Board of Supervisors — 2014-04-09

Music playing . .

Yes, everybody. Everybody looks good. We're all equally looking good. All right. Good morning. Convene this meeting of the Board of Supervisors, our third budget workshop. Mr. Allen can we have a roll call please?

Mr. Adam, Mr. Carbajal, Ms. Wolfe, Ms Farr, Mr Lavinino.

Okay, we're going to start with general public comment. I believe we have a couple of speakers. Mr. Allen?

We're going to start with Mr. Caldwell and then we have Shane Stark to follow up.

Chairman Lavinino, members of the board. I'm Andy Caldwell representing COLAB. You know, I had to miss yesterday afternoon's presentations because of the radio show but one of the things I wanted to bring up that we're getting a lot of complaints from people down here primarily in the city of Santa Barbara with regard to the homeless situation and I wrote an op-ed this week that I'm going to kind of reveal the gist of it to you. This is no secret, but there's a lot of people that want to put pressure on the Santa Barbara City Council and the Santa Barbara Police Department to do more to enforce vagrancy laws, aggressive panhandling, and a bunch of other things.

And I do believe the police department should be more involved in doing that. And it's coming to the point where people are canceling leases in Santa Barbara because they don't want their customers or their company having to deal with these issues, so it's a really serious problem not just for the tourists and the customers but for the actual business owners.

But what's lost on a lot of people in the city of Santa Barbara Is it been when the police department does issue a citation if they do arrest somebody. The rest of its on you. The jail, probation, social services, alcohol, drug and mental health services. What the county does in response to that complaint will determine whether or not that person's just right back on that doorstep or in that back alley the very next day.

Or whether they're shuffled through some system and come out the other end a responsible citizen or at most we can hope for. We're going to be focusing on this issue in this next year. And to tell you the truth, I met with some SEIU board members a few weeks ago and one of them worked for the Public Defender's Office and she was telling me about a program that they can take some of these people down to LA and get free treatment. It's a fairly successful program.

If that's true, and I asked her for an opportunity to follow up with her. If that's true, I don't know why we don't have a bus going down there. For the people that would be willing to receive treatment. So the bottom line, this is an issue, this is another issue where I know that there's been a homeless task force. I know that I think President Bush or somebody else or Clinton was going to end homelessness in ten years and we had this big ta-da meeting. And I've always said if they don't want to get better, we can't make them get better with existing laws. And we may end up having to come to that asking that our laws be changed. Thank you.

Jane Stark.

I didn't realize you were so tall. Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the board. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I'm here this morning representing the Education Fund of the League of Women Voters of Santa Barbara. As you know—I assume you know—there's an election on June 3rd coming up And I just wanted to announce that the league is holding a candidates forum on Wednesday, April 23rd. It should be two weeks from today if I can still count. April 23rd from 6-9pm at the Goleta Valley Community Center 5679 Hollister Avenue in the city of Goleta Old Town to be exact.

The forum will include both candidates for second district supervisor And both candidates for county sheriff. It will be taped and available on the league's website, and potentially I assume on cable TV. The forum promises to be lively informative. The public is welcome. I hope people show up. We're not, I should point out, not doing a pros and cons explanation of ballot measures for this election.

There are two important measures On the June ballot of particular interest to folks concerned with local government state proposition 42 which probably know about which requires in the state Constitution. Governments to comply with open meeting and public records laws, and makes it optional for the state to reimburse counties. It should be in cities for new mandates under those laws. And County Measure M-2014 as I'm sure you know since you've been debating it quite a bit. The county facilities maintenance ordinance very important for this county. I would like to say in the minute that I have left, a few words about the initiative process.

Voting on a measure, particularly legislation is not like voting for candidate. When you vote for a candidate, you vote in part with your heart. You think about whether you trust the person, whether you believe them and there's an emotional connection. When you vote on a measure, you're making a law. It can't be easily changed which calls for careful Calm, reasoned consideration of the facts. What it'll do, what it will cost and what are the alternatives? Please I'm talking to the voters now please read the ballot material carefully before you vote with respect to measure M before you vote study the text the arguments pro and con And particularly, the impartial analysis by the County Council and the fiscal impact statement on it from the auditor.

An informed vote is a good vote. Good luck with the budget process. Hope you do well. Hope to see at the forum. All right.

Thank you Mr. Stark. All right we'll now move on to our departmental budgets Support services. Our first one is our audit controller, Mr. Guice.

Morning Chairman Lavinino, members of the board. I'd like to just first start and recognize my staff, and we'll just use our org chart here. Myself, Theo, Julie who is in the audience, Heather Fletcher, our internal audit manager, Mike Struven, our financial applications division chief, Betsy, our financial reporting division chief. Amy, who is working on the Almentum Project and is in our computer section. Holly Renzi new to our office took Jennifer Christian's place who moved up to the treasurer tax collector.

Ed Price, our expert in property taxes. Nancy Doherty, who was our payroll division chief, who took the place of Tony McDonald, who got a transfer out to Montecito Sanitary District. And Katie Roth, who was also new to our division and took the right place of Greg Levin. And so we have three new division chiefs, a little bit of change in the organization. My success is all about their success. May seem like we have a lot of high level people on our department and we do. We operate with little pods, you know, a division chief, a supervisor, a couple of staff and were really effective In that way, internal audit right now has a division chief, a supervisor and one staff. Lowest level we've ever been in internal audit in my career that I know we only have three people working there.

Heather's still doing a good job and we're going to go out on campus and we're going to recruit new auditors which is the theme of our budget request here. So let me start with, I was trying to think of a quote and I went through my Deming book which is our management philosophy. And I said well I got plenty of quotes in there but anyone taken by themselves doesn't really make a lot of sense and maybe if I have some time at the end we'll finish with a little Deming. But I decided to take a different quote and this is from my wife's grandfather and I'm gonna relate My budget presentation today to his definition of the secret to a good sermon. The secret to a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, and to have them as close together as possible.

Well maybe they can figure that out. No, my wife's grandfather was George Burns and so her grandmother is Gracie Allen. So he has plenty of great quotes you can go get. The second thing I want to do is say okay what are we requesting? We're going to start where we're going to end. In our budget we have four positions we're requesting two senior accountants And to entry-level accountants and so I went to know it and I said hey we're going to ask for 4 positions in you know she kind of gave me that good counseling of a new County executive will maybe next year.

And you know realizing there's not a lot of money to spend around so I re synthesize that and said OK we'll put in a formal request for two entry-level accounts because we think that would be very good for the organization to enter into our new training and development program. And they're also our cheapest staff, and we get after you see what was happening yesterday about UCSB, we recruit great people out of UCSB and Cal Poly, and so that other anomaly going on out there is not reflective the people to enter the county workforce.

If you look around this room, there's a few people that entered the county workforce that way. Betsy, Melinda, Rochelle and Jennifer came in a little different route but they were in the auditor's office. Carrie Topliff our department head at child support, auditor's office, Julie from the auditor's office JJ from the Otters Office New Training and Development Program. So we've been successful to bring people into the otters organization and push them up into the departments.

Supervisor Adam has a question. Are you sure that if we checked everybody's Facebook there wouldn't be any pictures of any of these people up on signs or anything like that?

So let me give you another, I have a sister-in-law also in the movie business. And she was at our house a few years ago and I asked her about a movie that she had filmed. And I said hey Kathy that movies coming out how'd you do? She said I ended up on the cutting room floor. And in this budget process normally when the auditor comes and says I want a couple of accountant auditors and we compare ourselves into the final tally when you're doing your wish list We frequently end up on the cutting room floor. And I'd say, you know probably 95% of the time we're on the cutting room floor so with that let me go ahead and talk about our slides. Our first slide is $8 million.

And you know, you go well what does an auditor do for $8 million? I was looking at those budgets yesterday. $102 million, $80 million, $72 million, $10 million. I go God we don't have very much budget for the auditor and back when I ran in 1991 we were trying to say well what does the auditor really do? In its simplest form, we manage the county's checkbook We record every single deposit that comes into the county. We record every single transaction that goes out of the county, either I'm signing the check or we're processing the electronic transit transaction going out and then includes all those big budgets like social services mental health.

All their transactions are coming through it. We're expected to understand all those transactions and be accountable for all those transactions. Every social services claim that goes to the federal and state government, we're signing. Every mental health services claim that goes to the state government, we're signing. And some of those had some big paybacks. How much staff do we have to really understand what mental health is proposing to do in those huge transactions? In changing the way they're delivering services and changing their billing to Medi-Cal. We need to be able to understand that, so in addition to the county's checkbook we're taking all the property tax money in 626 million were distributing to other taxing entities. And we're taking a lot of other state and federal transactions and distributing them to other entities like SB CAG.

You know, we account for about 15 special districts on our books just running their general ledger. And so it's complicated what we do and we're not running just 800 million but you know, we're running probably 1 or 2 billion. Oh, we have a relationship with the county education office. All the county education office transactions run through the treasury and the auditor's office.

All of their cash and checks, just the cash part of the business. They came to me the other day and said hey we're going to switch financial systems. I go that's going to create a lot of workload for us because they've got to redo all their interfaces. And so that's another theme about what I want to talk to you guys about today is we inherit workload. When the feds change a program, we change our program. When the state changes those allocations, we have to understand them and we have to account for them differently. When you build a new North County jail and get two significant grants, we have to understand those grant agreements, sign off on those grant agreements, and make sure we get our receivables when it starts the construction process.

So that's kind of one of the things that we get new workload all the time, but we don't get staff to cover that new workload. We're covering our core and then we have a responsibility to do the rest. So let's keep going Theo. You know mostly we're general fund. We used to apply some cost allocation revenue to this. We'll get to that on the next slide. You can see down below we kept the cost allocation revenue And you see we were going down this year, and if we were still going under some old rules where we didn't take that into the general fund, we'd be doing cuts. And that was happening to a lot of departments. The cost allocation goes up and down. You can see it go up and down. And in some years you get your ear to the good and some years to the bad.

And we decided that for the service delivery departments, that wasn't very healthy in the budget process. So we've brought that money into non-department revenue. Next slide. We do in the future, you know we're using one-time revenue to balance our budget out of our auditor's automation budget but like this year we're scheduled to use it but we have vacancies again, we have turnover, we probably won't have to make that draw and we still have a balance that we need to staff up to and this year we plan to staff up to our levels and really draw on that balance.

In summary, I used to think God how do we survive with those kinds of cuts? And then I look at the cuts that all the other departments have on their charts and I just kind of sit and think wow. This organization has really taken a lot of cuts but one of the things that happens to us is when those cuts happen in other departments Things flow back to us. What they used to do, they can't do and somebody has to do some of those things so sometimes I feel like I'm a sanitation district it's all flowing downhill.

We audit sanitation districts just a little joke. So here's some of our accomplishments. You know, for four years we've been working with the Treasury tax collector to put in a momentum. The good news is we couldn't get it done in November. We're having very nice success right now. We're through five, we're in the fifth week of our what they call user acceptance testing. We plan to go live in August. We think we have a very high chance and it's gonna work.

And we'd like to get that project Completed so we can take back some of our staff. When we did this project, we didn't ask you for any more staff. And that's pretty unusual when you put in a major system like this. Usually, you go staff 10 new people. We did it, Harry dedicated five, I've dedicated five and we're pulling this off. Another little thing we did is here's a good example of housing and community development. We found out there's 40 million in outstanding loans. They put a list together, we help them audit the list. We put in a procedure now to monitor that list of how they should execute and go collect money off those receivables. There's probably some availability of collecting money back on those loans, we have a self-interest in this.

Those loans aren't on our financial statements and we have to make the decision are they the kind of loans that we should be booking on our financial statement? And then have procedures in place to monitor and account for the annual activity on those loans. We continue to work on budget development, we're sitting in the audience because we're listening to you guys today. We're hearing what you're saying about changes you want to make. We are digesting some of those changes and will work with that county executive office to help make those changes. And let me just tell you I didn't say thanks to the County Executive Office They've pulled off these hearings without a lot of our help this time. We got distracted doing some other things, Betsy was out for a little bit and so they really pulled off the first hearing and these hearings without a lot of assistance from us.

So they really stepped up where we couldn't help them as much as we were in the past. You know, we initiated development Our time card system, that's a project we're just kicking off. We have kicked it off before but you know we have a good employee self-service system and a good department network system. And we're in the process of upgrading those and redoing the 14 year old time card system. We've brought some fair labor standards problems to your board.

The time card system should help us track that over time. We continued enhanced reporting to the board on external monitoring at departments and lost property. In the next month or two, you're gonna see a couple of reports come back to the board one on the lost property. And the second one is gonna be on the progress we've made on redoing how we're processing contracts. That's a joint effort with the CEO and the county council.

So what are our objectives? What we're really good at in the auditor is we recruit and hire well-qualified staff. We want to conduct a recruitment for a new class of accountant auditors, we've been doing that since about 1991 over 75 people we've hired out of college. We take them through and rotate them through our department. We encourage staff performance.

It's all about this Deming management philosophy. In audit, you know we're going to focus on completing our mandated audits, training staff, continuing to improve reporting to the board and then, you know, we just jump in and help departments. I'll talk about one. You know, we have this OIG audit coming around and that's one of the projects they wanted us to concur, sign off And we said, hey they need some significant help from our office. So I jumped in and helped write that report really was my focus to say, hey that's $3.1 million. And if we don't write this response right, we're not going to recover that 3.1 million so we joined forces with them. I pulled a couple of people out of my specialty accounting division, that wasn't enough. I went and got Heather and her staff out of internal audit.

We brought the army in. We helped them rewrite the response. It's in final draft with county council and the CEO. And so that's just where we feel responsible to jump in and go help. Accounting services, hey we maintain 65 applications and they're complicated. And we got a lot of staff working on the property tax so we're maintaining these but it's important and we have good applications. We distribute the 768 million in property taxes and let me tell you, property tax is complicated.

That RDA dissolution stuff that, you know there's another example. Hey they gave us money for administrative costs of RDA dissolution but we couldn't go out and hire staff to go do that. We had to use existing staff that understood those property tax laws to help implement the RDA dissolution and our county did a great job on that with the seven oversight boards. You know our next year we want to go live in the property system.

There's a position to give general services a cost analyst for the North County Jail Project. I think they need it, but that doesn't mean that the work of the auditor's office will go away. We'll still have to help them. It's going to take them awhile to get up to speed. For the first two years of that grant we've done all the budgets We're reviewing every transaction. We set up their chart of accounts, we set up their fund structure. We got to do it for the new grant and it takes our collective expertise at the top to do something complicated like that. And we're still in the process of doing that and working close with general services and working close with their project management staff who really are the key to tracking those costs and making that come in on time.

You know financial reporting We've always done a stellar job with our CAFR, our budget, our cost allocation plan. But a good example on the cost allocation plan is the federal government changed the rules. The OMB put out new rules and said you have to depreciate all your assets now. You cannot use the old method of allocating your cost by the use allowance method. And so we always used the use allowance method. Now we got to change our whole system.

And then we provide the Board of Supervisors, CEO and management with the necessary financial information. Keep going. We're going to assist departments in the complex allocations of interagency revenues AB 109 comes about. Realignment 2011 comes about, they changed 1991 realignment. We have to change all our allocations, all that money flows through us and then so I think we're done with this slide as kind of a repeat. Our performance measures, one of the things I'd like you to take a look at in the back of our book when you get a time and you want to look at our performance measures. We kinda did something a little bit different where we have our five goals of our department in there and we're trying to relate our performance measures to those goals So I would just say you should, if you get a chance to look at the back of our book.

But we want to do our mandatory audits. We want to distribute taxes to all the 36 entities and we want to get our specialty accounting to do all our complex distributions. One of our performance measures people used to laugh at it. And we used to say, well, we want to do 26 payrolls on time. And people from the outside said, well what are you measuring that for?

Well it's kind of a statistical measurement about what we're trying to do and if we don't do those 26 on time You're going to be in deep trouble with the employees and the federal government for not paying your taxes on time. And it has big tax consequences, so you can't lose sight of that's got to be some of your top priority. You better staff payroll and you better do it right and you better do it accurately. So the other thing about a performance measure is You want to bring things into statistical control, and you can be measuring something so that you know that your organization is doing it properly. And it also helps you to describe the service that you're delivering.

We're doing these popular reports. We love our popular reports. We think that provides a lot of insight. And then we've been working on getting more of our staff with professional designations, not only CPAs. But if we have certified payroll professionals, we want them to do that. Deming says spend 2% of your budget on training. We've never got the 2%, but we do invest in training of our department.

The auditor doesn't have any service level reductions, thank you. We are requesting for two accountant auditor positions. They join our new auditor training and development program in two years. Theoretically we'll recover some of this cost from the federal and state programs so in two years the costs will be half of that. We think that our optimal level of staffing in this reduced environment is about 52 employees. And we would like to hire another financial accounting analyst and another senior accountant in addition to these two FTEs.

And so I think I went a little long-winded. So, I was going to read you the management philosophies of the Auditor Controller's Office which I'll just read you the opening paragraph which is our office has been profoundly influenced by the management philosophies of the late Edward Deming through Dr. Deming's work is difficult to summarize in a few sentences we hope you will see some of the key components at work in our department and that is the lead into all our employees for our employee manual So when they come into the department, we start teaching them Deming. They don't get it at first, you know? It's about focusing on cooperation. It's about the measurement focus and doing performance measurement. It's about working together It's not about the employees making errors.

It's really about the systems that we're employing, that we want to constantly improve and our employees working in You know, with high standards of accountability and cost-effective ways. And we want to constantly develop our human resources which is what our new auditor training development program is about. Bringing the kids out of college, rotate them through the divisions, get them a broad array of experience in the auditor's office and they kind of grow up to be Assistant department heads, department heads. And that's kind of our mentoring and training program from the financial section. With that I'll take any questions.

Supervisor Carbajal? I hope we don't get on the cutting room floor because my staff said you've got to go sell this!

Mr. Geist, if I was watching this, I'd say I want to work for you if I was an auditor. I think you do a great job and it's amazing how you've been able to do it with adapting to new systems. I've been around for a little bit longer than I've been elected here, and I just think you do an extraordinary job. And I think your approach to government is similar to county councils.

The better we're able to do our work and We prevent problems down the road. And I just think you do an extraordinary job, so I just wanted to say that.

Supervisor Farr?

Thank you Mr. Chair. Well thank you Mr. Geis for that presentation. I think that we all know how much your department does but it's good to hear about it again and there's a couple things I want to thank you in particular for one is those wonderful public documents that you put out They're so well done they're attractive. They have a lot of information in there so easily understood by the public and it's really helpful when we got speak in the community to have those with us and say here you know, here's this document you can get it I know that my office has worked with you on a number of issues, and you and your staff are always very responsive and helpful.

I know that periodically issues come up to do with our special districts, some of the smaller districts and the audits. And you've helped us with those. But I have a special thanks for you and your staff for the whole dissolution of RDA, and particularly in Isla Vista because you've helped so much with that. And I know that you will on into the future, and not just because of the accounting side but because you know Isla Vista and you care about Isla Vista and its future, and that has made all the difference. So thank you for the great work that you and your staff do.

Very good. Supervisor Wolfe?

Thank you, Mr. Chair and thank you, Mr Geis. I wish someone had a quote for being a great leader and that's what you are. And I think your staff obviously sees that and appreciates it. I know I do sitting up here. And I think one of the qualities for you is leading this ship and not taking credit for everything that goes on. And as has already been said, there's a lot of credit to go around to your office. And I think you made a really interesting statement about our CEO's office about the fact that she and her staff kind of carried the load to get us through these hearings. And, I just want to thank you for that.

So I think what you do, what your office does is you shed light on things like that and on the multi-million dollar budgets that our other departments are utilizing. So I thank you and I thank your staff for everything that they've done. And I really do appreciate it.

Supervisor Abbott? And I will just agree simply with everything everybody else said. Well done.

And if I don't say something, I'm going to look really bad. No you won't. It's nice to have and I don't want to call you the elder statesman but a statesman. No, no, I am. In the county it's traditional. It is nice to have somebody that has all the historical knowledge that you do in this county and I don' know what your future plans are but just want to let you know we're not going to let you retire any time soon because You would be practically impossible to replace, so we really appreciate all the work you guys do. And make sure you continue to keep payroll on time. That's also a benchmark that I have. I look and make sure it's in.

Supervisor?

You know, the only thing I will say Mr. Geis is that I was looking at the pictures that you started out your presentation with. And my wife has the same comment. Now once you know, I've been accused of using my high school picture at this age and that's all I'm going to say.

I'll just say Betsy was sitting next to me in that picture and so she got cropped out of it but... But my wife made the same comment about that picture so we'll have to update it. We all do the same thing don't worry about it. Just two comments about You know, I want to make sure we there are people that can replace me. I am replaceable. We have other great leaders in our department and all my staff you know leads we all practice this Deming stuff and you know outside our department We really mean it. We want the whole county to be successful, we want the CEO to be successful, we want general services to be successful. We want the sheriff to build that North County jail and we wanted to come in on budget. That's all the stuff that we want to do.

We want housing and community development to thrive. And you know, we want to get out from under what was happening at mental health and That's kind of what we're there and we'll jump in where we have to so thanks for all the great very much supervisor will

I've got a question for. Funding the accountant position for the North County Jail has been talked about and where it should be housed. Has there been any consideration to putting a position in the auditor's office to oversee the full operation of that?

Supervisor Wolf, through the chair. That's exactly the conversation we've been having that we do recognize there is a need for the position for the project duration and I've spoken to Mr. Geis and Mr. Pontes about that. That was my preference to put it in the auditor's office. It doesn't help the auditor's office in their other work but it would make that close connection with their office given the regulations of fulfilling the grant requirements.

You know that the other thing about where to place accountants in the organization is sometimes it's good if you get them closer You know, rub here is they have a project management staff that's responsible for you know those architectural costs and running those architectural lines and then the construction and doing the construction inspection. So you go well where's the accountant desk? Over there in general services working closely with that group Or over in our office and today to tell you the truth we're working together as a team so wherever that person is placed. We wanted to be the most effective for the organization and I debate that myself too.

I'm

going to leave it up to all of you then. Thank you.

Chairman Lavinino, members of the board. I'm Andy Caldwell representing Colab. I think if you go back probably almost every year for 10 to 15 years during the budget hearings especially before the budget book was gutted we pointed out the auditor controller's office was in our estimation the best managed office in the county. Unfortunately, that's some of the data that's not in the budget book any longer that demonstrated that. And one of the things that we've asked a number of years back and hearing you say these same things this year that we've been saying for a long time. We keep asking the question why don't you expand The role of the auditor controller to include management training for other departments and or Increase their ability to audit and use one of the audits as management training and things like that, i.e., don't let just have them audit financials, have them audit how well those organizations are being run for crying out loud it we keep wondering if somebody like guys had been in charge of mental health Would we have been spending an extra $20 million over the last couple of years?

It's a realistic question. We've had some real stinkers as department heads. I remember the year when one department didn't even know how many properties the county owned, let alone was managing those properties. Do you remember that? There's been some embarrassing people that were paying 150 to That we set packing because they didn't know what they were doing. And here you got a guy that other departments robbed his departments for people, but we limit his budget and we limit his scope of authority even though he's an elected official.

I think his scope of authority in the county should be expanded and specifically Under the audit, I think you got three auditors for the department. So we've got three people auditing $800 million worth of expenditures. That's absolutely ridiculous in terms of the ability to Catch waste, fraud and abuse. And then of course that doesn't include the special districts. How many of these cemetery district guys or water district guys did we end up reading about in crime reports because they ripped off the district? Well he's their auditor.

So it's not just the county function but that brings up the last point We don't know to what degree the auditor controller in the county charges all these other entities for the work his office is doing and the next couple of departments. The county should not be serving the school districts for free, and they shouldn't be serving some of these other special districts for free either. We'd like to see a breakdown of who gets charged how much versus how much it costs us to provide those services. Thank you.

That's it for public comment. We'll now move to the clerk recorder assessor, Mr. Holland.

Good morning. Chairman Lavagnino, members of the board. First I'd like to start off by saying I agree with everything everybody said about Bob Geis. He's a great guy and he's helped me a lot with my career and it's good to know we have a department like that that we can rely on when we need assistance. Okay, well I'm going to probably make this a little shorter than Mr. Geis also.

First off, I'd like to start off by introducing some of my staff. We have Melinda Green on the right here, Chief Deputy Clerk Recorder. Rose Rodarte is a Division Manager in charge of the budget. Renee Bischoff, as many of you know is our Elections Division Chief Deputy and Keith Taylor is the Chief Deputy Assessor for the department. Okay our total budget is $15.6 million dollars.

The general fund contribution is About 9.7 million of that, 60% of the total. We have 95.4 budgeted positions and we're still using one time use funds of 546,000. Next slide. And then here you can see broken out the 60% of the general fund contribution. The charges for services is basically recorder fees and reimbursements for election services primarily from cities, and then there's also some property tax administration fees in there which are monies that are charged to cities and special districts for actually administering the property taxes.

Next slide. And there you can just see the general trend upwards for the general fund contribution. And there's a use of the one-time monies, you can see that at one point we were up around 1.9 million and so we've got that down to about 3.3% or the 546 thousand. And there you can see the staffing summary for the entire department. We were at a peak of about 118 full-time employees, we're now down to 95.4.

Of particular concern there is the assessor division We were at 83 funded positions. We are now down to 68, so that's an 18% decrease in the assessor division. That's 15 bodies that we no longer have available to assist with the assessor work.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Holland. On slide four and I do recall this we had an increase in our general fund contribution almost a million dollars. And then if you look to the staffing summary on slide six, we see an increase in FTEs. Can you remind me What those So

this is slide four supervisor wolf

This that's my slide for so there's the increase in general fund Contribution there and then if you go to slide six, which is the FTS? so You see an increase from 92 to 95 Mm-hmm. Can you just remind me what those three positions are for were those in the assessor's department or

I believe they were in the assessor's division, correct? Correct.

All

right

Okay, and then we go on to accomplishments The accomplishments for the department, for elections. We expect to conduct of course the June 3rd primary election and certify the results by the 28th day following the Election Day. Of course that has not happened yet but we do anticipate that to be an accomplishment. In clerk recorder, we remodeled the severely underutilized area on the second floor of the Hall of Records. So this space is now available for wedding ceremonies and staff meetings.

And then for the Assessor Division, we are striving to finish 97% of all the assessments by the June 30th roll close deadline.

Mr. Holland? Yes. I think Supervisor Wolf has a good point here.

It's actually June 3rd. Oh yes. I

meant to point that out.

She knows exactly what day it is.

That was a typo in there.

I'm going June 3rd or 10th. No

no

no. We're saying the third.

Yeah, you know it's interesting. I have the ballot right here and we have 15 candidates for governor on this ballot We have nine Candidates for lieutenant governor 9 I think candidates for Congress And there's only one candidate for fifth district supervisor.

I did my best to get nine in there But what can you do?

Okay, for the elections we are for objectives for the upcoming year. We are of course looking forward to conducting the November 2014 general election. For the clerk recorder, we are doing a complete assessment of all the archived records to ID those records that need restoration. And then for the assessor division, we are hoping to actually get to 100% completion of all required role work by the end of the close of the roll June 30th 2015.

And then going to our performance measures, one of the things we're looking is to increase the issuance of marriage licenses. We have been trending upwards on the issuance of marriage licenses and as a department, we feel that having more people get married is a good thing. So we're looking forward to increasing the number of marriages. But one interesting aspect of that is that we're also, for the marriage licenses that we do issue. We're seeing more and more people actually ask the department to conduct a marriage ceremony so that percentage is going up.