Good morning, everybody. I will go ahead and call the August 25th, 2026, Washington County Board of Commissioners meeting to order. The clerk will take the role. Commissioner Miron? Here. Commissioner Karwoski? Here. Commissioner Cox? Here. Commissioner Bigham? Here. Commissioner Clausen? Here. Roll call taken. All present. Thank you. Please join us for the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you very much. We are at the comments from the public portion. I do have one speaker card. Chris Holbrook from Woodbury, if you would approach the speaker rostrum there. State your name and community. And then just as a reminder, we do not respond to public comment at this forum. Either staff or a commissioner maybe would follow up after. And then if we could just keep comments to three to five minutes, that would be great. Mr. Holbrook. I appreciate you taking the time to let me make a preemptive statement- ... about security surveillance cameras, whether it's by Flock or Axon. I noticed on the agenda today there's a presentation from Axon, so that's why I wanted to attend and see if it was about cameras, which in Woodbury we have had 22 cameras installed by the city in a contract with Flock without a public discussion, without a vote. So I wanted to come before you and ask that if we get to the point of making that decision in Washington County, we engage the community to maintain the public trust. So I've spoken... I won't go through my whole- Packet of information. I know I only have a couple minutes here, but there have been numerous county sheriff's offices in Minnesota, numerous cities, who have recently paused, suspended contracts for surveillance databases, which is different than photographs, things of that nature. Just one minute about some data. In Woodbury, our database has been searched 46,000 times in the first half of the year. 3,200 of those have had a warrant. By law, searching a database of tracking people is supposed to require a warrant. So that's where some of these issues are happening. There have been multiple data breaches. There have been mistakes and mistruths from the corporations themselves about this. So, I just wanted to get on the radar and keep monitoring the situation. I will have a discussion with the sheriff, as Commissioner Bigham suggested, about any future actions. So that's all I have. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. That is the only speaker card I do have up here at the dais. Is there anybody else from the public that would like to address the board at this time? Okay, seeing none, before we move to approval of agenda, we do have a commissioner, Commissioner Clausen, is remote. And so all the votes today will be roll call. So just in case people watching from home or in the audience are questioning that. So, the next item on the agenda is approval of the agenda. Is there a motion to approve today's agenda? Madam Chair, I would approve as presented. Second. Moved and seconded. Discussion? All right. The clerk will take the roll. Commissioner Miron? Aye. Commissioner Karwoski? Aye. Commissioner Cox? Aye. Commissioner Clausen? Aye. Commissioner Bigham? Aye. Agenda passes five zero. All right. The next item is consent calendar. Are there any items that members would like to remove for consideration? If not, is there a motion to approve today's consent calendar? Madam Chair, I will move to approve all items as presented. I'll second that. Moved and seconded. Clerk will take the roll. Commissioner Miron? Aye. Commissioner Karwoski? Aye. Commissioner Cox? Aye. Commissioner Clausen? Aye. Commissioner Bigham? Aye. Consent calendar passes five zero. All right. The next item on the agenda today is Mr. Halderman from the County Attorney's Office, who will be discussing the Axon Justice premier presentation. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Madam Chair and commissioners, and thank you for having us, the County Attorney's Office, with another presentation. I know that this has been really beneficial for our office to come in about every month and discuss different aspects of our office with you. It's been really great for us to show some behind-the-scenes things to let the commissioners know what we're doing in our office, and also let the community know what's going on in our office. I think it's very important for everyone. And so today, specifically, we're talking about some of the software programs that we have utilized in the last few years to really streamline our evidentiary issues and streamline disclosures and try to be the best office that we can be, for sure. And I started in this office, I started in December of 2019, and that was about two and a half months before COVID hit and changed how all of us worked in the office. When I started, we were entirely paper. So all of our files were paper. I was taking handwritten notes of what was going on in court. And it's funny to say, you think that's something that would happen in the '90s there, but this is 2019 that we were doing this. All of our discovery was coming in hard copies of CDs, hard copies of paper, and our legal assistants and paralegals were going through and manually organizing all these things, attaching it to hard files, and sending out copies, making copies to defense attorneys and other firms and things like that. When COVID hit and we all had to work from home for a little while, we all looked at each other and said, "What the heck are we going to do here? Are we going to bring files home? How are we going to do this?" And we quickly had to pivot and implement some pretty robust software programs that were, in this case, made by AxonEvidence.com and Investigate, Axon Investigate. So evidence.com is a cloud-based system that turns our files into completely online evidentiary systems. And you're going to hear Jaylyn Young. She's a senior legal assistant in our office. We've been working together for three years. She's really an integral part to our trial team, and somebody I really trust, and somebody who really knows the system and things like that. She's going to talk about how evidence.com has really improved her job and made her job more streamlined and easier to do, and the different and more things we can do with it, and transfer evidence to, like I said, defense attorneys and firms and things like that. And then you're going to hear from Joe Martin. Joe Martin's been in our office for over a year now. And this was a special position that we had requested, and he is somebody who is working forensically with some of our video evidence that comes in and is also putting together better presentations for trials, for jurors. And it really gives us the ability to really encapsulate a lot of evidence quickly and turn maybe what was several complicated videos into one nice presentation. So, with that, I'll have Jaylyn step up here. And I know we have a PowerPoint. Oh, here it is right there. So Good morning, Madam Chair and commissioners. As Mr. Haldeman highlighted, pre-Axon justice was an uphill battle. But with Axon, we can do everything in that program. It's a simpler and more seamless process than what we had before, which was kind of before my time. So for most of our agencies, we can request directly through Axon all of the evidence that we'd need to build a case. And what that looks like is an email with an upload link. And through that upload link, they could dump everything that we're requesting directly into our Axon case file. And then what we do with that evidence for disclosures, we can disclose through two methods. We can do a case partner share, which is a duplicate copy of our evidence case file or any evidence we're sending, and copies it directly into their Axon organization case file. The other method is a download link. It's similar to an evidence request. It's an email, but instead of an upload link, it's a download link, and it contains everything, all the evidence. That takes a little bit more time on their end, but still, it's an instantaneous send-off. How are these implementations improving our daily procedures? Well, our biggest takeaway is it saves on time and money. It's a faster turnaround. There's no wait times with receiving the evidence or sending it off. We don't have to download any evidence ourselves and upload into Axon. And we also have fewer technological issues. There's a feature called Axon Auto Conversion that automatically converts video to be easily playable and viewable. It saves money. We no longer have to consistently stock disks and USBs and flash drives, which can be very expensive. I think a stack of disks is like $30, and USBs could be a couple of hundred dollars, depending on the size of gigabyte. So not only has it been helpful with receiving and disclosing evidence, but with our organization and review. When we're dealing with these complex cases, we can have hundreds of pieces of evidence, multiple agencies, lots of people involved, and with that, we can have multiple case shares. And so as support staff, I try to make our case file as easy to navigate as possible, so when the attorney goes in, he or she can go in and grab what they need when they need it, and not get confused. But with multiple Axon case shares, we could be receiving evidence from multiple agencies, and we're able to link those cases together, so it's all maintained into one file. There's no multiple disks or anything like that. Organizing by folders, it's pretty self-explanatory. Say I have body cam with multiple victim statements throughout. I can separate those body cam and put it all in one folder to distinguish. Evidence tagging or labeling, it's basically like a bookmark that... Or I'm sorry, not a bookmark. Evidence tagging is a label that we assign to each evidence file. So we don't have to go into that evidence to figure out what it is. We can look at the label, see that it's Miranda, or a witness statement, or arrest footage. And then for review, to talk a little bit about auto transcription, that has been super helpful with reviewing evidence. It's become imperative that we need a transcript for every video. So Axon automatically transcribes all audible conversations and video. It takes just a few minutes to complete. It distinguishes different speakers and recognizes voices. And again, it saves a substantial amount of time. Beforehand, we would have to manually transcribe all of these videos, and some of them could be, say, an hour in length. And that could take multiple hours of my day to figure out what is being said. There's been many moments of me repeating a five-second time period like a broken record player, trying to figure out what's being said. But again, to have this for, say, we have 30 body cam, and they're all hours in length, it's just really improved the way that we can review video in a quick time period. Oh, and then a little bit about marking. In those videos and audios, we can bookmark places in the time frame so we don't have to scrub through and figure out what we're looking for. So we can highlight key quotes and key moments. And so a little bit of what it looks like. So this is what our case looks like when we receive it. As you can see, if you look at the arrow there, you can see there's 336 pieces of evidence, and it's all mixed together, and it's very confusing, and there's no rhyme or reason. So once I'm able to go through and organize everything, this is what it looks like. We've got respective folders. Everything has a rhyme or reason. At the top, you can see that we can link different cases together. It merges all into one file. So there's no multiple physical files, disks to open, and flash drives to plug in and process. And then breaking down the folder a little bit. If you go in, I've got a screen grab of the body-worn camera video. All of the labels are in their original form, so I can reference with law enforcement that we have everything. And then there's a corresponding tag of Miranda statement, witness statements, arrest footage. So there's a variety of different case tagging there. And then the transcript. When you open a video, this is what it looks like. We have the video that plays and then a corresponding transcript that you can follow as it plays. You can jump through the different words and scrub through that way, so This is what it looks like when I go in to edit that draft to make it a final court-ready copy. We have the assigned speaker labels, the distinguished voices, like I said. We have the different assistant controls. I personally like to just click the words and edit as I go. So video editing. Marking, I talked a little bit about already, but highlighting those specific moments and details in the evidence file. Clipping, so instead of playing the entire hours-long body-worn camera, we can clip out short moments to highlight different actions. And of those short clips, we can stitch them together to, say, redact out silent audio or just information that isn't relevant to what we want to do. And then redactions. A big thing that we use for trial prep, we prepare evidence for trial to be readily viewable to protect private, confidential, and sensitive content. There's a neat redaction assistant feature that if I were to do this manually, could take hours. So it redacts out notebooks, screens, mobile devices, and et cetera. So the main redactions are that manual mask. It's a blackout and blur, and I'll be able to show you in the next coming slides. There's an audio mask that mutes and bleeps the sound, and then an object tracker which masks moving objects and tracks it for however long I need it to track for. And then I will be able to show you. So here's a screen grab of a... They're breaking into this apartment to get to somebody. You can see in the timeframe there's a marker, and you can see that it highlights on the side there. And then we have our variety of clips. So when our attorney goes through, he or she can go in and click throughout the video. This is what it looks like for our redactions. So I'll just take you through what it all looks like. So I've got that manual mask. You see a gray square in the middle of your screen there. That will black out that section. It's not blacking out anything important. And then we have our object tracker over the suspect's face. For that green portion of the timeframe, it'll blur out his face for that amount of time. And then I got a little audio snip to mute the sound, just to show you what it looks like. And then I have a video example. If I can play it. Before she could have screamed. If she's saying, "I locked her up for two days," why didn't they lock her up? I'm asking. Okay, just chill for a minute. So that's just a little example of what it could look like in trial if I ever needed to use anything like that for redacting. And yeah, so that is all I have. Thank you so much for your time. So I'll let Joe take over. Thank you very much for your presentation. You did forget one thing, that this is more attorney-friendly, too. Oh, for sure. So they don't freak out in the middle of the trial. But certainly appreciate the demonstration and the efficiency. I'm sure you know this. There's a couple of us here on the board that are paralegals or were paralegals, and I'm envious of the ability and the technology and modernization of how you can process this very important information that's vital, obviously, to a case. So, any particular questions from... We have more? Yes. Go ahead. Sorry. We'll hold questions to the end. Good morning. A pleasure to be the one actually presenting a PowerPoint. Usually, I'm just the nerd behind the screen making it. I'm Joe Martin. I'm the E-Litigation and Trial Technology Specialist here for the Washington County Attorney's Office. So let me introduce you to Axon Investigate. So what is Axon Investigate? It is a specialized, forensically sound software tool designed for law enforcement and legal teams to review, analyze, and process video evidence. Now, Axon Investigate can do a lot of things, but since my job is primarily processing evidence and helping attorneys present it in court, I'm going to stick to the fun things that make my day just a little bit easier. So one of the immediate ways this program makes an impact on my job is through its advanced audio and sound editing. What I mean by that is Investigate allows me to extract any audio from a media source and look at it through the different frequencies of sound being made throughout the clip. Then I can isolate those frequencies and exclude or highlight them depending on what I desire. For example, here. We have many situations where, say there's an officer wearing a body-worn camera. He's standing on a busy highway next to a running emergency vehicle, trying to obtain a statement or have a conversation with a victim. This allows me to remove some of the white noise or possibly highlight a clip that is necessary to the case. Doesn't sound like a big deal, but once you've stood next to a running cruiser, it can be a little noisy. So it's something that has made an impact in my job and made some juror's decision a little bit easier. So the next function is video clarification. This is one which gets everyone excited and certainly got my office very excited when I said that it's going to happen. Now, this function allows me to Take a super blotchy, unclear photo and allows me to positively identify it. You can see that is from the same video. So this is the point where I need to clarify my statement. This isn't "CSI." I can't just keep smashing the enhance button and suddenly turn a gas station surveillance camera into 4K. But it does allow me to take a segment of a video that has a stationary object, like the car in the background of the video. I take it, and I take all the frames that were recorded in a 10 to 15 second ratio, and then I average them and see which ones show up, and that allows me to create a clearer image, in this case, positively identify a license plate. Now, it doesn't work for every situation, yet again, we are bound by reality here, so I can't do all amazing things. But it is something that has allowed me to identify faces, ID cards, documents, and license plates within videos, and that's just in the few months that we've had it here. So the next function, while not as cool as identifying a face or a license plate, is perhaps my favorite because it has saved me, thus far, the most time. What you see on your screen is a screenshot from one of my past projects. This project involved over 100 security videos, and all of them needed various things done to them so that they could be presented in court. And thanks to the advanced workflows and capabilities of Investigate, I was able to do them all at once rather than going through them individually. I was allowed to combine them together, resize them to fit a certain screen, clarify images, and speed them up or slow them down, depending on their playback speed. And rather than doing it all at one, I was able to do it in one batch function, and this saved me literally hours. And it created a much more sophisticated exhibit that allows jurors to see what was once 100 different videos of different sizes, frame rates, et cetera, and allows them to have a more comprehensive visual of the crime that took place and make it look as simple as watching a security camera footage following one person across a screen. And while it all looks messy, when it's all done through the functions that I have here, it can look something like this. You can have a situation where you have four different officers in a helicopter view, all different perspectives of the same event. While looking at them separately, the scene can seem very chaotic, but we don't want to leave it up to chance and whether or not the jurors can comprehend a messy situation. Instead, they can see an event unfold in real-time from all perspectives, allowing them to make the best decision with the information available, and not limiting their understanding because our technology has constraints or because of ineffective evidence or poor presentation. Because let's be real, with modern social media and current state of technology, many people come to court with the expectation of having a clean presentation and being able to understand the evidence that's in front of them, we believe is a given, and that is something we are striving to do. To sum this up, Axon Investigate can do a lot of functions. Obviously, I can't cover every single one. And some functions I haven't even mastered yet, but the final thing I want to leave you with is the idea of forensic accountability. Like I've touched on, we live in an age where the capabilities of technology are rapidly expanding, and that means the capabilities of the average user are also expanded, meaning that a normal person, if they get a hold of evidence like a picture, a document, or a video, without much know-how, they can alter that media and make it appear as something it is not, and sometimes even without realizing it. And in the legal field, that can get us in trouble. So we want to make sure we are doing this in a sound way. And one of the best things about Investigate is its security and accountability. Every time I remove background noise from a video or clarify an image, I can generate a report through Investigate that allows anyone who reviews my work to recreate it and know that the original evidence was not lost or tampered with. This means that we never alter a video, or we never add information that was not there. We are simply taking the information we have and giving it to them in a focused framework by removing unnecessary data if possible. In conclusion, the next time you see a visual like the one I just showed, showing the different body cameras, or you hear about digital evidence being displayed in ways I just showed you, know that at Washington County, we are striving to keep pace with the rapidly moving world of technology, and we are trying to do so with integrity and effectiveness. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you again, Madam Chair and commissioners. And Madam Chair, I want to assure you personally that I never freak out during trials, so. But what this emphasizes is that we're a total team effort in this, and to show the background of what... I'm very visual in the courtroom, but there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that I think is critical. I can't do my job without a lot of these things, and it's, I think, great that Jalen and Joe can come up here and talk about their daily tasks and what they're doing. And And these are things where if we get a judge ruling while I'm in trial and I need something redacted or need something stitched, we all have confidence that it can happen like that now. We have the technology to do it where if we have a ruling, we don't have to alter our evidence presentation. We don't have to be like, "Oh, what are we going to do? How are we going to change this?" We can make a change really quickly on the fly and keep things going. So, it's been a great program for our office, and we're fortunate to be able to have it and use it. So, thank you again, Madam Chair and commissioners, appreciate it. Thank you to all three of you for presenting today. Any particular questions? Commissioner Clausen. Thank you. Thanks for the presentation. I really appreciate it. Just a couple questions about the software. Particularly interested to know if you are using the AI features, the auto transcription, the redaction, the automated report. And if that is being done, who's reviewing that, and is there a disclosure for that? Yep. So, we don't use any of the AI features in Axon, in evidence.com. The transcription is something that comes up automatically. So I think in my last employer, we had a room of transcription people that were just transcribing videos just to get statements out in time for trial. This is something that I would say is a first draft. Everybody's going through what's happening in the transcription. So nothing that goes out... And it's also approved by the defense attorney. So we disclose our transcriptions to the defense counsel. They have a chance to go through it all, and certainly before trial, if there's any errors that would happen in a transcription, we would talk about those things and sort them out in court. And that's no different than how we did it before. It's just a lot quicker this way. Even when we had manual transcriptions, we would still have errors. We would still have spots at a transcription where we weren't quite sure what was being heard, and we would still have to speak with the defense attorney and the judge and figure out what exactly was going to happen. So, that's not really an AI feature, and everything else that Ms. Young was talking about is something she's doing manually. So some of that redaction things on the video, she's actually at first showing the program what she wants to redact, like a face or a number, things like that, and then the program can pick up that same number and do it. But again, I guess the good part about this is that all of our exhibits, everything we disclose to court, has to be disclosed to the defense attorney, and they have to approve it, or they can object to it before it gets presented in court. What are the retention rules for the footage that's kept? So the videos that don't have a tag of evidence, what happens to that video- If video does- ... or footage? If video doesn't have a tag, so if something's not charged? So if something is charged, we keep it for, depending on the case, you'll have to ask our colleague, Stuart, about this because he's our data practices guru. But something that is charged in court and ends up being a public document, we retain for, I want to say seven years. So- Seven? ... yeah. It is retained for a period of time. And if it's untagged, is that something that you also retain? Well, so untagged would be anything that's uncharged, we do not retain. If something is not charged, and ends up not being a case, we would not retain that. Okay. So, footage is then erased if it's not tagged. Yeah. I'm not completely familiar with how we do that. That's not necessarily my role in the office, but I know we're not required to retain it. What was the cost associated with this new software? Oh, I'm not the bean counter either, Commissioner Clausen. So I don't- Oh. It is something that I think when we're talking about what we came from and what we have now, all the police departments in our jurisdiction also are using these types of software programs. So, most of the police departments in our jurisdiction, Woodbury, Cottage Grove, and those things, they're using Axon body cams. And when they're recording their body cam information and sending it to us and we're using Axon, evidence.com, that helps ensure a seamless transition for our... And it just really ensures that these programs are working together, and we're getting the best product that we can to send out to defense attorneys, to send out to disclose, and be able to utilize that in a quick manner. We're getting more and more cases all the time, and to be able to have an efficient use of cloud-based security and cloud-based evidence presentation, it really helps us a lot. County Attorney Magnuson. Madam Chair, Commissioners, so we presented this to the board three years ago, and you reviewed the subscription of the package. We can give you a copy of the contract and go back and get the exact cost. There was a lot of bang for the buck here. It was not an expensive platform, all things considered. I think the thing that is amazing to me here is that we got Axon Justice, which syncs up with evidence.com, which is what law enforcement often uses. So that allows for this portal to transfer evidence. But there's also this advanced program that came with the original, and we didn't pay for Axon Investigate, which has got the real horsepower there. It was a two-week course that we paid for our specialist to go through and learn. But we were given some licenses along with the Axon Justice, and really, that was money well spent. So I hope that helps. Thanks. Thank you, Kevin. I really appreciate it. I know that your budget's coming up soon, so I do plan on asking questions about these types of softwares because they are increasing every year. And although we at times get a great price in the beginning, as we know, that isn't seem to be the case year after year. And so I think it's just a really good practice that we always just talk about the cost of software. And then I'm wondering about, you talked about Axon body cameras, but I know Axon, don't they have other types of surveillance? So from our role as the County Attorney's office, we wouldn't be involved in that. I know that they use different cameras as far as if you were in an interview room, and they would have systems where they were doing interviews of defendants that use cameras in that way. But their biggest product is the body cams. When you have to work with the different PDs in the jurisdiction, you're trying to get all the technology synced up so we can get evidence in and out as quick as possible. Will it also sync up to the drone footage that is now becoming available? Drone footage would be, I think, just separate from what I think we're talking about here. If a drone is used by a police department, that would be a video that would be separately downloaded and sent to us, and then disclosed. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you, Commissioner. Thank you. Commissioner Karwoski. Thank you, Madam Chair. Assistant County Attorney and Assistant Division Chief Halderman, great presentation. I also want to thank Ms. Young and Mr. Martin. Great technology. This Axon product is part of your budget that the county board approves, so these are investments we're aware of that you're making. Very supportive. Want to thank a lot of-- We've got Attorney Magnuson here, and a lot of your legal department. Really very impressed with the efficiency you get out of this. One, the accurate, it makes you much more effective, but also more efficient. I was wondering on this Axon product, is this a legal standard that's fully accepted in the court of law? Yeah. So, what it does for us, it allows us to make presentations. So we still have the same rules of evidence that we've had before. That's always constant. But this allows us to do things quicker and more efficiently to get us to those exhibits that we want to present. So, yes. Other jurisdictions have been using evidence.com. I used it in my prior employer as well. So it's been around for a while, and it is a very widely accepted program. Thank you. And lastly, I was in by the presentation of Ms. Young and Mr. Martin. When you take a pure video and you're basically using its existing accuracy, the clarity, you're not manipulating at all, you're just utilizing the film footage and making it as pure as possible. It's really amazing how the evidence is really not being tampered with. It is what it is. It's just bringing clarity to what you're trying to do. So I really appreciate the presentation and learning more about this product. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Commissioner. Commissioner Cox. Thanks, Madam Chair. I'll just say thank you as well. This is not something that I understand at all. And so getting a little bit of a glimpse into the work of your team is really interesting. And so I appreciate some of the comments, Mr. Martin, there at the very end about how all of the evidence is maintained, right? And it just kind of gives peace of mind that this is the industry standard, and we're using it to the best of our ability. So thank you. Thank you, Commissioner. Commissioner Miron. Yeah. Thank you for the presentation. I appreciate Commissioner Karwoski's comments because I really do think it explains it in a very good way on how this is utilized and not tampering, but utilizing the information we have. And certainly as we look at cost on these things, that's one aspect of it, right? But we need to look at the cost benefit, and really what was shared today was that benefit, and reduction in costs to the county attorney's office in putting this information together and providing it. So, the cost is one aspect of it, and certainly we're all interested in what that is. But more importantly, tracking the benefits and the reduction in cost to us by utilization of this technology. But thank you much for the presentation. Thank you, Commissioner. All right. Thank you very much. The other thing I just wanted to point out, that I believe since this has been implemented, the performance measurement on the time to charge a case has substantially improved and that was the main issue, is to have efficiency, and I guess, cost savings for time related to preparing all these cases, but also to shorten the time to deliver justice to victims. And that's the main point here. So just really appreciate all the work and time that goes into a program like this. And it's really incredible what can be done, and juries are taking note of it, too, which might add a complexity to it. So really appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Halderman. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, commissioners. Madam Chair? Yeah. Administrator Corbid. Madam Chair, if the board will allow, we do have a little bit of the budget information. Our budget analysts and our contract folks both listened to the... Are you going to address this question? No, I was just going to make one other comment- Yes ... and that is in terms of how long these records are retained, that information for our office as well as the rest of the county is on WashNot under the content management page. It breaks down that schedule. But I'll stay close by if you need me to address something. Thank you, County Attorney Magnuson. Administrator Corbid. Thank you, Madam Chair. So in 2024's budget, the county board approved a $75,000 supplementary request for the purchase of the software, and then in 2024, later in April, the county board approved a five-year contract with Axon for $328,120. So it's roughly $64,000 a year right now for the use of the product. Thank you for that information. All right, thank you. So the next item is human resources, and we are going to discuss adopting a proclamation recognizing the 20th anniversary of the Anti-Racism Workgroup with the ERG. And here to present is George Stone, our community services division manager. And some colleagues. And some colleagues, Madam Chair, Commissioners, my name is George Stone, manager in CSD, as well as executive sponsor for the ARW ERG, employee resource group. Along with me today, I have some members of that group. Priscilla Costilla, Pamela Alshabazz, and Jo Ayers Johnson will be helping me present the proclamation this morning, if that's okay. Yep, absolutely. All right. Well, and before I start, I just want to thank the board for allowing for this space. One of the first things that happened to me when I came to Washington County was I saw a sign in the lobby. It was actually during my interview in 2018, and it was a Anti-Racism Working Group sign, and it really stuck with me that in the lobby of Washington County Community Services was this resource for the employees here, and I thought, "This is the place I want to work." So, with that, it's been a long time coming and wanting to get some recognition for this group, and so with that, I will read the proclamation. Whereas May 2026 marked the 20th anniversary of the Anti-Racism Workgroup Employee Resource Group, recognizing two decades of fostering learning, connection, support, and awareness among Washington County employees, and... Whereas over the past 20 years, employees from across Washington County have contributed their time, leadership, lived experiences, and commitment to sustaining the Anti-Racism Workgroup and creating opportunities for dialogue, learning, support, and growth, and whereas the continued success and longevity of the Anti-Racism Workgroup reflects the dedication of employees who have worked to foster a workplace culture grounded in respect, belonging, inclusion, and understanding, and... Whereas racism and discrimination can negatively impact individuals, workplaces, and communities by affecting a sense of belonging, wellbeing, and opportunity, and whereas education, dialogue, and access to resources play an important role in increasing understanding, fostering inclusion, and creating supportive workplace environments, and... And whereas the Anti-Racism Employee Resource Group serves as a resource for employees by encouraging conversation, raising awareness, promoting cultural understanding, and helping foster a welcoming and inclusive workplace, and whereas Washington County recognizes that supporting employees and fostering an inclusive workplace strengthens its ability to serve residents, communities, and partners with responsiveness, professionalism, and care, and whereas Washington County remains committed to fostering a workplace where employees experience belonging, respect, inclusion, and opportunities to thrive. Now, therefore, be it proclaimed that the Washington County Board of Commissioners recognizes and celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Anti-Racism Employee Resource Group and expresses its appreciation to the many employees, past and present, whose leadership, service, and commitment have sustained this work over two decades, and be it further proclaimed that the Washington County Board of Commissioners reaffirms its commitment to fostering an inclusive, respectful, and supportive workplace to serving residents and communities with dignity, fairness, and respect. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Stone. Is there a motion to approve the resolution? Happy to move- I move ... to approve the resolution. Moved by Commissioner Miron. Second. Seconded by Commissioner Karwoski. Commissioner Miron. Just I love the way you created inclusiveness in how you presented the resolution here. But very meaningful resolution. It's ... interesting that we're celebrating 20 years now, and I had a nice visit with Robert Crawford here, former employee of Washington County, retired now, but was involved early on in establishing our employee resource group here, an anti-racism group. So, kudos to all of you for the work that you're doing, all of our county staff for embracing that work and being a part of it to the extent that we're able to. But thank you again for the nice celebration we had this morning prior to the board meeting, the opportunity to mix and mingle and visit, and talk about our commonalities, and how important this resource group is to Washington County. And George, I hope that other people feel similarly as you do. I think our approach really helps us attract the most talented, bright people that we possibly can to Washington County to do the work and service that we need to do for the people here in the county, and you're a big part of that. Your team is a big part of that. Thank you for that. Thank you. Commissioner Karwoski. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Stone, and thank you for presenting and all of you being here to present. 20 years. Mr. Stone, your point about it attracted you, and the county wasn't shying away with what we're doing. It's prideful with all our employee resource groups that we let the public know that we're doing these and be fully transparent. It's a point of pride, and racism is really something you have to work at constantly because it can be very subtle. And I think we need to retain and attract employees, and we don't need a distraction of racism of any kind interfering with that. I completely agree with the thoughtful comments Commissioner Miron made. So, thank you. Thank you. Any further com-- Commissioner Cox. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you all for the presentation. Like Commissioner Miron, I really like how everyone had, or several of you had a few words to say in there. I think the words that catch me in this proclamation are encouraging conversation, raising awareness, and promoting cultural understanding. I think if we all come from that basis of trying to understand, I know that's a public health thing that Director Brummel always reminds me of, which is seeking to understand. And I think that's what you started 20 years ago. And I think all of the other ERGs that have come since then, and this culture that we have here at the county, that is that seeking to understand and that we all belong here, really probably stems from a lot of the work of this group, so thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Clausen, did you want to...? Yeah, that would be great. George Stone, thank you so much for the presentation and the resolution. It's beautifully written. I agree with my commissioners' comments. We are very grateful that we have amazing county staff that have been able to take us to the next level in this last 20 years. We keep growing, and I'm hoping that through these anti-racism work groups and other employee resource groups, that we can bring more BIPOC and other youth ethnicities to leadership positions in Washington County. I know I have about, what, four months left, three months left here, and I really would like to see more diverse faces out of and staff, and I think that this group can help mentor people to bring them up to those department head positions. But I really appreciate the staff's opportunity to bring this forward. And I just close this up here, but I appreciate the celebration today. And we're celebrating 20 years, and it's so great to see Mr. Crawford here, because we're celebrating a lot of work that has been put into this group for 20 years. But the words that stick out to me are, "The Washington County Board of Commissioners reaffirms its commitment to fostering an inclusive, respectful, and supportive workplace," because there is still work to be done in our systems and in our processes. So, the celebration is you always celebrate your wins, but it's moving forward and continuing to make the progress that is also what we strive for. Madam Chair- Yep ... if I could just- Mr. George ... I just wanted to take a second to recognize the folks who didn't get a chance to speak today. Yep. Members of the Anti-Racism Work Group, including, as was mentioned, Robert Crawford, who from the old days has come back. We invited some of those folks to come and celebrate with us. And again, thank you all of you for joining us this morning for coffee and donut holes. And we really appreciate your support. And we have some new swag, some stickers. Part of my job as executive sponsor for this group is to continue to recruit for this group. Now that we are a county-wide ERG, we have expanded our ranks and have folks from all across the county encourage folks to consider joining the ARW. Robert, it looks like- That's good ... you want to speak, and I'm going to move out of the way. Yeah. Well, we listen when Mr. Crawford speaks. Mr. Crawford. Good morning, Commissioner. I felt a little invisible behind the poster Well, I just wanted to say thank you for continuing this work. Man, when I started here over in 1982, I was kind of the lone ranger, and I felt like I didn't have a lot of support. But you commissioners, the ones that were here and the three of you here now that was here when I was working back in the day, you guys supported me, kept me going. And Kevin, he was one that supported me. When we moved to Woodbury, we didn't have enough space for some of my workers. I asked Kevin, I said, "You got some empty cubes up there. You think we can use those?" First thing he said, "Yeah. Why not?" And that was really the beginning of our working relationship, and that continued until I retired in 2018. 36 years I worked here. Best place I've ever worked. Most challenging, too. But you know when you have the ability to communicate with people, good things happen. Doesn't matter if we disagree, you sit and talk about it, you can come up with solutions. Now I'm a very quiet guy. Most of you know that, right? And I got to know everybody in all the departments here, and one of my supervisors always told me, "Get to know the county commissioners. Those are the folks that make the county roll." He said, "You get to know them. Not just their names. Learn something about them." And Myra Peterson, who was a commissioner back in the day, she was one that I would always talk to. She was a gardener. Loved to garden. So when I go up to here to talk to her, I always talked about gardening. Don't know jack about gardening. And I would ask her, and she would just go on and on and on and on. And then the real reason why I was there, then I can talk about it, and she was all ready to receive it. And I learned those things. And so for you commissioners, these are your people. These are your employees. Don't be afraid to talk to them. Because guess what? You people just like they are. Ask tough questions. They got answers. They may not be the ones you want to hear, but that gives you perspective to think about some of the things that need to be done and can be done with your support. I'm honored to be here, and thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Crawford, for being here, too. All right, then- We need to vote ... oh, we need to vote on that. Thank you. The clerk will take the roll. Commissioner Miron? Aye. Commissioner Karwoski? Aye. Commissioner Cox? Aye. Commissioner Clausen? Aye. Commissioner Bigham? Aye. Resolution passes five zero. Thank you. The next item, we have two items from Public Works. The first one will be on items for the Law Enforcement Center Improvement Project, and that'll be presented by Greg Miller, our building services project manager. Welcome, Mr. Miller. Morning. Morning, commissioners. My name is Greg Miller, and I'm a project manager for the Building Services division. I am here this morning to present to you project LEC remodel phase two, bid pack four, which is capital improvement projects number BSD-CW-1601. This project was publicly bid. These are the... Oh, I'm sorry. These are agenda items I will present this morning. Project needs and objectives, scope of work, request for bids process, total bid results by work scope, bid summary, project schedule, project budget, and recommended board action. As spoken many times, LEC was built in 1993 and expanded again in 2009. In 2022, Building Services hired a consultant to study the building to determine what could be done to extend the life of the existing building. The study determined the need for major mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and life safety upgrades, as well as updating staff areas to be more ergonomic and flexible. The mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and life safety, as well as secure level three upgrades, have been completed. This project is a continuation of the LEC recommended improvements and is focused on secure level two and secure level one. Secure level two, home of the Patrol's division, scope of work consists of... And please note on the slide here that the images on the left show the existing conditions in the Patrol's division, which has not been changed much since 1993. While the image on the right shows the proposed design for the remodeled space. The project will completely remodel the existing Patrol's division and add the Emergency Services division to the space. Emergency Services is currently housed on secure level one. Secure level one scope of work consists of, and again, please note the images on the left are the existing conditions of what was the original 911 call center, which became the water parks and patrol space, and the existing EOC space. Converting existing emergency services division area into a mats room and the weight room after emergency services relocated to secure level two. Remodeling the former water parks and trails division space into a new jail roll call area and emergency operations center nerve center. This project publicly posted for bids on April 16th, 2026, with 16 work scopes. Bids were opened on June 9th, 2026. 316 companies reviewed the project, and we received 97 bids for the 16 work scopes. This slide provides the bid results by work scope. We received an average of nearly six bids per work scope. Only one work scope, and that's integrated automation systems, received a single bid due to the limited number of contractors qualified to work on the existing mechanical system controls. All work scopes received at least one bid. This slide provides the bid results by work scope requiring board approval. Of the 16 work scopes, only five meet the threshold requiring board approval, with a combined value of $1,331,110. There were 11 contracts approved by staff totaling $553,577. The construction manager's original project cost estimate was $1,950,585. The bid-day pricing totaled $1,884,687, which was $65,898 below the construction manager's estimate and well within the project budget. Design was completed in March 2026. Bids were opened in June 2026. Contract approval is scheduled for today. Construction is scheduled to begin in October 2026 and be completed in April of 2027. The full budget for the LEC project was $10,047,900. Costs incurred in cumulative contracts to date is $6,676,158. Remaining balance budget from past phases is $3,371,742. Pending bid awards for this phase of construction is $1,884,687. LEC remaining balance is $1,487,055. That remaining balance will be used for owner costs like furniture, audiovisual, and department storage needs. Public Works recommends the approval of the five contracts as shown. This concludes my presentation. Thank you for your time. I'd be pleased to answer any questions for this project. Thank you, Mr. Miller. Members, just because there's five and they're all going to be roll call, it would be great if we could go through the discussion first, and then just in an efficient manner for the clerk be able to do the roll call. So, is there anybody... Commissioner Miron. Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Miller. During construction, obviously, we've got a period of time, and how are operations being accommodated during that period of time during construction? Madam Chair, Mr. Commissioner, we are working closely with our stakeholders, primarily in this instance, the sheriff's department, and we're working through those. We're moving personnel around so we can continue our 24/7 operations in the sheriff's department to provide the community continued support. And that requires moving furniture around, bringing in dumpsters to take out excess items and things like that. So we're working very closely, and we have a very good working coordination with the sheriff's department where we're working through all the move logistics. And I just want to congratulate you on the number of bids received, the competitiveness of those bids. Obviously, some very familiar names with respect to contractors that have done work for us before. So, certainly reputable bids that we received in this project. I know there's a lot of work that goes into securing those bids, analyzing those bids, and bringing them back to the board for approval and just appreciate all the work that went into that. This is a very critical, important project to allow for continued efficiency in operations as the county grows, and as we see a building that was built quite some time ago. Those upgrades are certainly necessary and appreciate all the analysis that went into the needs here, and the building review to get to this point. Commissioner Karwoski. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm completely ready without any additional comments to support these items. I think Commissioner Miron summarized it well. And thank you, Mr. Miller, for the presentation. As you can see, overall, it's really outdated and worn-out office equipment, and I think we've really been Working with the sheriff's department, not only to recruit deputies, but there's a lot of people that work behind the scenes in addition to the deputies. So the office staff deserves to have a good environment to work in. It's much needed updates that are required. I'm fully prepared to support the five motions that are needed. That's good. Any other comments? Commissioner Clausen? All right. Mr. Miller, thank you so much for the presentation. I concur with the comments. The fact that there were 97 bids received for 16 work scopes, with the average being six plus for each of the work scopes, is amazing, and that's really what stood out. And I agree that this is overdue, and I'm glad this is moving along, and appreciate the effort that goes into projects like this, both from the actual construction, but also the disruption that it causes. Just the grace and appreciation and patience of that is always appreciated. So, all right. With nothing else, we will just go in order here, one through five. And I can start off by moving to approve contract number 18397 with Parcos Construction Company, in the amount of $185,100 for carpentry. Second. Seconded by Commissioner Miron. Clerk will take the roll. Commissioner Miron? Aye. Commissioner Karwoski? Aye. Commissioner Cox? Aye. Commissioner Clausen? Aye. Commissioner Bigham? Aye. Item one passes 5-0. Commissioner Miron. Thank you, Madam Chair. I will move to approve contract number 18401 with Pinnacle Wall Systems Incorporated, in the amount of $208,270 for drywall. Second. Moved by Commissioner Miron, seconded by Commissioner Karwoski. Any discussion? Seeing none, the clerk will take the roll. Commissioner Miron? Aye. Commissioner Karwoski? Aye. Commissioner Cox? Aye. Commissioner Clausen? Aye. Commissioner Bigham? Aye. Item two passes 5-0. All right. Item three, Commissioner Cox. Thank you, Madam Chair. I move to approve contract number 18402 with Viking Automatic Sprinkler Company, in the amount of $274,740 for fire suppression. I can- Second that. Commissioner Karwoski can second that one. Discussion? Seeing none, all in favor... Oh, just old habits die hard, Commissioner Cox. Clerk will take the roll. Commissioner Miron? Aye. Commissioner Karwoski? Aye. Commissioner Cox? Aye. Commissioner Clausen? Aye. Commissioner Bigham? Aye. Item three passes 5-0. I'll take the fourth one. Make a motion to approve contract number 18403 with Minnesota Sheet Metal in the amount of $308,000 for the combined mechanical. Second. Moved and seconded. Discussion? Seeing none, the clerk will take the roll. Commissioner Miron? Aye. Commissioner Karwoski? Aye. Commissioner Cox? Aye. Commissioner Clausen? Aye. Commissioner Bigham? Aye. Item four passes 5-0. All right, and the final one. Commissioner Cox. Thanks, Madam Chair. I move to approve contract number 18404 with B&B Electric LLC in the amount of $355,000 for electrical. I'll second that. Discussion? Seeing none, the clerk will take the roll. Commissioner Miron? Aye. Commissioner Karwoski? Aye. Commissioner Cox? Aye. Commissioner Clausen? Aye. Commissioner Bigham? Aye. Item five passes 5-0. All right, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Miller. Thank you. All right, the next item on the agenda is approval of two items for CSAH 14 at High Point Drive intersection improvement project, and to present that today is Ms. Erin Blalock, engineer. Welcome. Good morning, Madam Chair and commissioners. As mentioned, my name is Erin Blalock, and I'm a civil engineer with Public Works. I'm here to discuss the County stated highway CSAH 14 at High Point Drive intersection improvement project. Let's dive in. The plan for my presentation is to review the project's location, scope, received bids, quick touch base on the financials, and discuss a cooperative agreement for the project, which will ultimately lead for my recommendation for two board actions on behalf of Public Works. Washington County Public Works has an annual program comprised of intersection control upgrades in the capital improvement plan as RB2201. The county proactively plans for the installation of intersection controls to improve the safety and efficiency of traffic flow on the county's transportation system. The number of projects programmed within this program varies depending on funding, availability of matching funds, development changes, or intersection safety concerns. This project has been identified in the RB2201 program in the capital improvement plan since 2024, and is located at the intersection of CSAH 14 and High Point Drive, and technically Marketplace on the south leg within the city of Oakdale. A little background to set the scene before diving into our project improvements. There's been significant redevelopment along this part of the Cass 14 Corridor in Oakdale and Lake Elmo over the last decade. Specific to this intersection, the traffic operations were previously characterized by peaky traffic patterns resulting from shift work at a large corporation north of the intersection. With new commercial businesses popping up, such as Starbucks, Aldi, and Chipotle on the north side of the county highway, the county transportation system is being utilized differently. With these environmental changes, modifications to the existing traffic signal system and additional pedestrian needs were identified and planned for in partnership with the City of Oakdale. The project work includes modifications to the existing traffic signal system, as mentioned. To get more specific about the multimodal improvements, these will include a new crosswalk on the west leg of the intersection, pedestrian ramp replacements, new medians providing refuge space for pedestrians crossing the intersection, as well as stormwater management, including new culverts and new connections to the existing storm sewer system to address some drainage concerns after rain events, and signing and striping replacements. This project work is consistent with the Washington County Strategic Plan, specifically the goal to enhance and maintain investments in the built and natural environment to encourage growth, accessibility, and resilient communities, including the objective to maintain, develop, and expand multimodal transportation options to improve ease of travel across the county. As far as the public procurement process to get us here today, the project was posted for bids on June 12th, and bids closed on July 14th. Public Works held a public bid opening on July 14th, and seven bids were received. Sun Ram Contracting Incorporated submitted the low bid at $391,461. Although the submitted low bid is above the engineer's estimate, it was reviewed to be a responsible bid and within the program's construction budget, so Public Works is recommending to accept the bid. Regarding the funding overview for the entire Intersection Control Program, the previously encumbered expenses, which is shown second from the bottom in the table for other intersection needs, total $187,000. The Cass 14 at High Point's project expenses total $503,470, which includes consulting costs, permits, contingency, and today's board action for the construction contract. Revenues budgeted for this project phase total $1 million, and therefore, the remaining balance for the entire Intersection Control Project Program is $400,000. Funding for this project comes from planned usage of fund balance, state aid, and local contributions, which particular to this project are $200,000 funded from the City of Oakdale. A project agreement has been developed with the City of Oakdale for this intersection project. The cooperative agreement defines design and construction responsibilities between both agencies in accordance with the county's cost participation policy. It is noted that the cooperative agreement was approved by the Oakdale City Council on August 12th, 2026. With that, Public Works recommends two board actions for the county State Aid Highway 14 at High Point Drive Intersection Improvement Project. First, to approve a contract with Sun Ram Contracting Incorporated for construction. Second, to approve a cooperative agreement for the project between the county and the City of Oakdale. This concludes my prepared presentation, Madam Chair. I will now stand for any questions. Thank you, Ms. Blalock. Commissioner Karwoski. Thank you, Madam Chair. Perhaps to get this before us, I'll make a motion to approve contract number 18508 in the amount of $391,461 with Sun Ram Contracting Incorporated. Second. Moved and seconded. Commissioner Karwoski. I don't have any questions, but I'll make some comments. Ms. Blalock, thanks for the presentation. I think it encompasses the need really to highlight, one, it's pretty close to the engineering estimate. It's a $33,000 difference. There's local participation from the City of Oakdale. The community around there has changed a lot, and it's worth re-noting. There's residential, a large apartment to the south. There's the, we like to call it, the 3M development, about 225 acres of single and multi-family homes, not too far to the immediate north, with all the new retail. And then also, you could probably, I think it's fair to include Lake Elmo. Around the city of Lake Elmo, there's thousands of homes there, and many of them would drive Highway 5 through Oakdale to get to 694. You combine all these things, some of the pictures show how outdated the intersection is. So this modernizes it not only for car traffic, but really for bikers and pedestrians. And there's just Much more pedestrian use around this area, and it's only going to grow. So I appreciate the upgrades. It's going to bring driver efficiency and a lot of safety to pedestrians. Thank you. Commissioner Cox. Thank you, Madam Chair, Ms. Bladelack, thanks for the presentation. I think what I wrote down was the development in that area has changed the way traffic moves. And so it's just time that through the IRCS, that we look at these different things for safety, and I'm just glad that we have money programmed to take care of this. Thanks. Any other comment? Okay. Thank you, Ms. Bladelack, for the presentation, and this is a much needed upgrade in this area, as it's been stated, just due to the changes. And I always I know a lot of work goes into that report, the interchange report, and just really appreciate that as well, to be able to use that as guidance. Okay. First one, Commissioner Karwoski renews his motion to approve contract number 18508. Clerk will take the roll. Commissioner Miron? Aye. Commissioner Karwoski? Aye. Commissioner Cox? Aye. Commissioner Clausen? Aye. Commissioner Bigham? Aye. Item one passes five zero. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Karwoski. I'll make a motion to approve the cooperative agreement number 18554 between the City of Oakdale and Washington County. Second. Discussion? Seeing none. The clerk will take the roll. Commissioner Miron? Aye. Commissioner Karwoski? Aye. Commissioner Cox? Aye. Commissioner Clausen? Aye. Commissioner Bigham? Aye. Item two passes five zero. All right. Thank you very much. Yep. Administrator Corbid, we are now on general administration. Madam Chair and commissioners, just a couple items. The first one is just to thank the board for your support for the earlier project for the Law Enforcement Center project. I recall getting that 2022 report on the needs of that building, and I will admit that it was a little scary, a little daunting about how we were going to work our way through that because of the needs in that facility, especially because of its age. Although in conversations with the sheriff's office, and building services, they reminded me of the 24/7 operations that occur out of there, and how much difference that takes a toll on a building like that. So things like the lock replacement on doors and other items that we've worked our way through. Because of the board's actions in transitioning a little bit of money to that capital redirect program, we've made great progress in this project. We've also made great progress because of how the board used its ARPA funding and then freed up funding for this project as well. So I think we've made great progress. I keep a copy of that report on my desk because it was such a challenge to always remember that those types of maintenance and update projects need to be done in addition to the new builds that we're doing as well. So thank you for your support for that project and how much that's made a difference for that building. The second item is, and sorry if I'm to steal Commissioner Bigham's thunder on the board correspondence in a minute here, but maybe just to give a little bit of a description of the document that it's included in board correspondence today. That is a letter from the Department of Natural Resources, identifying to the county or proposing to the county a property exchange between the DNR and the National Park Service involving two sites in Washington County, the St. Croix Boom Site, Wayside, and the Ferry Falls Day Use area. So under the proposal, the Boom Site would be conveyed to the National Park Service and be removed from the statutory designation as a state wayside of the DNR. The DNR would acquire Ferry Falls, a 40-acre property, and manage it as a natural area. So we have forwarded this letter to the Public Works Department. They are going to take the lead in working with those state agencies, making sure we have discussion with them, seek input from the communities that are involved and the agencies that are involved. There may be some kind of zoning issues that we need to work out. And then, after those things are worked out, as requested by the DNR, we will provide an opportunity for them to present to the county board their proposal for the action in that letter. So, no action is needed at this time on that, but just want to make you aware of the work that we're doing at the staff level for that. And then finally, you may have seen this in the news reports this morning, but after a week of preparing by our PRTS department and county attorney's office and others for a potential recount, a discretionary recount in the Republican race for governor, the individual who had notified us of that recount did not provide the funding that he needed to provide by the midnight last night deadline, so there will be no discretionary recount at this time. So I want to thank the PRTS group for preparing for that, because if we were going to start, it was going to be starting very quickly, this afternoon even. So, the fact that they spent their time and energy doing that, just want to recognize them for that. But the actual recount will not occur at this time. That's the end of my report, and I'd answer any questions if you have any. Any questions for Administrator Corrid? I just also want to thank the election staff and PTRS, because I don't know that the public knows how much pre-planning, pre-effort, working through the weekend, go into stuff like that to... Don't get me wrong, I'm glad it didn't happen, the recount, but just the mere threat of it, puts everybody in a- ... planning tizzy to make sure we're going to do it right, because that's what we do. That's how we roll. And so it's just a lot of work, and appreciate the effort on that. Oh, Commissioner Karwoski. Madam Chair, I agree with your comments, but it's worth noting that this was uncompensated work that our staff- Yeah ... had to do in anticipation of a- Yeah ... recount that would've took private dollars- Yep ... to do because the race was not that close. So really, our county, and other counties probably throughout the state, really invested time- Yep ... which took away from other matters. So that's the unfortunate part. Yep. Thank you. Absolutely. All right, seeing nothing else from Administrator Corbid, we'll move on to commissioner reports. Commissioner Clausen, do you want to start us off? Oh, no. If I can be last, that'd be great. Okay. Then we'll go with Commissioner Miron. Thank you, Madam Chair. A busy couple of weeks. We had workshop meetings last week, so we didn't provide any commissioner updates. But had a number of meetings with both state and federal leadership. Commissioner Karwoski and I attended a Minnesota Inter County Association meeting. A lot of discussion about budgets, cost shifts to counties, reserve policies that various counties had, and I know there was some additional information provided after that meeting based on contacts with member counties. Commissioner Bigham and I participated in the primary canvassing board. I appreciate Commissioner Bigham walking in and being able to fill in on that duty. But went very, very smoothly and just, again, appreciate all the effort our elections team, property records, and taxpayer services put into that effort to make sure that we've got accurate elections. Commissioner Cox and I were able to attend a... No, it was Commissioner Bigham and I attended a chamber event for chambers across Washington County. It was a very, very nice mixer and a good opportunity to talk about the important roles that chambers have and the work and the quality of life that our businesses add to Washington County. Had a Clean Water Council budget and outcomes committee meeting. We've reviewed the various program proposals, and now we're beginning to attach recommendations for dollars for those various programs which the Clean Water Council will review. We had our workshop meeting last week. Just appreciate the continued effort reviewing our budgets for the various departments. I attended a community development agency meeting, and the budget and levy preliminary was approved and we continue to have discussions about property management within our various properties. And Commissioner Karwoski serves as the alternate. His name actually came up at the meeting, so I wanted to share that with him. Commissioner Bigham and I meet regularly with our recycling and energy executive director. So we have a meeting just to be updated on activities going on at the Recycling and Energy Center. We do have a meeting this year, and we have a hauler appreciation event, I believe- Thursday ... on Thursday, yeah, associated with that meeting. Commissioner Cox and I attended the Carnelian-Marine-St. Croix Watershed District budget meeting. In my opinion, very responsible budget, very engaged board. We had three new appointees on that watershed district, so it was good to see them in action and leadership. Mark Donay, who was one of those new appointees, is now the chair of that watershed. So they've elected officers, and I believe Commissioner Cox's memory might be better, but was it a 3% increase or so in their budget, I believe, or their levy? Three. Yeah, I think somewhere in that neighborhood. So very respectable coming off of a 0% increase from last year. And then, again, I just appreciate the work that the anti-racism work group does. Congratulations on the 20-year celebration. Was able to enjoy some coffee with Robert Crawford there. It was nice catching up and visiting with him. I just have so much respect for him and the work that he had done over his tenure here at the county, and had a couple of donut holes in addition. So that's all I have, Madam Chair. Thanks. Commissioner Cox. Thank you, Madam Chair. Commissioner Miron, we also had a personnel committee a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. Oh, that's right. Sorry to throw you there. But there were two policies that were on today's agenda that we reviewed at that meeting. I also attended the Lake Elmo Airport Advisory Committee meeting just last night. Thank you to the anti-racism work group. And then also a huge thank you to public work staff and PRTS staff for helping with a lot of constituent questions and support that I needed. So I'm grateful for that every single time. Thanks. Commissioner Karwoski Thank you, Madam Chair. Busy time since our last board meeting. Attended MAWB, which is the Minnesota Association of Workforce Boards. I typically go to that each year. It's up in Duluth. It was August 12th, 13th, and 14th. Ryan Selak, who's our workforce manager, is doing a great job. He did one of the presentations and handled a panel discussion, and it really seems to be well-received amongst other workforce directors in the state. As mentioned, it was nice to attend the Anti-Racism 20-year celebration this morning. Robert Crawford had time to visit with him. Ryan Selak has basically stepped into the shoes that Robert Crawford had at the county regarding workforce. And Robert Crawford is very much missed, really made a good impact on workforce development at Washington County, and Ryan's doing a great job. Had a climate action plan update with staff. I think we've all had those or are going to, as that plan is developed on climate action. As Commissioner Miran pointed out, we had the MICA, Minnesota Inter-County Association, meeting as we plot a strategy on how to work with our next session of legislators. I also had an executive committee meeting with MICA. Had a TAB meeting, Transportation Advisory Board meeting. I always do a staff briefing on that. The board meeting is setting up preparation for the solicitation vote, which looks like will be pushed into either January or February, due to extra public engagement, I think was the main cause of that. Had a Century Avenue turnback meeting. As that plan gets developed, that's the section north of 694. We had that meeting with staff and Mahtomedi as we go through some details. The biggest point of discussion is one of the options is a roundabout at County 12 and Century Avenue, as we work through resolving concerns regarding that major intersection. Appreciate staff's work on this project. A few of you are in the audience today, Kevin Peterson and Ms. Blalock. Attended an AMC meeting on housing, creative county ideas on affordable housing. That was interesting. I think there's more to come on that. I represented the county board at YELA. This was a Woodbury Community Foundation-sponsored event. They have it annually. I've been able to be fortunate to speak in some of the past years. But YELA stands for the Youth Engagement Leadership Academy. There were about 12 students that want to learn more about Woodbury, but maybe the bigger picture of state government. So there were other colleagues elected in the state and at the city council level, and we all gave our part on our role in government and our elected role and how it all fits together. Congratulations to those, I think it was 12 students that went through the program. It was the last meeting, and it was their graduation ceremony. Attended a back-to-school event, which is the second one we've had in my district. This one was at Walton Park in Oakdale. They gave out 450, to give you a perspective, backpacks with the supplies that help students, young students in need get off to a good year as they start the new school year. We don't only do that with a county investment. Some of our nonprofits are there also supporting it. And it's also nice to see our county library, our workforce development department, and other departments that are offering compatible services. And along with that, Oakdale does a Touch-a-Truck event that's extremely popular the same night, and our sheriff's department had a good presence there with the SWAT organization, and our Chief Starry is out in the audience, along with some other deputies. And they had the boating and all these popular pieces of equipment, and it's nice to visit with residents at an event like that. That concludes my report. Thank you. Commissioner Clausen. Yeah, thank you, Chair. I enjoyed the two-minute public comment that we received from Chris Halbrck regarding, I would say, probably his fear in regards to flock cameras in Woodbury, and talking about the Axon as a body cam. Coming here during that time was really important, and I really wanted to say thank you to Chris from Woodbury for making the journey to Stillwater at 9:00 a.m. I want to thank staff for all of the time that they took for elections, and I know there was some take ... issues that happened, and we did run out of ballots over here in Woodbury because we had so many people voting, which is a positive thing. But we were able to get those replacements very quickly, and I am thankful that staff answered the phone and all that information got, well, quickly, all the information was submitted to the right people, and the information was able to get the ballot quick. I think they were only out of the ballot for maybe 10 minutes in the precinct that they were at. Also, congratulations to School District 833 for the renovations that they're doing at the schools. I've been able to go to East Ridge High School a lot more now that my daughter is attending as a freshman this year, and she made the East Ridge soccer team. So I've seen a lot of the amazing accommodations, and it's going to be a lot safer for our children to go to school with the entrances having security. I wanted to just talk a little bit about the library. The library was discussed at a work session. We don't do votes at the work session, but it was stated at that time that our board majority wanted the lesser option, option two, which again, frankly, that is the bare minimum of what we discussed in 2023. And so I, of course, support option three, because option two is a limited amount being done. It's not going to accommodate the needs of the third busiest library in the state. And that is something that was discussed. And when the study, or I think it was Greg Wood who had said that it was a standalone project when we looked at the library, and it wasn't looked at as a population, or the demographics to see if that can actually be something that we can serve. So I'm really disheartened that we are moving forward in a direction that I don't think is wise for our money. We think that it's better to pause it, and I continue to ask for the board members to pause this while we sort this out. And then I just wanted to say that I did have a conversation with the mayor of Forest Lake, and we had a great conversation, and we both agreed that we think that it's something that Washington County should consider that we do term limits for appointments of committees and other boards. And so I do want to take that to the board and say, if you guys would consider term limits, I think that that would be something that people are hoping that allows more differing opinions in the future. Thank you. This week, I had multiple meetings about the age of delinquency and a task force that I'm on in the upcoming legislative session on how to prepare and continue to do the services that will be required for that legislation that was enacted on August 1st. I did attend the AMC Strategic Planning Retreat up in Otter Tail County, a beautiful part of Minnesota that has nice state troopers. And I also had many meetings on the Act this week, and the report to the legislature is due here. And we're doing the final touches on that and just how to figure out the fine-tuning in how we want to get that information to the commissioner and legislature. I really appreciated the opportunity to be on that from AMC. It's really a good group, really doing some amazing work. I had meetings on the Climate Action Plan. I appreciate staff's commitment and also just work that goes into that. And I think we have so many different plans, so many different plans that just span the whole each and every department that I think at some point here, we need to look at a software that can handle implementing this versus Excel spreadsheets. So, at some point here in the future, we should have a discussion about that as a board. I think it would be more efficient for staff and more visible with a dashboard on our website. I just think that it's probably going to be 2027 here, and we should not be implementing such massive plans on Excel. Just my thought. Yeah, appreciate having the opportunity to be on the canvas board. A little unexpected. The 20-year celebration of the anti-racism group was great, really well attended, and had wonderful conversations. I attended the personnel committee and had a great conversation in that as well. There were a lot of constituent needs this week, and really appreciate staff helping get information out to them and different forms and stuff like that. And then I want to end with a huge congratulations to our new Cottage Grove Director of Public Safety, Brad Peterson, 23-year veteran of the Cottage Grove Police Department and just He is replacing a legend in Pete Kerner. But he is just a wonderful leader, very committed and involved in Cottage Grove, and just appreciate his service to our community and our military, and also just really excited about his vision for the department. With nothing else, we've already talked about board correspondence that Administrator Corbid did already mention. And then we're going to take probably a, I don't know, five, 10 minute break here, and then we're going to come right back in and do the budget workshop for review of the law library budget, and then also property records and taxpayer services. Administrator Corbid. Madam Chair and Commissioners, sorry, during my report, I failed to remind the board that next week the board will be conducting my annual performance evaluation in a closed session. Director Nalezny is going to send out a reminder today to anybody who had received the packet to provide comments, to get them in to her, and her plan is to have a packet back out to the board on Thursday for your review, prior to the performance evaluation next Tuesday. So just wanted to add that. Thank you. And that's an executive closed session due to Chapter 13 protections of an employee. So, all right. Seeing nothing more before us, we are adjourned. State Patrol in conjunction with your partner. All right. We are going to go ahead and get started with the 2027 budget workshop for the library and the law library. Please take us away, Director Kramer. Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chair and Commissioners. My name is Jackie Kramer, and I'm the library director. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this morning about the 2027 recommended budgets for the library and the law library. I'd also like to extend a thank you to County Administrator Kevin Corbid and Deputy Administrators Jennifer Wagenius and Jan Lucke for their support. I'd also like to recognize the library staff who've been instrumental in developing this budget: Drew Wiley, Tina DeRyder, Kate Searing, Samantha Parker, Kim Ukra, and Michelle Erickson. Additionally, I'd like to recognize the library board for their guidance, and thank Commissioner Bigham for serving on our library board, and Commissioner Clausen for serving on the Melsa Trustees board. A major theme of the last 12 months at Washington County Library has been building. Most obviously, this year has included significant and complex building around our branches. We closed Park Grove Library for construction while opening a new temporary library space in the Cottage Grove Service Center. We're in the early phases of imagining a redesigned R.H. Stafford Library, and we're planning for all of our locations through a strategic facilities plan. Each of these projects has required flexibility and creativity from our library staff, cooperation and support from county partners, and direction from county leadership. Looking forward to these projects and how they will improve library services across the community is deeply exciting. It's also been a year of building in less literal ways. As we move through tasks of our library's strategic plan, we've looked to build our capacity, our collection, and our connections throughout Washington County. As you well know, Washington County Library has seven branch locations, a law library in the government center, three library locker locations, and a thriving digital branch where we provide online services for community members. We're able to provide library services at these locations throughout the county, thanks to your support and the work of library staff, who provide excellent service at all these community touchpoints. In many situations, library staff are the face of Washington County for residents who haven't had a reason to visit the government center or other service locations. In 2024, the library finalized its strategic plan, which highlights the four priorities that guide our work. Our four priorities are evaluate and improve library service delivery, strengthen organizational culture and operational effectiveness, enhance physical spaces and technology infrastructure, and expand the reach of the library. This year, many of our successes around the strategic plan are about building our foundations as a library system so we can best serve our community Our proposed 2027 budget will continue to move these goals ahead. Our first strategic priority is to improve library service delivery. This year, we launched a new outcomes-based program planning and evaluation process for library staff. This tool will help ensure that programs we're delivering meet community needs and offer opportunities to continuously improve our services. A library team completed an audit of all of our library policies and internal procedures. The team identified areas to update and important questions to ask so we can ensure our policies are equitable and effective across all our service locations. Improving our internal procedures will build consistency in service across branches and help staff confidently serve community members who visit those branches. With the launch of the new website, we also introduced a new tool to organize and promote our online research tools and databases. With this new tool, it'll be easier for users to explore our digital resources and find what they need. Looking ahead, we continue to see robust and growing use of our digital collection through the MELSA Twin Cities eLibrary, or more known to everyone as Libby. Digital checkouts now account for approximately 40% of total checkouts, which is exciting and challenging to support. One of this year's supplemental budget requests is a one-time funding increase to support the purchase of additional e-books and e-audiobooks. This funding will help us reduce hold times and better meet community demand for these items. And this fall, we're launching a pilot of a Library of Things, which is a type of emerging collection that allows users to check out materials beyond books. New items will include things like bird watching kits, car code readers, and Mahjong sets, tools that support experiential learning, practical utility, and creative discovery. Another strategic plan priority is to invest and support our current employees who work every day at the front lines of the county, providing support for our community members. This year, we piloted a new set of onboarding procedures for library service assistants. This pilot was based on an identified need to do a better job welcoming these staff members to our team and building effective training materials so they can be prepared to provide great customer service to our patrons. After the wrap-up of the pilot, we intend to shift our focus to improved onboarding for our librarians. We've also expanded use of DiSC assessments across our system. Kate Searing, one of our division managers, is now a trained DiSC facilitator who's leading conversations about teamwork and effective communication at all library branches. We'll continue to expand this work to library teams so we can build more collaboration and communication across the system. In addition to our permanent full-time and part-time staff members, we rely on a pool of substitute librarians and library service assistants to help us remain adequately staffed during planned and unplanned absences. This year, we've included a supplemental budget request to rightsize this budget line so we can continue to serve the public effectively at our branches. As we look ahead to the reopening of the Park Grove Library in 2027, we anticipate additional temporary staff support will be needed to meet new demand. Improving our branches and physical spaces are significant parts of the library's strategic plan. With support from across the county, we're moving forward with construction at Park Grove Library, planning for R.H. Stafford Library, and exploring our long-term needs through a strategic facilities plan. I'd like to take a moment to extend a note of gratitude to Public Works Director Wayne Sandberg, who the library has had the pleasure of collaborating closely with throughout all of these extensive building projects. Wayne generously shares information, advice, and wisdom he has gained through his years of experience with Washington County. Improving public access to technology is another important part of our strategic plan. This year, we upgraded our public printing hardware and software to a more effective solution for our patrons. Looking ahead, we're actively working to launch a new bookmobile to provide mobile library services during building closures. We're excited about welcoming the community to a reopened Park Grove Library in 2027. Planning for R.H. Stafford Library will also continue into 2027. We already have library teams working to figure out what it will mean to relocate our busiest branch, as well as our administrative staff and services. Another significant project we hope to embark on in 2027 is an upgrade to our integrated library system, or ILS, and public catalog. Our ILS is a comprehensive software suite that makes up the backbone of all library services. It supports nearly every function of the library, including all our materials, user accounts, and our public catalog. Our current ILS is outdated and doesn't meet the current needs of our staff or our patrons. With another supplemental budget request, we'll begin the year-long process to migrate into a modern, secure, and functional ILS. Finally, we are committed to connecting with new residents and deepening our relationship with existing community members across Washington County. This year, a team of library staff have been evaluating our library outreach practices and impact so we can make sure that we're being as effective as possible in expanding our reach in Washington County, particularly to residents in historically marginalized and underserved communities. This spring, we partnered with staff from community services, as well as trusted community messengers, to do a series of targeted outreach to community members in Landfall, Cimarron, and South Washington County schools. Through this outreach, we distributed take and make kits for families, provided information about library resources available from home, and scheduled virtual and in-person sessions with library staff to learn more about our library resources. This fall, we're looking forward to celebrating our 60th anniversary with new community-designed library cards and a Community Stories initiative. We're working to improve our library card signup experience as well with new welcome materials. Now I'll move into the details about our proposed 2027 budget. Core considerations for the library budget are similar to those that you've heard from other departments. Our strategic plan prioritizes modern and up-to-date technology infrastructure that meets the needs of library users and staff. In addition to upgrading our ILS, we anticipate other cost increases for technology hardware, software, and contracts, including those for our self-checkout machines, print management software, and other subscriptions. As we've already discussed, digital materials are a growing part of our overall collection use. Digital titles cost significantly more than their print counterparts, and meeting patron demand has been challenging and continues to stretch our budget. Our year of building has also had a significant impact on our budget process. These exciting projects have added to the workload for staff across our system, which we anticipate will continue into 2027. As we look forward to renovated library spaces, we're looking carefully at our short and long-term staffing needs. Our supplemental budget requests for the year directly speak to those needs. One-time investments for upgrading our catalog and increasing purchases of digital materials will have direct and measurable impacts for residents and library staff. Right-sizing our temporary staff budget will allow us to continue providing high levels of customer service to our community and adequately staff Park Grove Library when it reopens. The following slides will provide a summary of the library's proposed budget. This budget meets and exceeds the maintenance of effort required under state law for library services to the county. This slide shows a comparison of 2026 and 2027 library revenues. We have an overall 5.64% increase in levy funding for 2027. This is due to increased personnel costs, internal rent, and technology allocation costs. The majority of the library's non-levy revenue is funding from the state and is distributed by the Metropolitan Library Service Agency, or MLSA, and is staying steady. The remainder of the non-levy revenue includes funds received for lost and damaged items, sale items, payments from associate libraries, payments from county collection services, donations, and the one-time fund allocation to respond to those specific needs that I already spoke to that we identified through the 2027 budget planning process. This is a look at department expenditures. Like many other departments, the majority of our funding goes to our personnel. Services and charges include our copiers, library catalog, software subscriptions, and service contracts for things like our library lockers and extended access. Materials and supplies include our books, newspapers, magazines, and all the other items for checkout. The increases you see here are mainly due to rising costs in service contracts and software licensing, internal rent, and purchase services such as our courier and collection material processing costs. Our significant budget changes in the non-levy revenue category include a one-time increase in our funding for the upgraded integrated library system, the purchase of additional e-books and e-audiobooks, and the temporary staff budget line. Other revenue increases are minor and include slight changes due to actual revenue numbers from 2026, or excuse me, '25. In the expenditures category, we're seeing increases in software licenses and subscriptions, including the ILS upgrade, and I've already mentioned the e-audiobook and e-book funding a lot already, but that's in there. And lastly, we're seeing an increase in the equipment repairs and maintenance line due to vendor contract increases, such as our self-checkout service agreement, and we're also looking at planning-- We're looking at upgrading our people counters at all of our branches to improve our visit metrics. We are showing no changes to FTE in 2027. And I will move along to Law Library or would- Okay, I'll continue. So I'm also happy to share the Law Library's 2027 recommended budget with you today. The Washington County Law Library is located here at the Government Center in Stillwater. We greatly appreciate the board's support of the Law Library and Commissioner Bigham's leadership on the Law Library board. The Law Library provides support to the public, the courts, our public library branches, and other county departments. I'd like to take a little bit of time to showcase a few of the ways the Law Library has served in 2025 and '6. Through a partnership with Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Service, or SMRLS, the Law Library is excited to introduce a new legal kiosk for self-represented litigants without reliable or any internet access to obtain forms from the Minnesota Judicial Branch, apply for legal aid services, scan and upload exhibits to the Judicial Branch's digital exhibit system, and attend remote court hearings. Thank you to the board for your support of this new service. SMRLS has also partnered with the county's Homeless Outreach Services team to run an eviction expungement clinic hosted by the Law Library monthly. The Law Library in Washington County is one of only a handful of law libraries in the state providing continuing legal education courses to support the legal community and the courts. When the Minnesota Judicial Branch implemented a new digital system for exhibits, Law Library staff reached out to them and scheduled a course explaining the new requirements, helping both local attorneys and Law Library staff to use the system effectively. Recently, we partnered with the Washington County Bar Association to host an in-person class with attorneys and judges from Washington County participating on a panel, sharing civil practice tips. And lastly, law librarian Robert Truesdale presented to the Public Health and Environment nursing team to share legal resources and strategies for support focused on families experiencing significant stressors such as housing insecurity, immigration questions, custody issues, and partner violence. Robert also collaborated with SMRLS on a presentation to public library staff on how the Law Library and legal aid organizations like SMRLS work to close the access to justice gap in our community. Law Library staff walked away better informed as to how to support patrons with those legal issues. The majority of the Law Library's revenue continues to come from civil and criminal court fees, along with some levy funding and miscellaneous revenue, such as from photocopies and faxes. The Law Library is seeing a 4.44% levy increase to cover salary and benefits and internal rent. Non-levy revenue consists of civil and criminal court fees, and we're seeing a 7% increase as a result of the increase to the fines and fees approved in 2024. 2025 actuals were higher than we had budgeted for, so this 7% increase is based on those actuals. The majority of the Law Library's expenditures go to personal services, with the remainder applied to materials and supplies and services and charges. The increase in personal services covers wage and benefit increases, and services and charges are taking a slightly larger piece of the pie in 2027 for some minor facility improvements. We are anticipating a moderate increase in fines and fees based on the current trend with a slight decrease in sales. We've reserved $5,800 to make minor improvements to the Law Library space as needed, in particular, some shelving. The expenditure for books and periodicals has been adjusted to reflect actuals. We're also getting additional assistance from the State Law Library this year to take a deep dive into our physical collection needs. As digital access to materials increases, we may be making adjustments to the physical collection holdings in future years. No changes are being made to the Law Library staffing in 2027. And I wanted to just take a minute to extend a heartfelt thank you at this point to Robert Truesdale and Tim Grover, who are our law librarians, for their dedication to serving Law Library patrons. Patrons are often visiting the Law Library on some of the most stressful and emotionally challenging days of their lives, and Robert and Tim often spend upwards of 30 minutes during interactions to make sure that each individual receives thorough, accurate, and compassionate service. In summary, I'm proud of the many things the library has accomplished as a team this year, and grateful for the continued strategic investments that will improve library services for community members throughout Washington County. Investment in a new ILS will benefit both library staff and users by improving the basic technology at the heart of so many of our services. Additional investment in our digital collection will make sure library users can continue to access information in the format that works best for them. Excuse me. Improvements at library facilities and a concrete plan for the future of our spaces will help guide our future decisions As we plan for these building projects, we'll continue to look at our staffing needs to make sure residents can be effectively served when they visit any of our library branches. Washington County Library's year of building would simply not be possible without all the work of library staff at all levels. I want to particularly commend the staff at Park Grove Library, who showed remarkable poise and thoughtfulness through Park Grove's closure and opening of the temporary space at the Cottage Grove Service Center. During the closure, Park Grove staff have supported our temporary library, increased outreach throughout South Washington County, and provided support at our other library locations. While closing a library most directly affects the staff who work in it, construction at Park Grove has impacted every branch, as well as our administrative and technical support staff. I'm so grateful for the creativity and kindness our staff have demonstrated during this project. We intend to build on the lessons we've learned as Park Grove reopens and R.H. Stafford Library closes. Beyond these building projects, library staff sit at the frontline of county services every day. They make visitors to our branches feel welcome, direct them to the resources they need, plan and lead educational and enriching programs, build a robust and popular collection of materials, and much more. I'm excited to be leading our team, and I'm looking forward to the building that we can continue to do in the years ahead. Thank you, and I'll stand for any questions. Thank you, Director Kramer. Who would like to start us off? Commissioner Karwoski's got us. Thank you, Madam Vice Chair. Ms. Kramer- Unmute. Our- Oh, there. I got you. Thank you. Ms. Kramer, our library director, thanks for presenting. I want to thank, I know a lot of the library staff's out there, and you show up to a lot of community things. They are much appreciated. I don't have any deep questions on the budget. But I want one clarification on a slide, and then a comment about strategy, which is listed a lot, and it does affect your budget, and it's an opportunity maybe with the new libraries being built. So slide three, I apologize if I didn't ask this earlier of staff. I noticed that last night. The slide three... It's the map, Director. Thank you. Yeah. So you've got colored circles and number. What does the color and number pertain to? I couldn't quite figure that out. Let me see too. Madam Chair, Commissioners, honestly, I think the numbers are just numbering the different locations. I don't think they have a significance. They do. So they do. So the county libraries are in blue, and in green are the community libraries and the law library. Correct. Yeah. And then there's the lockers are in the- Green ... green. And sorry, I had red for the community ones. My bad. Yeah. And- Yep, that's correct. The blue ones are, excuse me, are the Washington County libraries. The green ones are the Washington County Library locker locations. And the red ones are the two associate libraries, the Stillwater and Bayport libraries. Sorry for bringing that up on the spur of the moment, but it was- Oh, no. That's okay ... annoying. But also the number within, is the number pertained to anything? I know it's probably just a graphical representation from some other use that put in here. Madam Chair, Commissioner Karwoski, I don't believe so. Okay. There's a welcome brochure, and then the welcome brochure, the number is Okay. So this graphic is taken from our welcome brochure that we give out to folks at the library, and on the welcome brochure, it has corresponding information for each number. So, I apologize. In this context, those numbers hold no meaning except to show, I suppose, the number of different locations. Yeah. That's what it is. Often, I'm misinterpreting something, so it's refreshing that I didn't miss anything here. But I wanted to go to slide four, though. I have no question about your budget, but it is tied to my comment here. If you look at these four bullets, it's talking about service delivery, operational effectiveness, and in enhancing physical spaces, technology infrastructure, and then the library reach. There's probably several things with the new library being rebuilt at Park Grove, and really one coming up at R.H. Stafford. It's an opportunity in the layout of those libraries. It would impact cost, but I'm just bringing it out. I know a priority of mine is to really enhance the ability to workforce development. Even if you send them to the Central Service Center for a more enhanced look at that, I think there's an opportunity in workforce development. Those kind of things do affect your budget, when you look into how can you provide better service I'm more than happy if for some reason that you determine that doesn't fit into a strategy that's highlighted. I know we've got a strategic plan coming up. So again, I don't have questions about the budget, but I am really intrigued by moving forward different services we can provide with the new libraries, which will impact the budget. But if we work smarter, not harder, maybe it's a wash. So, thank you for the presentation. Thank you. Commissioner Clausen, do you have comments? I think you're muted, Commissioner. I have questions. I don't have comments. Please. I'll just wait until Jackie's done drinking water. Thank you, Commissioner. Of course. Thank you for the presentation. Of course, we have had a lot of information in regards to the libraries presented to us recently, and so I have additional questions. Pretty easy ones. In which services of the library that we're currently providing is there a decline at all in enrollment? Madam Chair, Commissioner Clausen, I might have to get back to you with that information. We do keep statistics on, if you're talking about program attendance or visits to the library, we do keep all of those statistics or circulation, which I can certainly get to you. I probably can't speak specifically to all of them right now. If there's a specific one you're interested in, I can try, though. Yeah. I definitely love when we, in our budget, go over the usage trends, so visits, circulation, program attendance. You did talk a little bit about the digital versus- Mm-hmm ... the, I guess, walk-ins. And you said that was 40%, but I didn't know if that was an increase from year to year. And so, is there any information that you could provide on that? Because so much of your budget, I imagine, is utilizing it to forecast. If I can just step in here quick. Commissioner Clausen, if you have your budget binder with you, the last page- Yeah, no problem ... not the last page, but in the library section, there are output measures. And so we've got 2024 actuals of all kinds of things, '25 actuals, and then estimated, so that might be helpful, too. Thank you so much. Yeah. That was great. Thank you. I was just asking if our library director could answer. Madam Chair, Commissioner Clausen, excuse me. In particular to the digital circulation metric, the 40%, that is something that has been growing since I've been here, about three and a half years. And I believe when I started, that distribution of digital to physical checkouts was more around 33-ish percent. And it's since jumped up to 40. So, that digital circulation is something that has grown almost exponentially. It continues to grow quickly and is one of those reasons that we're unable to meet the demand because of the cost of those items, and the popularity. I would say overall, our visits are tending to increase. It's a little hard to say because with the Central Park project, that affected the R.H. Stafford circulation and visits so much. And because R.H. Stafford is about 40% of our overall circulation, it really dropped our overall statistics. So it's been hard. And then prior to that, we were in the COVID era. So it's been a little bit of a time stretch here where we haven't had a steady comparison of statistics. But, visits are on the rise, program attendance is on the rise, and like I said, the digital circulation is on the rise with physical declining. Thank you. So with that information, and knowing that our numbers aren't really being a good reflection, we probably should wait on the strategic plan, and that's because of the changes that you talked about. I think it is making it hard for us to plan and forecast for the future. I also know that there are other limitations that are going to be occurring in regards to federal funding that is going to cause issues, too. And so this is why I keep asking for us to just pause and try and get better data, especially when it comes to the circulation, the visits, the digital and the e-resource use. Because when we're looking at the strategic plan, we should be looking at which libraries are the ones that are the busiest so that we can make sure that we have the employees there and everything is there to support the needs of the community. And so I'm hoping that that information is a part of the ... strategic plan for libraries, and that we learn a lot more about what's happening inside, so that we use the same metrics everyone's using, because I know that that's a big part of how we determine library infrastructure costs and where they should go. I pulled up some of the normal metrics that libraries go through for just physical type of demands, and a lot of it is measured through different things like facility condition indexes. And then just looking at the ADA part of this when, as the largest city, we'll have a larger percentage of people who have ADA compliance needs. And then, with the current square feet of the biggest, well, the third busiest library in the state, we're not expanding it, and I just feel like it's really going to be challenging to be able to do any type of workforce development. It's really squeezed. It's so squeezed. There's just no opportunity for workforce development, and I absolutely think that Commissioner Kowalski is right and we need to do that. So, I think option three still is just very strong contender in the project selection. But I really thank you for all the information that was provided in the budget, the paper. I love more of a digital footprint, so if I could get some of this actually just PDF-ed, that would be nice too. Yep, absolutely. I'm sure we can make that happen. And then can I ask about the law library right now? Yes. Oops. Thank you. I'm sorry. That's... So I was wondering about the law library. You talked about that having decreasing in the amount of books that we're going to hold. Is that of the recommendation from the state, or who is recommending that we dissolve the books and move more into the digital footprint when it comes to library books that have our laws in it? Madam Vice Chair and Commissioner Clausen, we have not made that move yet, and we actually haven't had that direction or that recommendation made. We're working with the state law library, and we will continue to work with them in the next year. And they're going to do a deep dive to look at that collection use and see what digital availability is, and then make some recommendations. So we haven't moved forward with downsizing or anything like that, our physical collection. Do you think it would come back to the board if you do decide to move forward with that plan? Madam Vice Chair, Commissioner Clausen, I am not exactly sure on the procedure for that. Generally, our collection related decisions are made at the law library level. Okay. But I could certainly keep in touch with you about any kind of recommendations that are made. So, moving forward with a lot of digitalization of books, but I just don't want those books to last. My other question was revenue, because we never talk about revenue, but libraries actually do have some revenue. Is that mostly grants, or what kind of other revenue sources do you have, and is there any revenue sources we haven't tapped into that other libraries have? Madam Vice Chair, Commissioner Clausen, can you repeat that question again? I'm sorry. You said non-levy revenue? A little bit of revenue. There's a little bit of revenue that's collected with the library. Right. And I was just wondering if there's additional revenue sources that we've not thought about in the past. There's always some grant opportunities that are available, some through the state. We do occasionally pursue those if the fit is right, I guess. We haven't traditionally moved forward with a lot of outside grants. We do get the Melsa funding from the state, so that's what a big chunk of the non-levy revenue is. And then we get a little bit from book sales and printing and- Oh, okay. Book sales. Okay. So it's the book sales that you also have the revenue from. Okay. Mm-hmm. Is there ever an opportunity for philanthropy or groups to donate to the library, and could you go over that? Madam Vice Chair, Commissioner Clausen, we do get donations all the time. We get generous folks that do make donations. We haven't pursued any kind of actively asking for donations. So private foundational and that type of grants aren't currently being looked at, but federal and state are being actively applied to? Madam Vice Chair, Commissioner Clausen, I would say as opportunities come up, we analyze if the benefit is worth exploring. And we're made aware of some of those opportunities through some of our professional connections, like state library services, through Melsa. There are things like that that kind of bring some of those opportunities forward. So there are some available. There are not large amounts of those grant opportunities available. As the price continues to increase for e-books and other electronic games and whatnot, how do you think that we should move forward with trying to get some changes at the legislature so that there isn't that additional cost that's being added? Madam Vice Chair, Commissioner Clausen, the Minnesota Library Association, they have worked on some legislation that they brought forward last session to try and address some of those e-book challenges with the publishers and the pricing. It did not pass last session, but it's my understanding that they are continuing to bring something forward in this next session to try and address that issue on a statewide level. Awesome. Well, I would love to have a legislative platform on that issue if the board is open. Thank you for your presentation. Thank you. Commissioner Mira. Thank you. Appreciate the library staff that are here. Just excellent job providing these services here to Washington County. There's mention about the strategic plan. I really appreciate the effort and the work that went into that strategic plan. I can't imagine putting that on hold. Things like the library of things that you talked about, reaching out to those that learn through experiential learning, I think is a part of that strategic plan and a very positive and intriguing move to be made to move into those areas that Commissioner Karwoski identified as part of the strategic plan and reaching out to potential library users that we're not currently using. So I think continuing to follow that strategic plan and being guided by that is important in the work that we do. As we talk about budget, the one thing that resonated with me, and we had a lot of discussion about core functions and mandates earlier prior to the budget process. We continue to have discussions about those. We continue to see coverage about those things in the media. And Director Kramer, you mentioned that the money from the state remains steady. Okay. And yet, we saw a 5.84% increase in personnel. We saw a 7.98% increase in services, and we saw a 15.52% increase in materials and supplies. So although that may sound nice that the funding from the state remains steady, we continue to see cost increases. And don't get me wrong here, I think what's being proposed is a very modest proposal, and I think it certainly is necessary. But that's the dilemma that we face here in Washington County and other counties are facing as well, and I just wanted to make note of that. Commissioner Bigham. Thank you. Thank you, Director Kramer, for the presentation. Thank you to all the staff that are here. And again, I'm going to just lift up the gratitude of the patience of the library staff during the construction and planning and just kind of the disruption of what's going on with the facilities. I think a couple things. The technology updates are so important. And it's important as we're phasing in the renovations to Park Grove and to Stafford and then going into that long-term facilities strategic plan, kind of that vision of the future of what we want our libraries to provide for our communities. And I believe that you all have done a tremendous job, and our residential surveys show that. Again, you're just a 100th of a point behind Parks. I know, maybe next time we do it. So I just think all of those things mean efficiency and effectiveness and just better service and collaboration. So I think they all kind of go together is my way of thinking. And I think with the facilities study, I think there is a lot of hope and opportunity to look at whether or not workforce centers, family resource centers, public health centers could be part of upcoming facilities. And that study is about new facilities as well. And so I just think I'm excited about the possibility of that and looking forward to that. And then the bookmobile is incredible. It's an incredible idea, and appreciate the effort that's going into that. I am a titch sad that it's not ready by the time Park Grove has been closed down. But it hopefully will be ready to go after the first of the year here. And I really appreciate that accountability that you provided, Director Kramer, about learning from what we're doing here with Park Grove and moving forward on to the next projects. And I think that the bookmobile has so much potential to partner with our mental health van that we have, and all the different community events that they already currently are at, but will enhance that, and the advertising for the libraries, I think is all important. Related specifically to Stafford, and then I have two final question comments. I'm going to just keep saying that I think the law library kiosk, if possible in Stafford, would be really helpful, I think, for people, just to be able to offer that at more than just the law library here in Stillwater. And I know that we are looking at the courts building for some renovation, and I don't think it'd be foolish of us to take a look and see if there aren't some reconforming of the law library to maybe modernize what is happening there based on your narrative in the budget. So the two questions I have, would you be able to remind the board, and if not, if you want to email it out, when is the last time that you were approved a new FTE? Not law library. I know that answer, but... Madam Chair, Commissioners, if I recall correctly, the last time we were approved additional FTE was in 2024 when we were approved for a 1.0 FTE admin assistant. Thank you. And in this budget, there is not an additional FTE, so the next time the discussion would be for 2028, so four years. And the rate of growth that we've had in our county, it's just something to think about for planning purposes. I know that a renovated Park Grove and a renovated Stafford are going to increase traffic immensely, and so I just appreciate the narratives that you have in your budget, and I'm just asking the board to remember that. And then the final thing is, I know Ramsey County, when I was on MLSA, Ramsey County talked about their library card campaigns for fifth graders. And I know that I think Stillwater is partnering up right now, going maybe into this fall, into the new year. But I also think some sort of plan to do that when Park Grove is reopening in that area and Stafford in Woodbury to kind of help generate publicity for that, that wouldn't be a bad idea as well. And I don't know what kind of commitment that means for staff, data, and all that other jazz, but I just think it's a good partnership to have with our school districts. And anywho, I thought it'd be good to kind of highlight the new renovation, so. But keep up the amazing work. You and your staff are incredible, and thank you for the presentation. Commissioner. I will wrap us up and just say again, thank you for being here. So many good things were said. So many great performance metrics and data are in this giant budget book that we have, and so I appreciate kind of the commentary that you add to the numbers when you present with us. Also super excited for the bookmobile. I remember that growing up as a kid, coming by the neighborhood and it just being such a joyful experience. And so it's fun to think that we can maybe have some of that again. And I really appreciate you saying that, yes, all of these physical buildings, these projects and these renovations and all these things are very exciting. But I also appreciate you saying there is an increased workload that happens alongside that. So just so that we don't lose sight of that, I think is really important. So thank you for being here, and thank you for your presentation. I'm happy to support the library budget as you presented. We are scheduled for a 15-minute break. Shall we do that, colleagues? Yes. So we will come back at noon for the budget workshop for PRTS. Oh, come on. Four years ago in Woodbury. They had that locked down. Anyhow. All right. We will go ahead and get started with the 2027 budget workshop for the Property Records and Taxpayer Services Department with Director Stenftenagel. Please take it away. Thank you, Madam Vice Chair and Commissioners. Good afternoon. My name is Amy Stenftenagel, and I am the Director of Property Records and Taxpayer Services. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this morning about the Property Records and Taxpayer Services 2027 recommended budget. There we go. The Property Records and Taxpayer Services Department, also known as PRTS, provides a wide variety of critical services to residents. Our mission is to provide exceptional service in an environment of continuous improvement. The services we provide are highly regulated and critical for our local jurisdictions and residents. As a provider of highly regulated services, there are many state and federal agencies controlling the framework for the services we provide in PRTS, including the Department of State, Department of Public Safety, Secretary of State, Department of Revenue, Department of Health, Department of Natural Resources, and the state auditor. This level of oversight and regulation makes the department vulnerable to changes by the legislature and governmental agencies. That dependency makes our work with the county board on legislative priorities and our partnerships with state associations critical to informing decisions and advocating for the county and its taxpayers. PRTS provides service in five locations throughout the county, here at the government center in Stillwater, the service centers in Stillwater, Forest Lake, and Cottage Grove, and also the Central Service and License Center in Woodbury. As I say each year, this is my favorite slide because it shows how often PRTS touches the lives of our community members. We do everything from administering birth certificates, to helping people get their first driver's licenses, to helping people vote, to purchasing a home, and so much more. We take great pride in the work we do in PRTS and are honored to provide services each and every day that help those who call Washington County home. The work of PRTS requires eight divisions in the four functional areas listed here: elections, licensing, property records, and also property tax. We have wonderful staff in PRTS who provide all of these services to our residents. Here's a little bit of a closer look at our eight PRTS divisions and the number of FTE per division, ranging from 43.9 in our Service and License Center division to the five FTEs in our Taxation and Administration divisions. This slide not only shows the volume of the work done by the PRTS department but also the variety of work done by the employees in the department. For 2027, we're projecting these numbers. We will have over 122,000 tax parcels in the county for taxes payable in 2027. We will provide service for over 234,000 transactions at our license centers. Our number of registered voters in the county is now over 200,000. We will record an estimated 42,000 documents in 2027. And the most astonishing number up here for me every time I see it is that the Property Records and Taxpayer Services Department is responsible for collecting almost a billion dollars annually for the county and other taxing districts. Simply stated, the work done by this department is nothing short of remarkable. The key factors impacting the PRTS 2027 budget include housing market trends. The housing market continues to be unpredictable, with the number of homes being sold in the US remaining lower than in the past. This highly impacts the amount of revenue PRTS collects for the county on recording and fees related to home purchases. Annual wage and benefit increases, which is pretty self-explanatory and something all departments are impacted by. Rising technology usage and costs. Also, like other departments, PRTS is seeing the cost of technology increase along with the department's usage. Technology is Pivotal to helping us provide better service to our residents and to truly build connections with them. We're very excited about the possibilities for improved service delivery with the new technologies we're using. For example, we hope to soon be able to provide the option for property tax notices to be delivered electronically and to offer payment by credit card at our front counter here on the first floor of the government center. License and our wait times. Our license and our wait times at each location are longer than we'd like them to be, especially at the Central Service and License Center. As part of the 2027 budget, we are requesting an additional four FTE for that service center in Woodbury to help reduce wait times. And then also finally here, additional election JPAs. Each year, we continue to add joint powers agreements for our election services with our jurisdictions, and we anticipate several more before the 2028 presidential election. So we're requesting an additional 0.5 FTE to round out an existing 0.5 into a 1.0 full-time position. For PRTS's revenues, we're seeing an increase in the county net levy of about 7% due to a number of factors, including increases in personnel costs, internal rent, and technology allocations. Our non-levy revenue number is a bit deceiving each year because the PRTS budget is not apples to apples one year to the next due to election expenses that occur in the even years. The non-levy revenue is decreasing mostly because 2027 is not an even-year election year. It would be decreasing even more if not for the extra revenue in the license and permits category, thanks to the work that our license center do for several very busy car dealerships in the area, which we'll talk more about on the upcoming slide. So department expenditures, again, it's a bit deceiving comparing '26 to '27 due to those even-year elections. We're seeing an increase in personnel services, materials and supplies, and other financing uses, with decreases in services and charges and capital. Digging a little deeper into our non-levy revenue and those expenditures. In licenses and permits, as I said earlier, this significant increase is primarily... Oops, sorry. There we go. In licenses and permits, as I said earlier, this significant increase is primarily due to the additional revenue we're receiving from registration work our license centers do for several very busy car dealerships in the area. The decreases in fees for services and other financing sources are mainly due to comparing those even-year elections and odd-year ones. Fees for services is where some of that revenue goes from the jurisdictions that we run our elections for. We're seeing a little less of a decrease in fees for services due to an increase in the assessment fees we charge jurisdictions to assess the parcels in their communities. The interest we earn on the voter account, elections funding we get from the state has gone down just slightly, and the other financing resources decrease is partially due to 2027 not being an election year, but also due to us needing to take a bit less revenue from our recording funds, thanks to the extra revenue that we're receiving from our license centers and those registrations they're doing for the car dealerships. And also being able to use the voter account funding from the state to cover elections expenses. That also helps here in this area. For the significant budget changes to our expenditures, as I've mentioned, a big chunk of that is personnel. Materials and supplies went up slightly due to the tech allocation expense, postage, software licenses, and program supplies. Services and charges and other financing uses went down due to 2027 being an odd election year. In services and charges, some changes that are a little hard to see due to those election expenditures, including increases in internal rent, software licensing fees in our assessor's division, and also professional development costs in several of our divisions. Other financing uses is down slightly because we were able to take less out of our fund balance out of one of our recorder technology funds. And also for a few years, we've had funding in capital outlay to replace the security cameras at the front desk here at the government center. That project is wrapping up now, so there's a decrease in that expense line for 2027. Let's see. For our non-levy revenues... Wait. Sorry, hold on one sec. I think I already did that one. Yeah . Okay, sorry about that. All right. Moving on to our FTE budget summary. So this year we have 110.9 FTEs. For 2027, we are proposing adding 4.5 FTEs to the department, four service reps at the Central Service and License Center, and a 0.5 FTE for the election technician position to round that existing part-time position out to a full-time, especially because we are expecting some of those additional election services joint powers agreements in '27. And I also want to make sure to note that 4.5 additional FTEs are covered completely by non-levy revenue. All right, moving on to our divisions. I sometimes think about how it just seems like all the work that needs to happen each day in PRTS just kind of magically happens, but it is not magic. It's the amazing work by the people that I'll show you on the upcoming slides. Here's a photo of our PRTS administration staff. They are pivotal to all the work we do in PRTS. I think of them as the glue and duct tape that hold it all together. A special shout-out to them for all the work they do on our budget and everything else this year. Also on this slide is our amazing election staff. The special elections we held last year and earlier this year, along with our most recent primary election, have made for an especially grueling stretch of elections. I want to thank them for their hard work, dedication, and unwavering commitment to serving the voters of Washington County. In 2027, we'll have township elections in March and local and school district elections in November. In addition, there may be special elections added in 2027 based on the results from the upcoming 2026 statewide general election. But for now, we know that we will have the town, city, school district elections, and the township. Those will all be happening in 2027. For elections administration in the county, we have joint powers agreements with 16 municipalities in the county, which means we administer elections for over 80% of the voters in the county. We also administer all absentee voting in the county. In Minnesota, we now have permanent absentee ballot lists where you can sign up to receive a ballot in the mail for every election that you're eligible for. In even years, like this year, our initial absentee ballot mail-out obligation is approaching 9,000 ballots. This is the number of ballots that needs to go out the door those 46 days prior to the election, which is coming very quickly for the upcoming election. As I mentioned a few slides ago, we receive voter account funding annually from the state of around 120,000 a year, which we greatly appreciate. I'll also mention in 2026, this was the first year we offered early voting, a new process which mimics Election Day operations for those 18 days preceding Election Day. Nearly 5,000 residents took advantage of this new way to vote, and many complimented the ease of voting and dedicated voting facilities that we have within our buildings. This added method of voting has increased the personnel costs needed to keep vote centers fully staffed and will continue to be an ongoing added expenditure. All right. I'll also say we have been having some exploratory conversations with three municipalities who are talking about entering into JPAs with us next year. If that occurs, we would administer elections for 90% of the voters in the county. Moving on to our license and service centers. Here is a lovely photo of that staff. They may make their jobs look easy, but the work they do is anything but easy. Their knowledge, patience, and commitment to providing excellent customer service are what make it all come together. This graph shows license and service center revenues and expenditures back to 2015. The green bar shows our revenue and the light blue bar shows our expenditures. As you can see, in 2027, we're estimating increases in both revenue and expenditures. License center revenue in 2027 is projected to increase over $550,000, which is over a 15% increase due to that previously mentioned dealership work that we've been doing, along with a slight increase in driver's licenses and passports. You may also notice in our non-financial documents that we do expect transaction counts at our central service and license center to dip slightly from where we were estimating them to be this year. We anticipate these reductions in transactions to continue as more and more transactions move online and as the tab kiosks become more popular. We do still anticipate being busy enough to warrant that extra FTE that we're asking for in 2027 due to those more complex transactions we're seeing that we discussed in a board workshop several months ago. And we're seeing the increase in revenue despite the slight reduction in total transactions because the dealership work we're receiving gives us a lot of that extra revenue. So speaking of kiosks, we continue to see the self-service kiosk where residents renew their vehicle registration to grow in popularity. Currently in the county, there is a kiosk at the Stillwater and Oakdale Cub Foods and coming soon to the Hy-Vee in Cottage Grove. Chair Bigham, there's still not a date for that, but I'll keep you apprised. Moving on to property records. Here you can see our outstanding property records staff. The Property Records Division records over 400 different types of real estate documents and maintains taxpayer names in our tax system. You can also see here the document recording fees and the taxes that we collect. These are set by statute. You can see that while 97% of the mortgage registration and state deed taxes go to the state, we do receive a greater portion of the recording fees, and a portion of that does go into our county recording technology fund. You can see here on the slide the list of technology fund expenditures. Some of them do help our department, but the entire county also benefits from other uses of this fund. Here's some additional information about our Property Records Division and their work. Our property records database now contains more than a total of three million documents. We also want to report that in 2025, statutory turnaround compliance fell a little bit behind due to division management turnover and retirement of some key employees. The division is now fully staffed and positioned to strengthen processes and avoid similar challenges in the future. Our document recording software, it's called RecordEase, continues to be optimized to improve efficiency. Its optical character recognition or OCR capabilities reduce the amount of manual data that our employees have to enter. RecordEase also provides a convenient online search system and offers both occasional use and escrow subscriptions, generating additional revenue for the department. We also offer Property Watch, a free online service that will automatically send you an email notification when a document is recorded with your name on it. As you can see on our property records revenue chart on this slide, the Washington County real estate markets remains relatively stable, with modest changes in home values and transaction activity. While current conditions do not indicate a significant market expansion in the near term, continued activity is expected. Based on current market trends, revenue projections anticipate just a very slight decrease in 2027, resulting in relatively stable plateau that you can see here from '25 through 2027. Moving on to two more of our talented divisions, our Assessment Support and our County Assessor as well. This slide represents the work of our Assessors division, which continues to successfully administer the assessment of property, assuring that each community is treated equitably, the value adjustments are fairly distributed within each community, and that assessments are consistent with Minnesota State statutes. This slide also represents the work of our Assessment Support division, which serves as a link between our Assessor's Office, Property Records, and Taxation divisions. Each division in PRTS depends on the work of other divisions. The graph shows the number of parcels locally assessed in the orange, and the parcels the County Assessor's division values and classifies, which is that light green bar. We assess 27 of the 33 municipalities in the county, so almost all of them. Birchwood, Dellwood, Grant, Marine, May Township, and Scandia, those all remain locally assessed. I'm also happy to report that the county passed our 2026 state assessment review done by the Minnesota Department of Revenue with no corrective measures ordered. I'd also like to take this opportunity to mention something that Chair Bigham brings up every year, and I'm grateful that she does. The number of participants who get a property tax exclusion because they are a veteran with a disability, it continues to increase each year because awareness of that program continues to rise. If this keeps happening, we may need to talk about possibly additional staffing to help us cover the extra workload that administering this program requires. All right, moving on to another assessment slide here. The County Assessor's Office also oversees the property tax petitions the county receives. Homeowners, property owners, and business owners may contest their property tax assessments by filing property tax petitions. On this chart, you can see the number of tax petitions filed annually. In recent years, we have been using an outside appraiser, and that additional support on our significant high-profile tax petitions has been very successful. I'd also like to mention here our strong partnership with the County Attorney's Office and how much we value and appreciate their assistance with tax petitions. Our collaborative efforts within the County Attorney's Office have resulted in the successful defending of Washington County's tax base. All right, and last but certainly not least, our Taxation and Taxpayer Services divisions. For 2027, we're projecting that the county will have approximately 122,000 parcels. PRTS administers property taxes on behalf of the 56 different taxing authorities located within the county across 110 unique taxing areas. The graph on this slide shows the real and personal tax that the county bills annually. The Taxation division collects levies from each of the taxing districts and calculates taxes and credits on these 122,000 parcels of property in the county. The division also administers tax increment financing, or TIF districts, and the Fiscal Disparities Tax-based sharing program as part of that process. They also prepare the proposed Truth in Taxation notices and tax statements to raise awareness and provide necessary information to taxpayers, as well as overseeing the administration of the county's tax-forfeited properties. The Taxpayer Services division provides the collection service for taxes related to real estate, personal property, and manufactured homes. They also administer the county vital records function and operate a call center and customer service counter to respond to a wide range of assessment, taxation, vital records, elections, and property records questions. The work we do in PRTS helps the county administer on behalf of the other jurisdictions, and I also always like to note that typically the county portion is just 20% of the total that is billed. This again shows the complexity and scale of the work for property taxes, and it's not just for the county, but it's also for the other taxing authorities in the county. I'll also take this opportunity to mention here that our property tax system upgrade to our Aumentum system, we started that in late '25, and it's continued into 2026. I will admit it wasn't quite as smooth as we had hoped, but we continue to work through it and anticipate that work potentially continuing into 2027. And with that, my last slide, I'll go ahead and wrap up. I want to close with this photo of our incredible PRTS team. Everything I've shared with you today is possible because of the people in this photo and the work that they do every day. I'm incredibly proud of this team and grateful for their dedication to serving the residents of Washington County. I also want to recognize our PRTS leadership team, many of whom are here today. I'm incredibly grateful for their partnership, their commitment to our staff, and the way they step up each and every day to help lead the department through both the opportunities and the challenges that come our way. I also want to take a little bit of a sidebar maybe to say that leadership in local government is not always easy. And I think that's especially true right now. We're asked to navigate increasingly complex issues, make difficult decisions, and meet ever-growing expectations. I feel very fortunate to do that work alongside some truly exceptional department heads in this organization and would like to take a moment to just recognize some of them. Director Castillo, who leads some of the most challenging and consequential work we do as a county, serving people at the times they need us most. Director Brummel, who cares more about the health and wellbeing of all of us than most of us care about our own health, and graciously refrains from judging us for it too much. Director Piepho, who I'm increasingly convinced is completely unflappable. No matter what comes her way, she handles it with warmth, a smile, and a level of true calm that I admire. Director Sandberg, whose department is responsible for roads, parks, buildings, infrastructure, and seemingly anything else in the county that is large, expensive, or capable of breaking. You do amazing work. And finally, Director Kramer, who now has the privilege of leading a department I happen to know just a little bit something about and shares my appreciation for just how special our libraries are to our communities. I'm grateful to each of you and to all of our department heads for your leadership, your partnership, and for making the many hours we spend together doing this important work a little more enjoyable along the way. So thank you as well to county administration for your continued support, and finally, to the county board for your trust in our department and for your partnership in the work we do on behalf of Washington County residents. And with that, again, I will say thank you, and I am happy to stand for questions. Thank you, Director Stenfenagel, for a very fast presentation. Holy cow. You got through a lot of slides that are really important, and I want to thank you for that. Of course. We will go ahead and start our conversation. No one's raising their hands, so maybe there is no conversation. She's crossing her fingers, everyone. All right. Commissioner Karwoski. Thank you, Madam Vice Chair. Director Stenfenagel. Yes. Great presentation. Thank you. Very passionate, and rightfully so, about the work you do and the work of the employees. So many of them are out here. In fact, we have so many good employees, I actually thought I was talking to a couple library of people earlier, and there weren't any in there. So you've got a nice amount of staff here- ... to represent property taxes and elections. Mm-hmm. And thank you for the work you do. I have just a few observations, really. Mm-hmm. It's not listed, but slide eight is worth showing again. Okay. It's after seven. Thank you. Obviously. But some are not- It's got the 765... That one. Is it, which one is it? The 765 million in the center. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Lower left, 203,000 registered voters. Yeah. We have 290,000 citizens, which must be virtually approaching 100% registered. That's quite a tribute to our- Yeah ... residents, 18 and older. That is amazing. I hope they get out and vote, and we always encourage people to vote. I thought that was worth noting. I did want to move down to slide eight. Nope, slide 17. Okay. Here, let me look it up here. Okay, I think it's this one. This one? This is to assure voters, in recent federal discussions the last day about mailing ballots, there's 8,750 ballots. Are any of those at risk of not being mailed? Are we insulated from what Washington, DC is talking about with the Postal Service? Mm-hmm. Madam Vice Chair, Commissioner Karwoski, yes, those will all go out as planned, those 46 days before the election- That's coming up ... if that was your question. Yeah. Yeah. It's coming up only in a few days, so I just- Soon ... think it's worth reassuring voters- Yeah ... of that. Then just a comment regarding, you were saying there's three joint powers agreements with three different municipalities where we might do their elections. Correct. That would bring us to about 90%. Mm-hmm. Right now, is that listed at 80%? Yeah. Correct. So let's say we got to 100%. Mm-hmm. Would we gain some efficiency there of operation? As we get closer to 100%, is it harder to do the 10? Not that you're jeopardizing that in any way, but you're losing the expertise. Mm-hmm. So would it be good on our budget if we ended up being 100%? Mm-hmm. Yeah, Madam Vice Chair, Commissioner Karwoski, that's a good question. I would say we would become more efficient because right now we spend a lot of time communicating with the clerks and with those communities that don't- Yeah ... have JPAs with us. But I will also be honest, we would definitely need more staff as well if we got to 100%. Right. But that's a service they pay through the- Mm-hmm ... joint powers. They- Correct ... pay for that service. Yep. So to some degree- Yeah ... it's close to neutral. Yeah. I'm just pointing that out because I think it would overall probably be a benefit that you could use that effort elsewhere. Yeah. Slide 27. This one's probably something to do with the budget. I'm looking. Hold on. 27, okay. It shows the- Let's see. This one? Yeah. I often think it's prideful of county board and our staff that as people's property taxes increase, the fourth budget bullet down, we're 20% of that total tax bill. It wasn't that many years ago, I think it was approaching a third. Mm-hmm. I'll leave it at that in general terms. So even though property taxes have gone up and the county has been part of that challenge to keep them lower, I think we keep becoming a shrinking amount of that total. For every dollar paid in, 21 cents go to the county, and I think our county employees should be prideful of that. Mm-hmm. Although it is concerning to see the chart there. Over the last six years, some of these tax bills have generally averaged out as increasing about a third. Yeah. And that's concerning, but that's I think there's 56 taxing authorities. Not everybody's having 66 taxing authorities. Depending on where they live, though, you've got watershed districts, city taxes, school board taxes. So those are some significant taxes. But I'm very prideful that if we can continue to hover at 21%, if there's the chance that we can lower ourself, that's a good thing. But we're a partner on everybody's property tax bill, so it takes an efficient city government, an efficient school board, and just wanted to point out that 21%. Thank you. Mm-hmm. Thank you. Commissioner Bigham. Thank you, Director Stenftenagel, for your presentation and for our conversation yesterday to make sure I had some of the background information correct. And I neglected to thank Director Kramer for her conversation, too. I think it's important to make sure that the background information that we're looking at is accurate. And I appreciate the conversation we had about the number of properties for exclusion for veterans with disabilities. And just for the viewing public, we are going from 370 million to 425 million. And that has been about the same trend for a few years going now, and that's good. That is excellent. It's a benefit they earn and qualify and deserve. But to the director's point, that takes time to process all of that and verify all of that. And it wasn't all that long ago that your department and Veterans Affairs were just allowed to talk legally because it wasn't allowed in the statute, and we were able to switch that. So I keep wanting to talk a little bit about that because that's a big component. And then also, if anybody is looking at the actual spreadsheet, I just confirmed the intergovernmental revenue that dropped so much is because it's an off-election year coming up, and obviously to what Commissioner Karwoski said, that we receive revenue, but when those JPAs obviously aren't active, they're not paying us for them. Yeah. So we lose that stream of revenue there for the time we are not doing the elections. The other things that I think hit your department a lot is when other aspects of the state are not pulling their weight. And so technology is a big one that you need to be able to effectively communicate, and that's on both ends. And so I appreciate the attention that you give to that and calling it out and holding all of that accountable. And the last thing I would say, and I know I mentioned it in general administration, but your department also, in a way, kind of like Director Brummels too, you have to be prepared for absolutely the unimaginable at times, and that takes effort and revenue and time. And Commissioner Karwoski again mentioned that earlier. But the amount of time for the hurry up and wait- Mm-hmm ... or the hurry to get there and then park it kind of approach because you don't know what's going to happen- Mm-hmm ... is extremely frustrating, I know, for staff, and I wish there was a better way to handle that- Mm-hmm ... other than communication between, most of the time, it's the state. A lot of times it's also the feds or the courts. I just wish people would be more mindful of that aspect. And your staff is the face, honestly, of the county. They're usually the ones that they have the interaction with. Yeah. And so I just can't thank everybody enough for the work they do in the times that we are in. Yeah. And just thank you for all the organizing and extra effort. You are correct that the directors that you mentioned are absolutely incredible. Don't forget to thank yourself, too, because you do amazing work leading this team. Thank you. Commissioner Clausen, do you have a few comments? You're muted again, Commissioner Clausen. Thanks so much for presenting the material today. Mm-hmm. I was going through each line item and just recognizing the amount of work and how much you actually oversee. I do have questions. Mm-hmm. And you touched on it a little bit about temporary staff and paid family leave. And because those amounts are all different depending on the department, can you touch a little bit about how that is, what numbers you're using, and how that comes to be? Madam Vice Chair, Commissioner Clausen, are you talking about temporary staff like in elections, in license centers, all of it, all of them? In that? Or- So when I'm looking through your- Yeah ... each fund, you have a placement for paid family leave. Hmm. And each department has a different amount, and I was just wondering what the number was being used. Is that the same number, and it's based on the level of staff? Commissioner Clasen, we're going to have Administrator Corbid take that question. Thank you. Madam Vice Chair and commissioners, under each business unit, you will find an expense for the paid family leave program. That is the county employer's share of the .88% of payroll that we pay to the state to fund the paid family leave program. So, if it's different in each unit, it's because their payroll costs are different, and so the bigger departments, bigger payrolls have a higher cost share of that line item, but that's an expense in each budget. I would just note, and I don't know if this is part of the question, but we really don't budget for temporary staff to backfill paid leaves of either Minnesota paid leave or other types of FMLA leave. Those kind of additional duties get shared amongst the staff that are in those departments. So, with the exception of funding some overtime, really the leaves that are occurring through Minnesota Paid Leave are being absorbed through other staff just picking up those duties from the individuals that are on that leave. Yeah, thank you. I think that's really important as we grow in a population- Mm-hmm ... and you can see that the registered voters is increasing, that we start looking at how to best serve our community, and we continue to do that. However, with the addition to paid family leave, what I'm noticing is that we've had longer lines at the licensing center, and I also want to make sure that we have enough election staff. So, moving forward, I do think it would be prudent for us to put down some policy measures in regards to elections, particularly when we should move from an elections manager to an elections director position. I think that if we are serving 90% of the county, that we should then change and maybe look at a restructuring of the department to ensure that Amy Stenfenagel, our wonderful director, has other more qualified leaders to really handle that high-level elections. I am afraid that by us having taken on absentee voting, that we have often not properly looked at the amount of work that's involved in it. I know that we try and do that through the cost share, but there's still an enormous amount of strategy and thought planning that goes through with elections. So, I would hope that we look more into how we could structure elections to be supported in the addition to these contracts with cities. I do think it was really important to make the elections center to be Central Service Center. It was at Central Park, but the amount of population growth that we are headed to, 300,000, we will likely hit that probably within the next, I don't know, five years. It's not going to take, I don't know, five, 10, considering how many housing developments we are getting. And so, we have a duty to serve and make sure that we are able to deal with the pressures of elections, especially as you noted, the special elections that have happened every year. And that is stressful for the staff. So, I was hoping that we could do some policies in place to expand changes that I know that are imminent. I also wanted to say here that I wonder if ranked choice voting would be less overall cost of staff. I don't know if we've looked into that, but I know several large cities like Bloomington and Minneapolis, they do ranked choice voting, and they say it's easier. Now I'm wondering, if we do end up taking countywide elections, is it not prudent of us for then to look into ranked choice voting? And that's the number one area that I wanted to talk about today. Okay. Commissioner Miron, do you have any thoughts? Well, not on that particular issue. And I'm not sure about restructuring either. I think that's part of a broader conversation and maybe relates again to strategic planning as we move forward, but certainly elections are cyclical. Commissioner Bigham indicated that you need a whole bunch of people during an election year, and off years, how do you balance that? And so I think it might be worth some additional discussion. I want to applaud you for the work that you're doing with the car dealerships. That's three quarters of a million dollars that's coming into the county To help offset any levy that we might otherwise be providing. So kudos to the service that's being provided there, and I think that's just one example of some of the good work that you're doing. The complexities of elections, the checks and balances that go on, and I think there's one other noteworthy thank you that should go out, and that's to the volunteers that help with elections and help bring, in my opinion, integrity to the election process, that oversight that those volunteers... And I know they're paid, but really minimum amount for the work that they do. But I think it helps establish additional credibility within the election systems when even though we may be overseeing elections for a lot of communities, it's those volunteers from within those communities that are really providing services that help us really meet the obligations we have with respect to the complexity of elections. Director Stenfenagel, I really appreciated the emotion in your thank you. I think we all share that emotion to the people that work for us. We certainly understand the value that they bring, particularly to this department, and the amount of work that's being done, and the collaboration that's being done as you described it in your emotional thank you. So that certainly is shared, I believe, by this board, and we just so much appreciate all the work you do. And it was mentioned earlier, but in most cases, you are the face of Washington County at all of our service centers and the work that you're doing, and helping people out with transactions that are necessary for them, and that roadmap with all of the places we touch people, or you touch people through property records and taxpayer services. That is a favorite slide of mine as well, and I think just goes to demonstrate the need that you fulfill here within the county. So thank you. I don't have any budgetary questions. It's a very complex department with a lot of work. And again, we see that trend. Personnel costs are continuing to increase as we look at supplies and materials and those types of things as well. So, and then obviously facility costs, and your department bears a lot of that because of the sheer number of facilities that are within the purview of your department. So just thank you to everyone for all the work you do. I will-- Administrator Corrid, would you like to- Madam Chair, just a couple quick thoughts, and then there's one maybe just to lead into next week's presentations as well. But one of the things that Director Stenfenagel and Deputy Administrator Wagenius, with some help from some smart budget people, are going to be looking at in the next year is how we handle this election cost issue in the budgeting. I think there's a possibility that we can make some things be a little bit more simple and a little bit more easily understood, the impact of the even-year, odd-year elections budget within PRTS. I think that'll be helpful. One of the things that we struggle with, and this has been coming on as we've taken on more JPAs, is these communities will pay us the money in the even year. We are hiring full-time staff that are here in even and odd years, and so having to make that money work over that time period is having some impact on the PRTS budget. So we want to understand it. We want to make sure that it's-- Maybe we can make some transitions now because it's becoming a much bigger chunk of that PRTS budget than it used to be. So you'll see that, and hopefully that'll be an improvement, that'll be a little bit better transparency on what elections are costing us and how it's impacting the budget. Just before you wrap up, and I'll be done with my comments, next week, we have the final three budget presentations from the sheriff's office, the attorney's office, and the general operations commissioner's county operations budget. That will be presented by Deputy Administrator Lucke on the 1st of September. Then we don't meet on the 8th. On the 15th, we will have a budget workshop to review any changes you would like to see for the preliminary budget that you will then be asked to set on September 22nd. So that's coming up very fast. So I just want to make the offer from the staff level that if you have any questions about the budget as you're going through this between now and that last workshop, please share those with us, and we will try to put together any information you need, or options for you, or potential changes to the budget as we prepare for that last workshop and the vote on the preliminary levy and budget. So that's all I have, Madam Chair. I will also just share my thanks. In the last couple of weeks, there's been an increase in questions from residents in my community, and they are incredibly complicated, and I just really appreciate you taking the time to answer each of them with the care and respect that they deserve. So I really appreciate the support that you give to all of us commissioners as well. So, thank you everyone, 12:48, and we are done. Yay. Thank you.