovel and help a little.

But the reality is is that I don't think it's just as simple, and I know that you're not making it as simple.

I just feel like that this is why the workshop I think is so important is we can look at what that means moving forward with capturing data because I am a data nerd too, and I like data.

I think data helps to drive decisions that are informed and fact-based.

And so I would encourage us to think about that as we move forward in this process.

It's not just what you're talking about here.

There are other opportunities, I think, to engage the public in that process.

Absolutely.

And I, you know, I I I uh it's easy to say these things.

It's very difficult to actually actually put these things into practice, right?

So the you know, the the bullet up here about work needs to be done across all departments to set a baseline service level.

Um, you know, that's based on the current resources that are allocated by this board based on the budget process.

Um it's super hard, and that's a good segue into the next slide, which is an example of where we've done this actually fairly well.

Uh the creation of our infrastructure scorecard is really an uh a realization of based on the funding we have and the resources we've got available, you know, how are we doing uh in our our roads, our stormwater, our parks, our facilities, equipment services, sewer collection, recycled water, uh, and the sewer treatment.

I mean, these these are the things that we uh track, and and it's really about the capacity, the condition, the funding, the future need, the operation and maintenance, public safety, the resilience and the innovation.

I mean, those are the things that we track in each one of those categories to see what services we can provide and what that service level looks like given the resources we have.

And so as you can see through this, you know, the from fiscal year 22 to current year current fiscal year 25 scorecard, we have been able to adjust.

The board gave us direction to to raise the grade.

Uh, in some areas we've been successful, in other areas we've found more information and just through the process of collecting data, uh, you know, we've determined uh, you know, kind of really where we're at.

And we're refining this year after year after year, getting pretty comfortable to the point where um you're right.

The road, the road piece, the funding and the and the future need, uh, those have actually slipped from what we thought they were in fiscal year 22.

And part of that is the pressures of the economy.

We can't buy as much asphalt as we used to, as an example, and so that the dollar doesn't stretch as far.

It's the same thing we're we're finding in our own homes when you go to the grocery store.

Uh, that's on a different scale when you come to the government and you're trying to take care of these assets that are worth billions of dollars, and uh, you know, an ability to provide a service level.

But here's a a data-driven area where we are able to look at this and make informed decisions and prioritize the work.

And I now again, it's it's one thing to talk about the roads fund and some of these other funds.

A lot of these funds actually have funding that's paid for by the users of those things.

So um equipment services, sewer collection, recycled water and sewer treatment, those all have kind of dedicated funding.

Um, they've got a dedicated thing book of business, they've got service levels that are provided and rules and regulations and all those other sorts of things.

But when you start talking about the other parts, the more discretionary pieces, we're still quite frankly catching up from decisions that were made in the 2009 through 2011 time frame.

Uh, all decisions that the board had to make at the time that were very difficult.

And so we're we're working through those things and really understanding kind of where we live today and what the what is the appropriate service to be providing to in this instance.

Uh many, you know, some of these are our own internal services, so facilities and and equipment services, those are internal needs that we've got.

Um parks, uh, you know, we we do surveys with parks and uh the majority of our users are pretty happy with the parks that we've got, the trailheads, the amenities that we're providing.

So, you know, while it still shows that we're you know, we're down there in grade on the parks, we've we've actually moved the needle on that in that instance.

Uh stormwater, we've gathered some more information, and yeah, you know, it's it is what it is.

It's it's it's where we're at.

We've got some issues.

We've talked to this board about it.

Um, but you know, unfortunately, we've got a you know, it's it's easy, it's easy for people uh, you know, to say, well, you should do X, Y, or Z.

It's really difficult though, when you're talking about such a broad book of business and how to prioritize the limited funding that we've got to provide those services in a manner.

And so that's that's really what we're asking you is that simple little task of just prioritize everything we do.

Uh let us know, let us know, you know, kind of where it is, and we'll and we'll communicate that.

But but another piece is that communication, right?

So when decisions are made and we go through that process, and that's where the strategic planning process, the next steps with that are really to kind of work through setting a baseline service level that we can afford in this county based on the trends and the forecasts and all of those other sorts of things.

So to some extent, you know, Lori and her team and Abby, that we're gonna do what we can do to give you the easy kind of path.

It's not gonna be easy, it's gonna be very difficult.

But you know, uh, we've got a lot of smart people in our in our department heads and our elected officials that can help us through this process.

I think this is really just setting the stage for uh things probably should change, and these are the hard decisions that we've got to make uh as a community um because we we know we can make these, you know, make these things and to get to the point where those other things that we need, those directions that you have given us through the strategic plan for uh jail-based mental health facilities and court facilities and some of those other sorts of things, just getting super creative on how do we do that.

But all of those decisions roll down the road.

So, you know, I I started this talking about mandated and non-mandated services.

Some of the services we provide are not mandated because we're looking into the future to try to to alleviate the pressures that we know are going to happen if we don't do something now.

Uh and this is another example with infrastructure of you know, just something that's tangible that we can see.

Commissioner Hall.

Thank you, madam chair.

And I yes, it's complex, right?

Because even if we're not mandated to keep the pavement at a certain index, you know, we may have to replace a road, which then is super irresponsible for the taxpayer dollar.

And we may have additional roads that are creating health issues for whatever reason car wrecks or uh air quality issues, even that are mandated by the health district, and that we're also tied to their requirements as well.

And um, our decisions affect those things, and um also understanding, you know, uh to touch uh to touch on a touchy subject, I think sometimes in this community is the counties stepping up and taking over the homeless services piece.

We know we're saving the taxpayer dollar, but because we're only you're it's 60 some odd dollars a night to stay at the CARES campus.

The issue is though when we see reduction in health care costs because we're at the no, they're not as many people at the hospital.

We don't necessarily see that at the county level, right?

Um, or but we do in the jail.

And so I think uh understanding that things that may or may not be mandated by law, still save the taxpayer dollars and also ensure that you have better economic vitality in your community because you're investing in uh aspects that make people's quality of life better, like parks, for example, where there's no requirement on that piece, but it's certainly something that's a huge priority for the community.

I think anyway, this is not helping the discussion necessarily.

But it's it is I think it shows though that maybe to the community that there isn't just an easy fix of okay, the state mandates that we take on this many uh cases for foster kids.

And if we get over this many cases, well, good luck.

That's not how things work around here.

We're gonna be picking up, especially as people suffer economically, the county has to pick up more because they're falling into our safety net.

They're not able to take care of themselves or their family members.

So yes, anyway, fun times ahead.

But yes, thank you for trying to kind of show that complexity.

I think that that's really good for the community to hear.

Yeah, and I I do think that you know, so the many of those non-mandated services that we provide uh are very important to our entire community, right?

And we just don't do something just to do something.

There is a benefit that is realized by our community, whether it's a quality of life indicator or you know, lessening costs elsewhere.

All of those things help us create community, and that's part of our job, right?

So at the end of the day, there's only so much to go around.

And so at some point uh hard decisions are gonna need to be made just based on uh, you know, I mean, I don't, I don't know, um simple things, you know.

Do we need to have uh well, let's talk a little bit.

Uh AI was brought up earlier, right?

And so it's not about reducing the number of employees we have, it's really about giving the employees we have a tool to help them do more with the same.

Yeah, right.

It's it's to be able to stretch the service provider that we've got by making their job a little bit easier.

So that's that's kind of the the process that we've looked at on how AI can help our employees provide a better service to the community.

Um, so it's not about you know taking those jobs, but those are decisions we make.

We don't have to invest in something like that.

We could, you know, try to invest in another person to you know do the research or whatever that might might be.

But I think we've evolved to the point where we're we're making those smart decisions.

And sometimes our our public um and even some of our employees don't see that.

They don't know don't necessarily understand that, but certainly it's going on.

And since this is a workshop, I'm gonna talk about it a little bit.

Thank you.

I just wanted to acknowledge the leadership that happened in FY22 to get the score the infrastructure scorecard going.

Thank you, Commissioner Hill and and Herman for that leadership because it does provide that framework that helps us keep the our eye on the ball.

But um, it also helps when, for example, RTC just commissioned a maintenance needs study back in May of 2025 that looked at City Areno, City of Sparks, Washoe County, looked at RTC's roads.

It did that blanket comparison, and all jurisdictions have deferred maintenance.

And we're talking about $600 million in total of deferred maintenance, and all jurisdictions have budget shortfalls.

$800 million in 10 years of shortfalls.

So when you have this policy that we are going to continue to update our scorecard that is then supplemented by these regional studies that come into play, it does build a stronger case for we've got the data, we've been tracking and doing the storytelling.

And bottom line for the, you know, the the maintenance and the infrastructure needs, it's there, these are invisible things that constituents forget about.

And it's easy to forget about and kick the can down the road, like you know, changing the oil in your car.

You're like, I don't want to spend money on changing the oil in my car, but then how much are you paying out of pocket when you have to replace the engine?

And so that's the issue with infrastructure.

It's it's hidden and it's quiet, but they're massive uh large ticket items that are lurking in the not so um distant future.

Yeah.

But I'll add that um the fact is is that again, I think the more awareness that we bring to these issues and understanding the complexity is helpful, but I do think that there are opportunities.

Um as you know, Mr.

Slero, um, you know, when I got here, I asked to look at how we can regionalize, right?

Sewer wastewater and stormwater, and there are experts in subject matter, including yourself who serve on that board, and where that progresses is an opportunity regionally to look at efficiencies and bringing down costs.

And I I'm extremely proud that that, and thank you for helping to carry that ball in terms of you know, the request that I made way back when, because it is only when you're facing tough times that tough decisions turn into possible opportunities.

And I'm not suggesting that everything is you know sugarcoated in that way, but I think everyone, all of the folks here that work really, really hard and are valued as contributors to our community, have you have a brain power, you have a brain trust of how can we do things better?

Whether it's AAI or whether it's the regional study with RTC or whether it's the regional approach to looking at a regional solution for sewer and wastewater.

Um that though those are the opportunities I think to help balance this complexity.

You know, we could sit here, all of us, and talk about some systemic funding and how that works, but there a lot of that is out of our hands.

So I think that we have to do with what we have available to us and recognize that sometimes the things that you think are so easy aren't.

And I think that's what hopefully today will also reveal.

But I do think it's important, and thank you, by the way, because I know that I've brought this up in public several times.

So thank you.

On the 820, when I did look at this slide the first time, I'm like, what is 823, 116 and one?

And I would not have guessed it.

But thank you for sharing what those numbers are in terms of what the county is responsible for.

And you don't have necessarily, you might have maybe service levels that aren't dictated, but you have the mandate in various capacities.

What I don't see here though is what does equates to in terms of dollars as it as it relates to the budget, both on the revenue side and the expense side.

And so it's something to think about for the future, because uh my first question when I saw this is okay, thank you for looking at that mandated versus non-mandated, but what does that equate to again on that um funding/slash expense side?

And not that I'm suggesting to Commissioner Hell's point on foster children as an example as we continue to have less and less homes, and and Vice Chair Garcia has brought this up many times.

We have less and less homes for those foster children, and therefore, what do you do?

So the kids cottage as an example has seen this up and down, and even some federal mandates that were actually impacted that I'm well aware of that I'm gonna skip just in the interest of time.

Those all then fall onto the county on what do we do with these children?

We have a responsibility.

Let me share with real quickly uh uh a stat that uh Judge Walker, who I've known for a long time and worked on uh on projects outside of this and for the benefit of foster kids.

You ready for this?

70 percent of the adults that go through the court system that have a sentence that you know taxpayers are are our funding while they're in prison are directly related to foster care, directly related to foster care.

So that in and of itself is a whole workshop on what can be done for services to stop that, to stop that, so that you don't have this perpetual um you know situation happening.

That burden is unbelievable.

Um so there's so much complexity to this, but I would like to go back.

If there's a possibility, I don't want to add to the burden of everybody's already overfilling plate.

Uh, but I do think looking at what those dollar amounts look like is very helpful because I think that it is part of the whole, and that's what I have been asking for for quite some time.

So I I I certainly look forward to that opportunity for those numbers to be shared.

What the revenue is for those mandated services versus the expense of the mandated services, and then you know what what is the remainder, right?

And so those are where some of the tough decisions uh come into play.

So thank you for the opportunity to share that.

I got off into foster care, so sorry, but it is it is a huge number of what happens.

Yeah.

So I'll stop there.

It's all right.

No, I mean that's that's the that's the discussion.

There are a lot of things that we do that you know that that have an impact, and so to be able to show that in a different way, and that's really what the scorecard is about, right?

So maybe we can create uh mandated service scorecard or something that helps define that.

Um but I I did I will wrap up today uh this morning with some some trends that we are yes.

Oh, sorry.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

You know what?

Everyone's been raising their hand, and I didn't see your hand, so sorry.

Commissioner Clark.

Oh, you're welcome.

Uh things that you brought up, and I'm gonna make that some clarification on you said something about Sparks and R and Sparks and Rena were doing things a little differently, and we had to maybe think about adjusting how we were doing.

Can you bring an example of what you were referring to?

No, so that's so that's just an example of where we might um drive our service level based on how others are actually providing a service, right?

So uh in this instance, quite frankly, uh, you know, I was thinking in my mind about um snow plowing uh because it's winter time, and the feedback I get from our community is we do a really great job with snowplow.

Well, you know, Reno maybe not so much.

We've got to drive through Washa County to get into Reno to go to our job, it's different.

There's all kinds of reasons why that.

But you know, so our service level actually impacts the city of Reno at that point, right?

So our service level is higher than potentially the service city of Reno, and it's for all the you know, all the reasons that are out there, different different things.

It could also happen in reverse.

Uh City of Sparks does a great job with their stormwater infrastructure.

Uh Washa County, uh, as we see with the scorecard, we're struggling a bit with some of our stormwater infrastructure.

They provide a higher level of service, quite frankly, than we do in stormwater.

And so that impacts us to want to, you know, try to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak.

Uh so those are just a couple of examples where other jurisdictions uh you know create um create, I don't want to say problems, but just certainly create a disparity from the citizens' perspective on how we're spending the funds and why.

So again, uh uh focus on that.

Uh I don't think we should dumb down what we're doing to try and equal to what other municipalities are doing.

I think we're doing a great job in a lot of areas.

I'm not so much for for the other municipalities.

That's that's just my take on it, and talking to citizens as well and observing what's taking place.

So uh again, we should if we're doing a good job at something and somebody else isn't, we shouldn't lower our expectations or lower our our service to get to their level.

I think I don't think that that serves our our county uh unincorporated folks uh properly to to do that.

So I wanted to get some more information about that.

Next, uh, you know, we talk about our roads, you know, and I'll bring it up again, some of the highest gas taxes in the nation, and we still have poor roads.

Uh something is not right there.

The citizens are uh aware of this and this escalating tax goes up each and every year with cost of living, and it's it's uh a lot of money.

Uh I I know I've talked to people that uh the truck interstate truckers make it a point not to stop in this county to fill up those four or five, six hundred gallon fuel tanks that they have.

They'll buy gas fuel diesel somewhere else to avoid that.

So uh, you know, that's and and but the use of roads.

They're there, they're wear and tear on our roads with the the big rigs are a problem, and and we don't get a capture any of that uh tax revenue because they go out of their way to purchase fuel in other places.

So uh the people need to understand that.

Um also uh we've talked about these numbers, uh the the number of employees that we have.

This is a budget meeting, and and other than you bringing up the number of agents, uh the number of people that work work for the county are employees.

No one's brought up the the budget, the budgetary impact of that.

Some departments, uh assessor's offices, over 90 percent of their budget is used for employees.

The throughout the county, it's uh exceeding 80 percent of the budget is employees.

I I think we need to to look at that.

That needs to be on the table, and it needs to be in these discussions.

That's the biggest expense we have.

I don't want to see anybody get laid off, and that isn't where I'm going with this.

But I think we do need to make sure that each and every person who's hired by the county gets in big bold print on whatever kind of contract or whatever application that they have is that they may, based on the economy sometime in the future, may be laid off.

This isn't an employment for life after you've made your probationary period.

People need to understand that seniority first, you know, last one in is first one out, kind of a thing, and and make sure that that's on the table.

If we're gonna have a legitimate, honest discussion about the budget, that is our largest expense.

Is that correct?

Is that a correct statement?

I think I think that is a correct statement.

Okay.

That personnel is is is our largest expense.

So that needs to be on the table if we're gonna have a legitimate, honest discussion uh about the budget.

And and I do think that that's part of you know where this is headed, right?

With the service level, the the ability to provide a level of service uh directly in you know impacts the number of people you need to do that.

So if we can create that baseline layer of this is what it, you know, given the budget we have today, this is the amount of employees it needs to provide the service at this level, then we can make those decisions around well, we want to lessen the level of service here, there, wherever it is, maybe increase the level of service elsewhere, shift people around, whatever that looks like.

But we've got to get to that baseline piece.

I I totally agree that you know we've got to have a discussion around service or you know, budget and number of people, you also have to understand what service you're actually providing and what that looks like and the reasons why.

And so that's why we're talking about this piece through this this process.

Sure, sure.

And I understand that, but I just need to get that on out in the public's uh uh understand what where I'm going with this.

Uh you uh they also started your comments with uh asking us for we had anecdotal information about, you know, I I talked to the clerk uh here earlier this morning, ask her about the uh Board of Equalization is coming up, the hearings are coming up.

She said that the uh assessor's job office had done a great job uh reducing the number of hearings we're gonna have.

It's uh around 40, 40 hearings out of uh 190,000 pieces of property in time in the county.

I think that's pretty admirable.

And uh she also said that the assessor's office had settled a lot of these issues and and come to an agreement with the the uh property owners.

And and so it impacted her office.

So she's gonna have four days of hearings.

The DA's office is not gonna have to have their folks tied up.

So that's cost savings, real cost savings to the county of of reducing uh the interaction and and reducing the friction with with the taxpayers.

So there's a good example of one department saving at least two other departments a lot of time and energy uh for this.

And and those departments need to be recognized, and maybe we should be talking to department heads and can come up with other ideas like that, and not only just telling you, but telling the commissioners which departments are are actually putting their heads together and and showing us uh better ways to do things because the folks that are in those departments are the subject matter experts.

We're not they can tell us the shortcuts that we're never gonna figure out.

But that that's something that we need to be looking at in the budget as well.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I I think you bring up a really good point.

And I think the caucus that they're gonna have, is that what it's called?

The Congress that you're having with all the department heads.

Um that would be really interesting to see the brain power that's in that room to Commissioner Clark's point.

I I also um am looking forward to um hearing uh more about EVs because if we're gonna talk about the highest price on gas, we need to be able to balance that with all of the free riders, including myself, who are tearing up the roads and not paying a dime.

And that is a situation that is an example that the legislature certainly could do some things, but I think we may see some opportunities to address some of that at a later time.

I also think that when you're dealing with budgets and you're dealing with some things that certainly don't look so um promising, um, as I said earlier, I think that there are opportunities and being optimistic for efficiencies.

But it's not only just a cut cut cut, and I'll use the assessor's office as an example.

I've spoken with the assessor who um has shared that if he had um I don't remember the number, but had additional employees, he's not able to capture the assessments of at a hundred percent level.

I hope I'm presenting that correctly.

If he's oh, there he is right here.

Uh so I hope I'm doing this justice, but I certainly have spoke with him about sharing um what that investment and what that ROI that's a business decision.

So I'm making this up.

If you add four employees, and that four employer employees' costs, and I'm making this up X, but the ROI on that in terms of bringing in additional funding that we're losing, not because anybody's doing anything wrong, not because anybody is intentionally missing anything, but capacity.

I think we also have to look at that investment in terms of that equation too, not just at the cut side.

I think there's a balance here.

So I think the brain power of all the talent of all the department heads and the efficiency that I've already shared.

I think the opportunity to look at some things that might be coming before us with addressing roads with EV, and then certainly the opportunity to look at business plans that may come out of this congressional.

What is it?

It's budget caucus.

I congressional okay, Congress.

That's where I'm getting.

I'd say sorry that I'm not getting the terminology right.

Where you're meeting together with a lot of really smart people to talk about how to achieve efficiencies.

Um, I'm looking forward to sharing that or hearing more about that.

So anybody else have any comments?

Commissioner Herman, do you have anything that you would like to add?

No, thank you very much.

Commissioner Clark, anything else you'd like to add?

No, thank you.

Okay.

Commissioner Hill.

Vice Chair Garcia.

Don't want to miss anyone.

Thanks.

Good afternoon.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay, thank you.

Good afternoon.

Uh uh members of Board of County Commissioners, Manager Thomas, thank you, ACM Solero for doing my slides.

I only have a couple.

Um, I want to kind of start at the top and go down to what we're gonna be doing to propose the manager's proposed budget on April 14th, so that we start with the vision and discuss how we get there.

Um, so I know that you're all quite seasoned.

You've all experienced our strategic plan participating in it, and as taxpayers knowing about it.

Um, but for those who are new in the room, the Board of County Commissioners here is this is something to be proud of.

You've had a very robust and mature strategic planning process for 10, 15 years, maybe even more than that.

And so I won't read from the slide, but I think of these as the high-level visionary, large projects, things that you do.

Think of uh Washko Behavioral Health Center, think of behavioral health, think of housing, think of senior services, uh, think of infrastructure.

These are the large cross-functional, cross-departmental, um, you know, impacting the maximum number of taxpayers for the taxpayer dollar projects that you undertake.

That becomes the North Star for us when we're talking about talking about budgeting and where our budget proposals um lie.

So I I kind of put budget proposals into two or three buckets, two major ones.

One, uh the ones that Mr.

Solero spoke of, which are required by the NRS or the code or some other uh legislative mandate.

I call them the bread and butter services, uh, or something that really highly benefits the community and perhaps avoids costs or um disruption of lifestyle down in the future, five years, 10 years down the line.

And so that North Star, the strategic plan, um, guides our daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual um activities.

And so if it doesn't fit into the bread and butter category or one of those four orange items, we have to question why we're doing it with the finite resources that we have.

And so when we talk about the daily, monthly, weekly, monthly uh behaviors and activities that we do, that's the accountability piece.

That's you saying to us, here's our vision, us saying back to you, here's what we think we can do in the next X number of time period to get it done, and here's what that looks like.

How do we measure success?

Does it has this been successful?

And if it has, great.

If it hasn't, we pivot.

Fiscal policies.

Slural referred to them as uh page 380 in the in the budget book um and and so I'll I want to highlight a couple of them that I think really impact today's discussion and give you a a kudos for thinking ahead adopting these policies because um I've seen a lot of financial policies these are to be proud of their forward thinking they set the foundation for the county and they really guide us to fiscal sustainability in the current year and in the five year forecast and maybe if we even look into the 20 year capital improvement program forecast um so just to review them very very quickly I know you know them but there may be people who are new watching online or or in the audience that that may not so you have a fund balance policy you have reserve policies you need to have cash on hand because the times when we collect revenue is not the times when we're spending our our money all the time so you want to have fund balance in reserve your policy is between 10 to 17 percent of expenditures from the prior year and so you we we are I'll I'll give a little bit of a report on where we are Ms.

Cook gave a report earlier um but I'll kind of give um give a little bit of an update in in one more slide but that's a that's a policy that we adhere to that sets the foundation for fiscal sustainability that then we can achieve your vision emergency stabilization you've taken it one step further and put four million dollars into emergency stabilization which this seems a little bit counterintuitive but when times get tough that's when people really need us and so if an emergency is declared we can we can access those funds that that was a very uh thoughtful policy that was put into place.

Investments we heard earlier this morning from Treasurer Taylor and his team they focus very very hard on preserving the taxpayer dollar you know there no no loss of principle of course but in addition to that then they focus on how we're going to spend the money and when they work with the CSD who has the largest capital improvement program so they have the spikiest cash flow they know our normal cash flow they look at the spikes in cash flow and they invest accordingly with our investment advisor and then lastly our yield how much money are we making to supplement the general fund and any other fund that has money invested with that investment advisor.

So very very heavily regulated by the NRS you cannot invest in Nevada or any other state that I'm aware of in any way that you may wish like you do at home but so we we follow the law but we uh we also are very cognizant of our our cash flow needs and preserving that principle.

Mr.

Slero uh referred very um nicely to the infrastructure scorecard and I look at that as an ability to prioritize we look at the scorecard we look at what's read we see how high of a priority it is and then Mr.

Slero and his team move forward proposing capital improvement program projects to you that's forward thinking and it helps us remain sustainable.

It helps our cash uh cash flow projection forecasting uh you see you've seen Ms.

Cook uh and Ms.

Hill many times come up in front of you and talk about the five year forecast we have a very sophisticated forecasting mechanism that I I want to um highlight here we can forecast down to the person and with 3,000 employees I'm gonna round of course but with 3000 employees and collective bargaining several different collective bargaining units setting that foundation for the current year and then escalating it for five years at 80% of the general funds expenditures is really important and and kudos to you for setting the policy and to the team for executing that that forecast grants not all money free money is good money and I'll leave it at that sometimes those things once the money is gone we assume it's going to naturally fall into the general fund and that may not be your priority but we've put you in a position of feeling pressure to move that item into the general fund because the public becomes used to it I'd make the argument that that may not be good money.

It may but it may not and there are many more there are 10 pages I noted that the font was properly accessible but the margins are very thin so 10 pages of financial policies good for you.

The thing that I will will say also is I look at the external auditors and the rating agencies as kind of the canary in the coal mine you have received two rating increases different revenue pledges so not the same revenue pledge but two different rating agency rating increases in the past three three and a half years.

For me that is a statement it's not a statement that we don't need to fix things in the outer years of the five year forecast it's a statement that you're deliberate you think about things you explain them and then you act because the rating agencies don't expect you to be perfect they expect you to be deliberate in the external audit of course Ms.

Hill has given excellent presentations on the year end um the year end uh clean audit opinion thank you Dave so to go to from from those larger visions and the how you've set the foundation for success in the one year and the five year forecast I want to kind of trans transition a little bit into what we're doing today to make the managers proposed budget sustainable in the long term and I'm gonna say a couple of things and turn it over to manager Thomas for some comments and then take it back if if I might so you you saw Ms.

And I'm gonna say a couple of things and turn it over to Manager Thomas for some comments and then uh take it back if if I might.

So you you saw Ms.

Cook uh give a presentation, and and it included a fund balance of over your policy, we're somewhere between 30 and 31 percent as of June 30, 2025.

Um that is above your policy of 17 percent.

Now, that doesn't mean that we'll have all of that excess uh uh beginning fund balance to to spend in the upcoming years because A, it's one-time money, it's not recurring revenue that we can bake into our budget, and B, we already know that we're gonna have natural contractual increases that are occurring.

Um, so say I have a software agreement or an auditing contract, and it increases by three percent.

We need to bake that into the 27 budget, and we need to do it across all 24 departments.

And some of those increases we call them base adjustments.

If you've seen that, uh we call them base adjustments, and some of those are really large.

We need to take those out.

We need to look at our personnel, natural personnel increases that we're required to pay, um, but which Ms.

Cook also discussed.

And then we need to talk.

There are a couple of one-time items that are coming up, a couple of capital projects.

There's a major software upgrade.

Um, there are some items that I know need to be prioritized that absolutely need to be done that'll be coming to you now or at the very beginning of next year's budget cycle.

Um, so so we won't have as much as between 30 and 17 percent, but we are we are guiding executive leadership, many of whom are in the room today, and thank you for that, um, to be creative, do one-time spending on implementation of technology or something that will make your life easier and make the tax then translate into the taxpayers' life being easier.

Um, enter into a contract versus trying to hire uh a new employee.

Um, try to not only does that quite often save us money, but it also shows the community that we have faith in that they can provide the service.

I've kind of heard that feedback from certain people in the community that when we do that, it shows good partnership.

Um, we also uh will be making uh likely um manager Thomas will be making a recommendation to increase capital funding transfer up to not maybe up to the level that we need to keep the scorecard uh constant, but an increase at least.

And so, with that, I I believe you have a couple of uh items that you want to say about personnel because we are going to give people direction, or we have given people direction.

This will be the second year in a row.

Please do not request additional personnel because of what Ms.

Cook described a few minutes ago, the revenue trajectory and the personnel trajectory are diverging, uh, and so we cannot afford to do that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

One of the things that I am most proud about this organization is our fiscal resiliency and and how we approach fiscal um policies, and the board has been solidly behind that, and that's just been wonderful to experience for the time that I've been here and and even looking into the future.

But the thing that I'm most proud of of the organization are the 3,000 people that do the work that we do every single day and provide the services to the community.

And so we heard a little bit earlier on in this presentation about an interesting term called jobless growth, where there is an expectation nationally that we may lose millions of jobs, even with increased market performance or productivity.

Um, when and if I hope it doesn't, but if it happens, we know that the county is the organization that steps forward in a community to try to assist people that don't have the resources.

And we do that with the people that we have here, and I know that many of them are listening.

And so, what I want to be very clear about is by adding no new personnel, um, what we're what we're not interested in, what I'm vehemently against is reducing the existing personnel that we have.

I know that most departments need additional resources, not less, nor is there an interest um as your CEO in reducing the resources that those people have.

We worked really hard to write size the salaries of this organization through the Corn Ferry study to make sure that right in the middle of the road, not the highest paid and not the lowest paid in this region, or in the West, for example, are our employees.

And in a time where there is economic uncertainty or housing and child care costs are significantly straining our employee base who are challenged to provide these services every day.

There's not an interest by me, and you won't see in a recommendation to this board that that those salaries be reduced.

And so I just wanted to set the stage for those that are listening, and for everyone to understand how we do the work, because when you look at the long-term freak-outedness chart, um, that's assuming that we don't change anything.

And I know that we're looking very hard as an organization through the budget congress, through the talent of our elected officials and our department heads at what we can do.

I heard the term earlier, we're gonna do more with the same, and that's really where we're at.

Um, we we are not in a position to be adding a whole bunch more, um, but but in the converse, I'm not looking to decrease the level of support that we offer to this this employee base.

And so I just wanted to get that on the record, and I thank you for the opportunity to do that.

Thank you.

One thing I I do want to mention to you, and this is a this is a change that according to um what manager Thomas said, we're we're looking for innovative ways to do more with the same.

And one of the things you may see, we've heard some pushback from you, and I fully agree with it in in normal cases not to bring mid-year budget requests for for increased expenditure, particularly on personnel, because it doesn't allow you to debate all of the programs and services that are being proposed.

It only allows you to see this one thing that's coming in the middle of November, which is which is not a good way for you to be able to make policy.

One thing we're going to be proposing to you is that we have certain departments that as someone leaves or retires or hits the lottery or whatever it may be, as that position becomes vacant, they want to change it into something else because what we needed 20 years ago is not necessarily what we need it to be today.

Um, and so I had been pretty strict in the past on saying we're not making changes, but if we're really going to ask people to keep their position count flat, even though the costs are increasing, we need to be creative.

And so what we're going to be doing is allowing departments to shift those positions as long as the cost is net neutral, and we have some ways internally that we can handle that, but you will see job evaluation committee JEC changes go forward, but they'll be net zero, they'll be creative.

And if you'd like, we can give a very good description so that you kind of get used to this because it's going to be a change.

We have one going on right now in the sheriff's office where they went from two positions to one position, and then they're going from one to two.

And the cost is is uh I think it's about $500.

It's flat.

Uh, the position count is four, so we're not increasing position count because that is your duty and not not ours.

Um, but it's a it's a creative solution, and so we're gonna put some guardrails around it and and you'll see these come forward.

And so we would ask for your support in doing that so that we can keep head count flat.

Anything else?

Thank you.

Anything else?

Uh I just wanted to step next steps.

Let's go.

Let's go.

Let's go.

So on February 3rd uh next week, we'll have the budget congress, and that's internal.

I mentioned it to you because it's innovative.

It'll be the second year that we've done it.

The team is excellent.

Um they're they're they they the things that come out of the budget congress are quite amazing, and I look forward to next next week's discussion.

That's one person per department, and we just really go and discuss how we can make things more efficient, where the pain points are, and how we can um how we can solve things together, not and you know, cross-departmentally, cross-functionally.

And again, we'll have two more financial reports on April 14th.

We will, you're testing my memory on April 14th.

We'll have the morbid less doing more less.

On April 14th, we'll have the managers proposed uh budget.

It's also called the tentative budget that we are required to file with the state by April 15th.

The May 19th is the public hearing, and these are all sort of statutorily required deadlines, and then by June uh 1st of 2026, we will file the budget with the state of Nevada Department Department of Taxation.

And with that, I'm happy to turn it back to you, madam chair.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Commissioner Clark, do you have any questions?

No, thank you for asking.

Commissioner Hill.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Uh and I'm assuming just in between all of well, before April 14th, certainly, I know we have our financial reports, but you're going to be doing breakouts with commissioners to really make sure we understand the new recommendations and what you want to do for changes in detail as well.

Yes, and taking feedback, of course.

Okay, thank you.

Commissioner Herman, do you have any questions?

No, that was excellent.

No, just excellent.

Thank you.

Vice Chair Garcia.

Thank you.

Thank you for um kind of wrapping this up.

I um am also hoping that there is opportunities for engagement in the community.

Um, I know it's probably not a surprise to bring up the Washoe checkbook and the fact that we um, even though the the um budget book was um, and I've got it on my desk, but the reality as a paperweight, but anyway, um it it certainly is important, and I want to commend you for doing the work on the checkbook because that's that too is evolving.

So you can even look at the statutory requirements as you're going through that that checkbook, and I I'm hoping that we can look at doing a budget 101 when the time is right, as you see fit, because I realize that we're in the progress of all of this, but I do think um engaging the public and hearing what they have is really really important.

And I and I say that because I did some um research on um chartering our course, and it was uh a process that um many have gone through.

Uh it was designed at a time when we hope we never see where revenues were decreased at Washoe County at for at 40% at 40 percent.

Every time I think of that number, I can't imagine what that was like.

I certainly lived here, most of us did and saw the decimation of the construction industry and and jobs and um, but that charting our course is really a great guideline, and thank you all for using that.

Thank you, Mr.

Solero, Manager Thomas, and the team for looking at that.

I appreciate your indulgence with me bringing that up.

Um I also just really, if I could take one more moment and thank everyone, because if you look at the recommendations from the third party study, it actually manager Thomas brought that up earlier in terms of why are we here?

We're here from that recommendation, and the recommendation was to create a workshop opportunity for staff to present detailed information that we just don't have the time to do when we're conducting a business meeting during a regular session of the Board of County Commissioners.

So I think that um I hope everyone has felt that this has been extremely beneficial, but I also want to thank everyone for the time that went into it, because all of the hours that you all have spent is recognized and appreciated to put on a presentation at the level that you did with all the complexity is um I think a testament to the talent and dedication we have of staff and all of the folks that are even here or those that are watching, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what it looks like with some of the recommendations that you're hearing in terms of um, I know that doing more with less was one or or doing more with the same, but also just really understanding that sometimes things look so easy on one side, and then you realize that they're complex on another, and so I hope that the framework to which we saw today of having this national lookout of what that impact has, bringing it down to a local level, looking at we are at least on the right path in terms of housing and many other places as well, but also then bringing it down to what are the steps, what are the expectations and the alignment of those expectations for the public is really important, and giving the public the opportunity to actually weigh in and to understand what those what that trade-off is.

That's there's an economic term called opportunity costs, so that's what we're looking at the opportunity costs.

So, having said that, do any commissioners have anything else before we move on?

Manager Thomas, we're we're going to move to public comment.

I was just getting ready.

All right, thank you.

We are on final public comment.

Comment heard under this item will be limited to three minutes per person, may pertain to matters both on and off the commission agenda, and used time may not be allocated to their speakers.

And please make your comments to the commission as a whole.

First up, we have Trista Gomez followed by Terry Brooks.

So I just want to remind uh Manager Thomas and Ms.

Commissioner uh Garcia that I have put in two public record requests for the capital, the capital cost of the cares.

And the first one was denied, um, citing that they had done an exhaustive search and was not were not able to find any information.

And so I put in another request, and that request specifies that I'm looking for if you're not uh able to give me that uh information in aggregate that instead you could give me the contractors, the permits, the consulting fees, those kinds of things.

Um, and I will find them in checkbook that uh Miss Andrea, the Commissioner Andreola um put in, so that I'll I'll get that raw data myself.

I'm okay with having it as raw data, but I would like the data, and I this is my second request public through 311 and through several departments.

So I'm asking for that.

Uh another um I'm asking for that in raw data because just like I'm looking at this um the the middle presentation, you know, page nine where it's looking at the the hourly um the wages for these different people.

Government is number four out of 14, and that number four out of fourteen doesn't include person benefits.

And so when we're looking at these kinds of costs, right?

Like if you're looking at so I did get I did somebody to tell me that there's 70, there's 70 employees that cares.

So you're looking at over a million dollars in just personnel cost of the cares, and so those those kinds of things need to be taken care of.

I moved, I called back into town.

I haven't lived into in town since like 2018.

I live in a neighborhood where I'm I'm going to work while people are walking to work, walking to bus stops at six o'clock in the morning.

My neighbors have two jobs.

I'm around people that are donating plasma so that they can make their bills.

This is new, this is a new demographic.

This is not something that I dealt with before, but those people are paying additional costs for the CARES campus, and and I'll talk more about what my experience at the CARES campus.

And so this is an important piece of what of cost savings inside of the county and how that's impacting residents and and what that means for people.

I mean, it's it's it's a big deal.

And and is that a disparity?

And so I'm interested in those costs.

I'm happy to have the raw costs, and I would really like to have those costs.

Um, I I originally uh it was 1216 when I originally asked those for those costs, and I still do not have those.

So um that's really my main comment for now.

I really really love those costs, and so I'm about out of time, and I'll have more to say soon.

And uh thanks for your time.

Thank you.

Terry Brooks, followed by Janet Butcher, good morning.

It's me, Terry Brooks again.

And today I'd like to engage into the topic of discrimination when it comes to age.

People live longer now than they used to live, and the elderly now need more than they're able to give.

When employers look for help, it's the elderly they usually avoid.

So the elderly are less likely to become employed.

The elderly then are usually the last ones to be hired, but when help is not needed as much, the elderly are first to get fired.

Because of their age, the elderly have a burden to bear, and they have a higher need for good health care.

And if they're unemployed and don't receive health care, that will make their burden even harder to bear.

Some politicians want to do their best to help the elderly, while other politicians want to avoid the elderly.

But a lot of politicians who have won an election and then age while in office start heading in the right direction.

When older people retire, they can sometimes get set in their ways.

And then for a long time, they can stay through such a phase.

The older you get, the more you've seen inflation, but it can get out of hand way beyond your expectation.

Paying rent can be harder to do when it's higher than your social security.

That can not only lead to poverty but can cause a sense of insecurity.

The elder pop elderly population keeps increasing more and more, but their income doesn't keep up with expenses, so they might wind up poor.

With all that they have already done, the elderly should not be ignored.

Instead of all our instead, all of our elderly people deserve a good reward.

I would like to thank you all for listening to me today.

And if I can afford to live a while longer, I'll have even more to say.

Thank you.

Janet Butcher.

Um I I'd like to thank Chair Andreola for having the meeting, the budget meeting in chambers.

Um I haven't always followed um the commission meetings, but over the last five years I have, and I think all of their budget meetings have been in some obscure little tiny place.

So I too bad more people weren't here.

But um I and I found that the subjects were interesting.

I really liked the gentleman who gave kind of the big overview.

Um I do I I do I'm gonna pick on him about the 10% cap.

Um I do think it's a great idea, and I hope I hope it can come forth.

Um granddaughter gets um invitations to join up for 34%.

Now when you're on such a low budget, you're gonna pay 34% for borrowing money for a little while.

That's pretty crazy.

But um I also appreciate the word return on investment.

Um I know not all departments can, but there are departments that should and could should look at that.

Um this doesn't have anything to do with the commissioners because you don't have anything to do with this, but I know a lot of people don't know this.

But if you have a low credit rating, you pay higher car insurance.

Um because they I guess the philosophy behind that is if you have a low credit rating, you're not a good driver.

I know a lot of people that make a lot of money that aren't good drivers, but anyway, just wanted to bring that up.

Thank you very much for this presentation.

Have a good day.

Thank you.

There's nobody else signed in.

Thank you.

We'll go ahead and close public comment.

Um, I'm guessing there's nothing online because of the meeting.

So I'll move now to item number six, which is commissioners and county manager announcements, reports and updates.

Manager Thomas.

Really?

Wow.

All right.

Commissioner Flock.

Commissioner Hill.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Just two items since we're talking about budget.

I would like a report to the board on how much more we're spending on ICE detainees and what we're getting reimbursed.

I think it's important that we understand that cost and the citizens understand that cost.

So I'm not sure if we should have the sheriff present on that or if it should just be a member of the board, however, it needs to come across, but it should be a discussion that we have.

Um, thank you.

And then uh back on this item that I had asked for, oh my gosh, a few months ago, then learning more information about the fact that um NRS doesn't allow for the um county to create um uh preferences when it comes to buying certain media, like buying Spanish uh media and creating a preference saying, hey, our population, that's like 30% of our population, we need to make sure that we're equitably getting out information, especially if we're buying media um and that we have to go with low bid and uh professional services, etc.

But I think that there may be other ways that we can make sure that we're reaching the full the the community.

And so um I sent these to manager Thomas, but one of them would be that our team um create a directory of all media and who they reach and making sure that that's a reference guide for staff so they understand all the opportunities to if if we're gonna do paid media that we're reaching out to those diverse sources and then also um seeing how we could create some sort of reporting of if we're doing paid media who we're actually buying it with, and that the board has some transparency to that.

Um so uh I put those together and hopefully that can be also part of a budget discussion, knowing that we're not really we don't do a ton of paid media um overall for the county, but if we do, I just want to make sure it's equitable and that we're reaching all of the public.

So thank you for that.

Thank you.

Umiser Herman, do you have anything?

No, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I agree that it was a great meeting.

I'd like to again thank staff for um setting up this room.

I know it takes a lot of heavy lifting, uh, literally and figuratively to get it looking like this.

Our guest presenters, I don't know if they're still in the room.

Thank you for joining us today.

Um, I think that I really appreciate that one slide that says the we are not alone.

It was the title of that slide.

Um, I because you know, as we look at Washoe County Reno Sparks and Watchtow County school district, we're all swimming in similar waters right now, and um costs are just rising faster than our reoccurring revenues, and so that's kind of the the theme that we're all facing, and it's gonna take a lot of collaboration, but um, I think at the end of the day, uh the uncomfortable reality for me is that you can manage well and still fall behind because of this structural deficit that we're facing.

And so I'm really looking forward to diving in deeper.

Um, and I think the goal today was to work through some of those priorities for next year, and I think that was achieved.

So great job setting this up for us.

Thank you.

One, um, I've recently found out that there was statutorily an opportunity for seniors that had hardships to have a bit of a break on their property tax.

Um, and I have found that that has not equated to um being current.

And I think that there hopefully I I've spoken with uh Mr.

Sarman, who must have heard that I was going to call his name, who's now left.

But the um I've been in contact with him, and so I don't know if there's an opportunity to to look at that.

Um I think as we move into that, especially with how many seniors we have.

I I think that that's something that maybe we can look at.

I don't know what Washoe County can or can't do, but that what that program was available and now no longer available for for various reasons that I'll skip.

I also want to share that on February 4th, uh Spanish Springs CAB will be having the Sparks Hope team along with the Washa County Sheriff's Hope Team, and um hearing about the great work that they do and um looking forward to everyone who would like to attend.

I hope we can see you there.

And then I also um reached out to um Judge Walker, Chief Justice Walker, actually, uh, about uh coming and doing a presentation in terms of the correlation of the sequential intercept model and and how it all relates as he put it in a meeting that I had, and um Commissioner Herman was with me at that meeting where he actually shared the millions and millions of taxpayer dollars that are being saved because of what Washoe County is now in its third year year in implementing the sequential intercept model, which extends to various programs like our place, the CARES campus, and and other places, along with looking at some of the addressing the mental health issues that um whether it's the jail-based program or or other resources in our community, and when he said millions, he used that term.

I thought it was going to be Carl Sagan with billions and billions.

It wasn't billions and billions, but millions and millions of dollars.

I think that's really important because facts matter, and I think that sometimes looking at things and not necessarily understanding the direct savings and the impact of what that looks like is important.

So I'm looking forward to maybe having Judge Walker and the team.

It could be a company maybe on the financial end with Miss Jacobin and Kathy Hill and Miss Cook as well.

So um, I don't know what that'll look like, but I hope that we can have that.

I hope we can have that kind of presentation even before the budget so we can understand what that expenditure, because it is a large expenditure in Washoe County, is my understanding historically, decided to take that on in a collaborative way with other jurisdictions in agreement with that.

So I think also having the understanding of not only what the cost is but what the savings is, um, and then always asking, you know, what kind of resources for the return on investment might we look at.

So again, um thank you so much for I think uh the third party independent study revealed a lot, and this is one.

I was so excited about this, um, and I remain excited, and I hope this is not gonna be the last one because the third party study indicated that big subjects like the budget are actually the perfect perfect setting to do exactly what we saw today, where we have one subject, a lot of great information, a lot of wonderful discussion among commissioners, but more importantly, actually being able to look at all the information and then where do we go with with whatever the topic is.

So I certainly um want to thank again everybody who put in all the hard work because when you have a presentation and and the the succinctness of everything, that's a lot of work behind the scenes.

So thank you so much, and thanks to our guests who did a great job.

I hope everyone liked the format.

I certainly felt that this is a success to celebrate for um moving forward and look forward to whatever the future may hold and future workshops.

So I am gonna call this meeting adjourn at 12 55.

Thank you so much.