Minutes 05-26-2022 Budget Work Session

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16 Commissioner Bedford said the Board took a vote to not make budget amendments between now and the adoption of the manager's recommended budget prior to adoption of FY 2022-23 budget. She said that a commissioner could run an amendment if they are not on the outside agency board, but they have not done that in the past. Chair Price said the Board will be approving an amount and the manager will determine the specific awards. Bonnie Hammersley said that is correct and tonight she is sharing what the amounts of the awards are. Chair Price asked John Roberts to comment on what the Board voted on. John Roberts said that he did not know they had resigned from the governing boards and that was the point. He said the law makes it a misdemeanor for a county commissioner who sits on a non-profit board to consider or award funds to those non-profits. He said that what the Board voted on was taking the Board's authority over the nonprofit boards and delegating that to the manager to award the money. He said that if everyone has resigned from being a director on a non-profit board then it is not really necessary that they be completely excluded from voting on this issue. He said that if the Board wants to revisit their prior motion that is an option. Commissioner Hamilton said she recalls the Board determined to delegate the award authority to the County Manager with the idea that the Board could revisit the process in a later year if they feel it is unsatisfactory. She said the Board can limit the total allocation (1.35% to 1%), and then County Manager will divide the money accordingly between outside agencies. She said she would be interested in knowing the number served by each outside agency. Bonnie Hammersley said the county has that information from applications and they are required to do that. She said they do not provide payment if the required reporting is not completed. She said that in this circumstance, she honored every advisory board's ranking of each outside agency and that she is very comfortable with this. She said when she first came to the county, eight years ago, the advisory boards were very frustrated because they were doing all of this work and then the commissioners would start picking favorites and change the funding allocations. She said that as a reminder, these are a part of the county's operations and the people that are reviewing the applications know the most about the value of the outside agencies to the county's operations. She said that if there is a question about why they were ranked, the applications and rankings are available. She said this is an intense process that the county follows. She said the advisory boards and department directors do not know the funding formula ahead of time. Commissioner McKee said he understands the frustration of an agency if they were to get a score of 68, but this process is performance driven. He said it is two steps removed from what the previous Boards used to do. He said that he has seen Boards move money from one agency to another agency and that was getting too close to pork barrel politics, and he was glad to see it move away from that. He said that the next step was better, but it is always subjective, but no way to get away from that. He said there is no way to get away from saying we have to have a cutoff. Commissioner Richards said that she wanted to be clear that her initial question was about process and the law behind the decision the Board made to delegate the awards to the county manager. She said that other jurisdictions are doing the process differently and they made a decision about the law but then resigned so their decision does not really come into play. She said then the Piedmont Health score popped out at her and there is no way for any person, advisory board, or commissioner to be totally objective when scoring. Commissioner McKee said for him it was a process. He said that on previous boards that four votes are all it took to defund one agency and give to another.