FINANCE/TAX REDUCTION/MANDATE RELIEF COMMITTEE

Wednesday, February 12, 2025 - 10:30 AM

Steve McNally, Chairperson

Robin DeLoria, Vice-Chairperson

Chairman McNally called this Finance Meeting to order at 10:30 am with the following Supervisors in attendance: Clayton Barber, Matthew Brassard, Chris Clark, Robin DeLoria, Derek Doty, Ken Hughes, Steve McNally, James Monty, Favor Smith, Matt Stanley, Davina Thurston, Ike Tyler, Margaret Wood and Mark Wright. Shaun Gillilland and Joe Pete Wilson were excused. Charlie Harrington and Cathleen Reusser were absent.

Department Heads present: Hannah Carson, Laura Carson, Michael Diskin, Judy Garrison and Michael Mascarenas. Chelsea Merrihew was excused.

Also present: Joe Keegan and Beth Gillis – Lake Champlain-Lake George Regional Planning Board.

News media: None present.

MCNALLY: Welcome to the Finance reduction mandate relief committee. We have a guest today, Beth Gillis from the Lake George Lake Champlain Planning Department. She’s got a small presentation. This is Beth, she is one of our contract agencies she does a lot of work in grants and planning for the area so she’s got a presentation and here we go.

GILLIS: So I’m Beth Gillis. I am the Director of the Lake George Lake Champlain Regional Planning Board. We cover the districts of Warren, Washington, Clinton, Essex and Hamilton counties. We all are your contract agencies and so I’m making it a point this year to make my rounds to county boards and just talk about what we did the year prior. So I’m just going to start going through some of things that we did in 2024.

So in 2024 fourteen of the grants that we were awarded totaling about $4 million dollars in funding brought to the region. This is a step I put up at the beginning of all my presentations to the counties for every dollar contributed by the five counties in 2024 we brought in $92.00 in funding into the region.

These are the 2024 grants that we wrote and that we were awarded. We partnered with the Adirondack Foundation for a community outreach grant I’ll talk about in a few minutes. We partner with Adirondack Roots to secure a $300,000 smart growth grant for pre development for work force housing on four sites, three are in Essex County one is in Hamilton. The Town of Chester was a dam repair in the Village of Granville in Washington County for a waterline, the Town of Lake Pleasant was a park project. We secured $250,000 through our agency to do work on cellular which I will talk about in a minute. We secured almost $200,000 to help pay for admin. For the county septic replacement programs that were going on and Clinton, Warren and Washington are the counties that opted into that program. We secured $90,000 for a water shed management plan in Washington County. Town of Moriah for Bulwagga Bay. The town of Plattsburgh and Salem for salt sheds. The Village of Speculator was a comp plan we secured funding for writing of comprehensive plans which we have six of them going on right now and the Warren and Washington county grants were for road salt reduction equipment.

So in 2024, we worked in 57 of our communities and all five of our counties. We’re also currently managing 50 grants. We have municipalities, non-profits and other economic development organizations for the region and then we have 15 grants that we manage that are ours.

We spent a lot of time out and about this year. Presented at the APA about housing. We met with the Lieutenant Governor to speak about housing. Down in the corner, is myself and Mark Patterson who is the Deputy Secretary of State for local Government and Chris Saunders is the Federal co-chair for the local border commissioner. You can see Assemblyman Jones, Assemblyman Simpson and Ally Webinar when we were down at Adirondack Day in Albany.

Broadband is one of the things I screwed up on the timeline so we had two efforts ongoing in 2024. The first was the New York State lead funding process so we received $75,000 from the Empire State Development to lead the provider challenge and also do the draft grant areas and then we had an additional $440,000 grant from NBRC to work on a regional broadband deployment plan.

So the New York State lead challenge was very similar to the Federal challenge that we did the year before. We submitted 606 provider challenges, 543 were accepted, and 63 were rejected. The 63 that were rejected were only because the ISP’s actually deployed fiber between the time the maps we had to use were made and the challenge which was like a seven to eight month lapse.

And we also submitted comments in the grant areas for the lead funding so New York State had it broken up in each county of the grant areas and that is what the ISP’s bid on for fiber deployment. The first rounds of those grants were actually due last week. When they put out the map and again I don’t have a picture of the original map but I think they had Essex County in three grant areas we disagree with that. We actually submitted four and then they came back with six so we did challenge the six that they had put out. They did mess with our Hamilton County grant a little bit and we did re challenge that because we didn’t like the way they did it and they accepted our challenge on that one.

So through our broadband deployment plan we held out 125,000 BSL’s in our region, 8200 of those are served, 820 are under served. The real purpose of this slide and why I put this up is because I put the statewide average of the total percentage of unserved BSL statewide is 2.5% every single one of our counties is above that percentage.

Cell as I mentioned, we were awarded a $250,000 grant for the regional board commission, Empire State Development for the Connect all office put in a $88,000 match so we’re going to look at some availability within our five county region. We have a dry test RFP currently out right now. The map that you see we put out to the public to say, hey just circle some areas where you know is some really bad cell service because it’s going to help us pinpoint where we need to send the dry testing. We also purchased Ookla data. Ookla is a cloud source data company. It runs in the backgrounds of androids there’s also an app that you can put on your apple phone and it tests speed and connectivity for cell. You can purchase the data really what we’re looking for is to see if it correlates really well with the dry test because if we can use Ookla data and gets us close enough to what the dry test is telling us is or is not cell service we can use that annual Ookla data to track change and progress without having to constantly have people dry testing all around our counties so also part of this effort is to identify areas for additional maps for towers and we are working on small cellular technology planning. We actually secured money for Hamilton County to PILOT some of that so that’s another way to look at getting cell service into our region.

Housing – we’ve been doing some technical assistance with communities. We have zoning, best management practices guide, and we’ve helped some communities become pro housing so if you’re interested we are happy to help. I mentioned pre development earlier. We are working on six projects for those with Adirondack Roots one of them with ROOST and we also have a workforce housing revolving loan fund so we secure funding from Northern Border to establish a rental unit renovation fund so our current small business loan fund you can only use for commercial properties so if you had a building and you had commercial on the first floor, residential on the second and third you could only use our existing funding to renovate the first floor but now we have funding where you can do the second and the third and it’s to put new units online so it’s not for units that currently have rentals in them and it’s for long term rentals no short term.

We also submitted a $3 million dollar request through Congresswoman Stefanik’s office for housing for the region. It was picked as one of the fifteen projects that she will move forward. She and staff worked on the appropriations process to actually increase that ask to $5 million and it went all the way through and it’s sitting with all the other CDS projects waiting for our appropriations bill to go through so it’s not secured. I hope it does go through. I’ll be super bumped if it doesn’t but if it doesn’t then we will just kind of figure out some other way.

I mentioned Adirondack Day and for the first time housing was part of Adirondack Day. We were asked to lead that table so we had our Adirondack Roots and Adirondack Foundation and ROOST down there. We created a chutes and ladder type game and so we’ve been asked again this year to do the housing able and I feel like we have to one up the chutes and ladders and I’m not sure how we are going to do it but we’ll figure something out.

HUGHES: Candyland.

GILLIS: That’s an awesome idea. Adirondack Housing Candyland. Alright, challenge accepted Ken.

We are also doing regional transportation planning so we have our North Country Safety Action Plan going on right now this was funded through Federal Highway through their Safe Streets and Roads for all program. We are actually doing two plans, so one is Hamilton, Essex, Clinton one is Warren, Washington and so the Hamilton, Essex, Clinton is called our North Country. So basically looked at crash map is the one all the way to my left showing where fatal and serious injury crashes are concentrated within the region so Plattsburgh, Ticonderoga, and Lake Placid. We also did a hotspot analysis and so looking for safety suggestions where can be safety suggestions implemented to reduce crashes priority road sites mainly intersections and also those systemic analysis so looking at potential future and those were concentrated in Plattsburgh and Lake Placid so that plan will actually be done and out within the next couple of months and then we are actually going to start working with NYS DOT on implementing some of the practices.

Our community development – we launched our main street revitalization program in 2023 and so the first things we did were do revitalization strategies in Crown Point, Essex and Westport. We secured a USDA grant to do that. We actually ended up with money left over so we went and worked in Moriah and Matt was nice enough to let us hang out with him over the summer.

The Lake Champlain Communities outreach initiatives the Adirondack Foundation grant, there’s eight communities total three in Essex County that we will be working in and Jess in my office has been working with Elizabethtown to wrap up their grant for Mountain Bike trails.

And then in our water quality program in 2018 we released a non-point source pollution reduction plan for Lake Champlain Watershed. We updated that in 2024. We’ve been using that plan to secure water quality implementation funding in the Lake Champlain Watershed and we now have a spot on our website where all the projects are listed.

And lastly we have our small business loan fund, the committee approved five loans last year. We currently have 49 loans totaling $5.23 million in capital, 11 of those are in Essex County almost a $1 million loan capital. They did approve another Essex County loan in December so that will be closed in the next couple months.

And our small business technical assistance program, so we have on call business consultants that we match with businesses that need help with planning financials, websites online sales all of those so far we’ve done 18 businesses, 5 in Essex County through that forum. That’s it.

MCNALLY: Thank you Beth. Does anybody have any questions for Beth?

DOTY: Hello Beth. Could you speak a little bit further on the State safety action plan as it applies to Lake Placid working with the Department of Transportation, once the information is gathered where does it go from there so that there are actual solutions to the problems you are going to identify?

GILLIS: Yes so there will be some solutions identified in the plan and DOT is actually part of that planning process with us, well aware of where the hot spots are the problem intersections and we are going to work with them to prioritize where we should seek, what we are trying to do is we’ll write grants to help do those projects if we can add capacity to DOT to secure funding outside of their area.

DOTY: Old Military Road and inaudible Road.

GILLIS: Okay, you got it.

DOTY: Those are the two spots.

GILLIS: I’m sure.

MONTY: Beth, quick question back to broadband the last month I’ve received several correspondence from Justin Tanner from Verizon I guess they are trying to jump into the broadband game with us but every time he sends me a map you can’t read it. You see all these yellow dots on it and I got him to send me one because he’s talking about expansion that Verizon wants to do in Essex County. I didn’t know if you received that or have any information on this at all?

GILLIS: So they don’t share their expansion plans with us and it’s probably why he sent you an unreadable map.

MONTY: That was exactly my response to him.

GILLIS: They will give you the ish areas but –

MONTY: Similar to what Charter-Spectrum used to do.

GILLIS: Yes.

STANLEY: So staying on that sort of broadband vein but with cellular, the work that you’re doing with cellular in these drive tests and what is the end game? I mean, we know it doesn’t work so like is there going to be something that is going to give somebody something to make it work because I mean these drive test can be different too. Things work great before seven in the morning and they work great at midnight and we have bars of service all throughout my town but no service. It’s an actual broadband pipeline band width issue and it’s great that Verizon is finally getting into the broadband game –

MONTY: But they don’t tell you what or where.

STANLEY: I agree. I have talked to a representative from Verizon and trying to put together a map just in Jay of where and when things don’t work and unfortunately during that conversation the FISU game was a great example they know it doesn’t work but they still keep selling service like it does.

GILLIS: Yeah so the drive tests are just the first part and they actually look for downloadable speed and service on multiple bandwidth and then there’s like indoor and outdoor and in cars like it could maybe work outdoors but it doesn’t still work indoors and sometimes you go outside to use your cell that’s information we get out of the drive test. The purpose is to look at the hotspots and we’re looking at mostly developed areas and major travel corridors so if you’re in the back country and you don’t have cell service you’re not my priority right now.

STANLEY: Well, I would like cell service just in my down town Ausable Forks, along 9N and 86.

GILLIS: Yeah, so what we are going to do is basically look at the topography and see where we could pre permit macro towers so instead of letting the companies decide where the macro towers go why don’t we tell them where we want to maximize service and if we need to do the pre development for them through this funding we will do that. We are also looking at the small cell towers I didn’t get into it too much but it’s usually used in developed areas to boost cell service but the New York State upstate cellular task force report indicates that we might be able to use it on linear travel corridors so you put them on the existing poles and as you’re driving down the road you are basically jumping from node to node to node to node and you have continued cell service so we’re going to do engineering for that.

STANLEY: So Verizon they found four locations in the Town of Jay they wanted to put towers on, they signed contracts with one or two property owners or were close to signing contracts, we were working on giving an easement to another location and then they backed out of all of it. So you did talk about the app that you can download to your phones could you send us those links so we can get that out?

GILLIS: Sure, yes.

STANLEY: The more data that we can get and show that love you, but your stuff doesn’t work would be great.

GILLIS: Yes and I should mention too that we partnered Connect All Health funding but we are actually working with the Director of Wireless services, it’s like she and I are doing this project so it’s really cool to kind of have New York State kind of behind you.

STANLEY: Any help you need from us I would be happy to help.

GILLIS: Awesome thank you.

MCNALLY: I think possibly the broadband Verizon dabbling into the broadband is because they are purchasing Frontier that has existing broadband.

MONTY: No, that’s no excuse. It’s been that way since I’ve been fighting this battle for ten years between Verizon and Charter Spectrum they are proprietary and they don’t have to share their information and the public service commission will not unfortunately share their information so how can we develop a plan if we don’t know what the plan is.

STANLEY: So the thing that I find funny about that is broadband and fiber and as you know this isn’t regulated by the public service commission. It all goes through the Attorney General which is weird it is communication like, why is the difference? And I will say I’ve had a lot of success referring people who have been having broadband issues to the State Attorney General’s office and they’ve been working out of Plattsburgh to help get a lot of those at least private issues resolved.

MCNALLY: Okay anything else for Beth?

GILLIS: I know Jim.

MONTY: You know, you’ve had those conversations with me.

MCNALLY: On your $5 million dollar ask what are your plans with that money if you do receive it? It’s housing, correct?

GILLIS: Yes it’s for housing work force housing so we are specifically targeting that 80-100% AMI with that work so there’s technical assistance to communities, there’s pre development and there’s also we have a new builds within that so we have projects that we are doing pre development on right now that would be really nice to be able to have some of that grant money to help seed the development of those projects right because if it was easy and profitable somebody would have done it. So it’s going to be any one of those so how can we help facilitate development whether it’s a nonprofit developer or for profit developer I don’t care who does it so that’s kind of the plan for that money.

STANLEY: Sorry, I need to get off my soap box but another part of that workforce housing and development stuff which is really come to light in the Town of Jay is NYSEG and power up here. There is a project that is been going through APA now probably almost two decades the biggest hold up now is going to be power like our main substation in our town is now maxed out so if this development is going to go in the cost goes to that first development coming in and it’s mind blowing how much the cost and the leave time for power and I mean we have our own power issues here at the county and of course now people are complaining about electrically bills going up I mean it almost seems hopeless at times.

GILLIS: You can say the same for water, the same for waste water if the infrastructure isn’t in place then what are you going to do we’re trying to help facilitate some of that.

MCNALLY: Anybody else?

MASCARENAS: I will just add for the small amount the three counties pay for your services we get an awful lot in return so thank you. I didn’t realize you were so involved in housing. I knew you did a lot of broadband work and that kind of thing and I commend you for your work on housing because we’ve all been kind of beating our heads against the wall trying to figure this out as we continue to lose employment opportunities to people that simply can’t find affordable housing in our area so best of luck hopefully you get your award.

MCNALLY: Anybody else? Alright thank you very much.

GILLIS: Thanks for having me.

MCNALLY: County Clerk has been excused.

GARRISON: She has a resolution.

MCNALLY: She has a resolution, do you want to read it Mike?

MASCARENAS: I can or Judy you can.

GARRISON: It is a resolution accepting and placing on file the 2024 annual accounting of monies received and disbursed by the Essex County Clerk everyone has a copy of it with their packet.

RESOLUTION ACCEPTING AND PLACING ON FILE THE 2024 ANNUAL ACCOUNTING OF MONIES RECEIVED AND DISBURSED BY THE ESSEX COUNTY CLERK. Tyler, Barber

MCNALLY: Questions, concerns? All in favor, opposed – carried. Auditor, Laura Carson.

L. CARSON: Good morning. So I apologize for not getting my report out until Monday I didn’t give you much time to review it but I was waiting for some data to still come in that I wanted to include in it.

So page one is our department head report. I do have a clerical error on it. The Coroners in 2025 their base salary is actually $5486. As you can see we didn’t pay out any mileage in January to the Coroners. I only received vouchers from Mr. Heald though so they are utilizing their county car. Just in January they put 1400 miles on it so they are using it and we only have one funeral home so far submit a voucher.

Page two, is the supervisor expense report, there’s nothing remarkable there. Page three, is my invoice summary so we processed about 2600 invoices in January. We noted 380 errors. We’ve prevented $961.00 in duplicate payments and $10,000 in over payments.

Page four is the auditor budget pretty simple, nothing remarkable there.

We’ll switch gears to Assigned Counsel. Page five and six is our Assigned Counsel budget for 2024. We are still processing vouchers for 2024 the cutoff is actually tomorrow. So of our $1.2 million dollar budget we’ve spent $1.44 million on assigned counsel that’s administration and everything and page seven touches on it a little bit more so in 2024, so far we’ve processed 1,228 vouchers they total about $1.4 million and we will recoup roughly $350,000 so far from the state it helps to cover that increase so we are looking right now at about million dollars in 2024 in just bills just invoices from attorneys.

Page eight this is for 2025 Leah has assigned 50 cases and closed 28. The 2025 budget we’ve processed very few vouchers so it wasn’t really, I’ll touch more on that in the next report.

Page nine we had some tax roll corrections. I think we received four but it affected seven different accounts nothing that stood out.

Page ten let’s talk about something fun. Page ten is our ROOST summary for 2024. On Thursday we sent out your final 2024 ROOST check you get them quarterly and so I wanted to do, Mr. Mascarenas suggested I do a comparison. So in 2023 you can see we collected about $6.7 million in occupancy and as it trickled down you can see what each of you made for your towns in 2023 and then in 2024 it is the same it increased we collected about $7.1 million and then after you deduct the admin fee and what we paid to ROOST and for the fairgrounds and so on and so forth what the towns get left with which totals about $2.4 million that went to the towns in 2024. So there is a side by side comparison for you should help you budget for the following year and if you have any questions on that just let me. Oh, we did adjust the STR rates. I reached out to Dan Kelleher at ROOST and got the updated percentages for town so that’s why you see they may vary a little bit. I wouldn’t say anything too substantial but it was just to be fair because some towns are getting more Airbnb’s so like I side if you have any questions on that or does anybody have questions for me?

MCNALLY: Any questions?

HUGHES: Great report. I really appreciate seeing that side by side of the breakdown that is great.

L. CARSON: Thank you.

CLARK: Yes, that was very clear news to me.

MCNALLY: Anything else? You’re all set. Thank you very much. Real Property.

H. CARSON: Good morning. I do have a resolution request. I have placed 2025 annual report in everybody’s mailbox so I have a request to accept and place on file our 2025 annual report.

RESOLUTION ACCEPTING AND PLACING ON FILE THE 2025 REAL PROPERTY TAX SERVICE ANNUAL REPORT. Hughes, Wright

MCNALLY: Questions, concerns? That is a great document. I look forward to it every year.

H. CARSON: I was going to ask, does anybody not look at it?

MASCARENAS: I love it.

MCNALLY: It’s really a great document.

MASCARENAS: It’s at my fingertips all the time because people are always calling.

MCNALLY: It’s a great comparative tool when people come in and complain about their taxes you just show them Moriah’s and I’m an instant hero.

BRASSARD: For another few months.

MCNALLY: All in favor, opposed – carried.

H. CARSON: So I do want to give you all a heads up especially for Chesterfield, Keene, Moriah and St. Armand this year they are having to send out assessment disclosure notices. I am pretty sure the last time these have gone out was 2009. These by law need to go out for towns that have an equalization rate below 85 and are planning to get up to 100 so in these notices, they are different then change of assessment notices these will take the new taxable value in the town and the last year’s tax levy’s from school, town and county and it will kind of give them an idea I use quotes “an idea” about what they are looking at for a tax bill this coming year. They can be misleading. So I’m giving you a heads up because more than likely you are going to get a lot of phone calls and those will be going out in the next couple of weeks so I’m sorry.

BRASSARD: I understand that is a state law that is going to happen. I mean everybody knows your taxable value goes up your tax rate drops so you’re going to have people in Moriah that are going to look at it and say oh, my god my taxes are going to double. No, your taxes aren’t’ going to double your taxes might go up ten to fifteen percent.

H. CARSON: It will actually give them a tax amount. Okay, this is what your new tax rate, this is about what your new tax rate will be and how much your tax responsibility will be compared to last year and it will show last year’s as well.

BRASSARD: Yeah, but it doesn’t it have 2025’s tax rate?

H. CARSON: No it will take the new taxable value and the last year’s tax levy’s to come up with a new tax rate.

BRASSARD: Perfect that makes it a little more.

MCNALLY: Trust me. Don’t be happy. Been there, done that. Don’t be happy. Do you have any good news?

H. CARSON: No. I can try and answer any questions anybody has about those but this is the first time I have ever had to deal with them so it’s new for me.

MCNALLY: So, before you can leave do you have anything positive to say?

H. CARSON: It’s Wednesday.

MCNALLY: You’re good to go. Treasurer’s office.

DISKIN: Just to make it a little more difficult for the Chairman I’m going to change my last name to Carson actually that way you will get somebody up here that will show up.

So I sent you out my sales tax earlier and when I did send it out obviously we hadn’t had a report yet for February but I followed that up with one afterwards. Just this morning I got our second payment results in, you don’t have them yet I’ll send them out to you but we were about $80,000 more than last year so we had two plus checks this month totally not quite $200,000, so the deficit brings it down to about $168,000 for the year which isn’t too bad compared to where we were. We started out about a quarter million. We are coming down on it a little bit and hopefully we will catch up. We did last year as we go through the next few months. As you all know and maybe for those fairly new here, this kind of ends the sales tax year as far as budget because they are calculated from March 1 – February 28 this was done long before I think any of us were here in a year that a former County Manager decided he’d put fourteen months of sales tax in and bring it because he looked at and said well, this sales tax that you’re getting in in February is actually for November and December than what you get in January and February so let’s start counting for that year before which is one way of looking at it but that throws it off the rest of the time. Most counties just take January 1 – December 31 what they get in but whether it was a budget crisis or a different way of looking at it I’m not sure but it did get changed so our numbers never match up with the state’s in that sense of what quarter we are on and what month we are on because of it but the actual money we get in in February is for sales that happened in December and primarily December, a little bit in January but primarily in December and that’s why but we never count it until February and it does count in our budget that way. So now that we have that in I think we’ll be able to and Linda will take an analysis and we’ll see where we are with the sales tax for the year but I’m sure well ahead a couple million than last year for budgeted I think.

MASCARENAS: Yes we absolutely are.

DISKIN: Occupancy, as Laura just explained to you and went through and she did a great job doing that. She’s kind of taking over that because they have to audit that stuff anyways she has kind of taken on that role to help us out in our office did a great job with the ROOST part of it comparing it and so it was a great report and kind of helpful to us to have the auditor’s office particularly Laura take that over and show you that analysis. You can see we took in just short of $7.1 million dollars last year it’s the biggest year obviously that we had. Amazing from when we started in 2000 we took in slightly over a million dollars and even about five, six years ago we were still at three million and once we started hitting the short term rentals we are now over seven million so you can see what the difference is in short term rentals has done and for the year we ended up about $340,000 more than last year.

Other than that, I have the results of the budgets and that’s pretty much all I had for you this month unless you had some questions?

MCNALLY: Any questions?

DISKIN: I’m glad to see the Town of Westport got their check from ROOST.

TYLER: They didn’t tell me that.

DISKIN: You don’t have to ask me that anymore, you got it.

TYLER: They didn’t even tell me. They keep me out of the loop.

MCNALLY: Anything else for Mike? County Manager.

MASCARENAS: Okay I believe you have one of the resolutions I have on your desks. This was actually a youth bureau resolution that didn’t make it to the Monday meeting. A resolution authorizing the Chairman of the Board to enter into an agreement on behalf of Essex County with the New York State of Children and Family Services for the 2025 resource allocation plan for youth program funding as provided for in the 2025 Essex County budget. This we do budget and plan for every year. It’s for funds that come for specific purposes for New York State understand that these funds don’t necessarily mean what you’re getting as a town. You will get what’s on here but there are other pots of money that funds come from. This is not an all-inclusive as there’s county dollars that are also funded to towns for youth programming food service programs and things like that. The back page is about the grants that were recently awarded and applied for by your towns they now have some discretionary funding that have been pushed out and this is out and this is how it shook out. I believe had over $136,000 in applications and only had about $34,000 to award but that’s a good problem and that’s what you see there.

RESOLUTION AUTHORIZING THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD TO ENTER INTO AN AGREEMENT ON BEHALF OF ESSEX COUNTY WITH THE NEW YORK STATE OF CHILDREN AND FAMILY SERVICES FOR THE 2025 RESOURCE ALLOCATION PLAN FOR YOUTH PROGRAM FUNDING AS PROVIDED FOR IN THE 2025 ESSEX COUNTY BUDGET. Wright, Tyler

MCNALLY: Questions, concerns? All in favor, opposed – carried. Thank you Mike.

MASCARENAS: Resolution number two, Judy doesn’t have it, Judy soon will have this. What we are looking to do is change the way we do faxing countywide. We are still with a lot of hard line machines that were utilizing. We’re looking to go to an all in one fax to email server which will get rid of a lot of that old infrastructure that we have. The chosen vendor is FAX Checkout and the initial startup cost is $11,935, county wide. That seems a little expensive, that’s the initial fee. The reoccurring fee will be for support in the future so it is just to get that server and infrastructure up and underway for us to utilize.

RESOLUTIOIN AUTHORIZING THE COUNTY CHAIRMAN OR COUNTY MANAGER TO EXECUTE A CONTRACT AGREEMENT WITH FAX CHECK OUT IN THE AMOUNT OF $11,935.00, FOR START UP OF AN ALL IN ONE FAX TO EMAIL SERVER AND INFRASTRUCTURE. Tyler, Wright. Hughes – opposed.

MCNALLY: And what will the maintenance fee on that per year?

MASCARENAS: The first year it is $3,000 so I’m expecting that’s what it is going to be on an ongoing basis will be $3,000.

MCNALLY: Questions, concerns?

HUGHES: What is the ongoing maintenance cost now for the system we have?

MASCARENAS: It’s really, it’s Hugh and he tested this in terms of the effectiveness of the server with Mental Health over the past year and he really likes the way it operates in terms of getting rid of all the hard lines so a lot of that cabling we’ve got there is old and he simply wants to go to a digital server.

HUGHES: For $11,000 start up?

STANLEY: I’m not on this committee but is there going to be hard lines that you can stop paying Frontier for as a result of this?

MASCARENAS: I can find that out. I’m assuming so.

MCNALLY: Anybody else? All in favor, opposed –

HUGHES: Yes.

MCNALLY: Carried.

MASCARENAS: That’s all I’ve got.

MCNALLY: North Country Community College, Joseph Keegan.

KEEGAN: Good morning. Nice to see you all. Happy New Year. I didn’t get to see you in January. I hope the New Year has been generous to you and kind as well. I want to extend my ongoing gratitude to you all for your support of our students and the college. We had a good start to the spring semester. We were joined for the fifth semester in a row that we were up in enrollment. It looks like 4% and roughly was the start of the enrollment for spring that is due to the efforts of a lot of folks and we are really grateful for that.

We have the second year of that new nursing cohort remember we’ve got the hybrid that is running spring to fall. I shared with you in December that we’ve got a 100% pass rate for that program which is really outstanding for any program and we’re upping enrollment for that for the spring so that’s good for all of us the counties, the families, the health care providers.

The director support professionals program continues which is very helpful for families that are supporting individuals with developmental disabilities. We have advanced EMT running both in Saranac Lake and Malone right now and we’ve got a basic and refresher course scheduled for Essex County in March so we keep on trying to support the counties and region’s needs in those areas.

A couple other things I think might be of interest, we’ve been working with the New York State Police to strengthen our campus safety footprint and plan. They did a campus safety primer with our faculty and staff in opening of spring we are going to be doing a table top exercise next month Mike, I think you’ve got an invitation if you haven’t received you will be getting one bringing in area partners just for a couple things, one, what are the kind of resources that folks can contribute but also what’s the learning that can go out from what we’re undertaking and have sort of a reverberating effect for other localities, communities, etc. and we are working with area health care providers to look at where are there are additional health care needs that we might be able to help with program even on the credit or noncredit side so Hudson Headwaters, Adirondack Medical, UVM network and there’s some promising things there hopefully we’ll see some of that come to fruition and we’ve got some capital items that are underway. We are making some upgrades to the sports athletic facility which hasn’t seen much investment in a number of years and that’s a good thing. We’ll be continuing our investments of our nursing building with some energy and other infrastructure there and then most delightful to us probably the most boring for most people is we are going to be upgrading our student information system. We have a dog of a system and we are going to be moving up to a I don’t’ know where in the evolutionary chain but something much better that will allow us to get some efficiencies out of really one of the most important things that underlies our digital infrastructure so we had some dollars to be able to use that which is great and then finally, yesterday we hosted Secretary of State Walter Mosley at our Ticonderoga Campus and our Saranac Lake Campus. He was sharing Governor Hochul’s affordability agenda on her 2025-2026 budget. Important for us is there is a proposal for free community college for adults students ages 25-55 in high needs programs such as nursing, allied health Mark was there at Ticonderoga. Thanks for coming Mark. For Essex County and Franklin County that is good we’ve got a lot of adults in that 25-55 range that would be able to benefit from that if it should come to fruition. That’s it.

STANLEY: EMT education was brought up during the EMS subcommittee and it was discussed how great the program is having it through the college. We were wondering and I’m sure Emergency Services is going to bring this to your attention but is there a way to create the EMT course to be a hybrid or maybe half of those 200 hours are done virtually and then the other half would be like practical hands on at times? We feel there may be an increase in people wanting to become EMT’s if the travel was cut down some so just wanted to bring that to your attention.

KEEGAN: Thank you for that. Mr. Robin DeLoria got to me at my entry into the door and hinted the same thing. I have it written first thing on my list.

DELORIA: Matt is my co-chair.

STANLEY: I was going to say I’m the second in charge so I had to bring it up second.

KEEGAN: So now that I’ve got two voices I have it down, I’ll look into it Matt.

HUGHES: Good morning Joe. I see here that enrollment continues to positively trend up. Two quick questions, one, what is the maximum enrollment of North Country Community College? Is that a number that even exists?

KEEGAN: You know I would have to look back. So for historically trends it was, our height was in 2009-10, during the great recession we never came close to that previously and we hadn’t since and that was roughly 1300 students we are sitting at a little bit over 800 right now.

HUGHES: That’s helpful and my second question is do you have an idea of what your general acceptance rate is to the college?

KEEGAN: So we have a 100% acceptance rate with the exception total because we are open access so if you are provided you have the requirements to get there either GED or high school diploma as long as you have that we are open access however, we’ve got three programs the allied health programs that have competitive admission so you may not be able to get into those but you can get into another program.

HUGHES: Great, thank you very much.

MCNALLY: Okay anything else? Thank you. Anything else for the Finance?

TYLER: Yeah, I have two resolutions please. The first one is of congratulations to Tim Pierce who is retiring as Lewis Town Justice after 27 plus years.

RESOLUTION OF APPRECIATION AND CONGRATULATIONS TO TIM PIERCE, TOWN OF LEWIS JUSTICE UPON HIS RETIREMENT. Tyler, unanimous

TYLER: And of condolence to the family of Sandra McQueen who is a lifelong resident of Westport. She was the owner, operator of McQueen’s Food and Fountain and her daughter Kellie King as spent over 20 years in the Public Defender’s office.

RESOLUTION OF CONDOLENCE TO THE FAMILY OF SANDRA L. MCQUEEN. Tyler, unanimous.

MCNALLY: Okay anything else for Finance? If not we are adjourned.

As there was no further discussion to come before this Finance committee it was adjourned at 11:20 a.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Judith Garrison, Clerk

Board of Supervisors