001That was the first time I tucked in my shirt in one of these meetings just today. Today? Yeah. Was it tucked in? Now when I w when you walked in the building or you tucked it in before the meeting started? I tucked it in before the meeting started. Oh, that's funny cuz I literally you walked across at some point. Maybe it was maybe it was to go to bathroom. I was like I don't think his shirt was tucked in. First time for everything. Well, you know it's all good. All right. So close now. Let's find the right meeting. There we go. Jonathan, when are they going to start? Wildship looks good. The framework is up. two and Amber on the phone is nine, right? We'll call to order the facilities committee of the whole meeting
002for Tuesday, May 27th, 2025. Uh first item on our agenda is a consideration of our meeting minutes from March 31st, 2025. I would seek a motion to approve. It's been moved by Dr. London. Is there a second? Second by Mr. Anderson. Take a roll call vote. Yes. Flynn, yes. Thomasino, yes. Larson, yes. Yes. Bodak, yes. Anderson, yes. Manley, yes. Burger, yes. Nine, yes. Zero, no. Zero absent. Motion passes. Item three, presentation of facilities assessment tool and recommended ending fund balance. Mr. Elwine, Mr. Bombach, either both of you. Just as he's coming up, it's going to be absolutely Jonathan's show here. He's put a lot of time into uh not just these slides, but everything that went into this assessment. This started a while back. It was brought forward at a conversation at finance. It needs
003to come to facilities committee to the whole and it needs to be at the finance and back to the board. But ultimately, we set ourselves a goal for a gen general fund ending fund balance and we talked a lot about doing the same for a building fund. So that's the that's the table dressing. Thank you, President Burgerer, and the the committee. I appreciate you allowing me to present today. Um I'm going to start off the presentation, like all good presentations, by going off book. Um, just to give a a little bit of a history on this cuz I realized I I kind of neglected that. So about a year ago, um, as Brandon said, we were talking about minimum balances as it related to our general fund. And the finance committee asked us, well, how
004much do we need to keep in that in our building fund as a reserve? And Brandon and I kind of shrugged our shoulders and said, "That's a good question." So, we did some research. We talked and we looked at um where our peer districts are. Um, and really the the answer was there isn't a good standard. So, we thought let's build a standard then. So, that kind of takes us into the the crux of our presentation. Um, the agenda we're going to walk through why why the reserves matter, our rubric and methodology, um, our district-wide condition summary, reserve fund targets, and then timelines. Um, and again, feel free to stop me at any time for questions. So, why do minimum reserves matter? Uh, they protect us against unexpected facility costs. They avoid disruptions to instructional
005planning and staff. They reduce pressure on the general fund, which was um an issue we had in the past. and they support long-term planning and financial stability, which we'll get to toward the end of the um end of the presentation cuz we get a lot of questions of, you know, how much money can we spend, what projects can we do, and this is really the first guidepost cuz we don't really know what we can do until we need until we know, excuse me, until we know how much money we need to keep in the bank. Um, and it keeps focus on students and not surprise repairs. you know, allows us to keep keep our schools running efficiently and effectively and putting uh the focus on them and not a boiler failure or a roof leak.
006Uh we've got multiple layers of of protection in here. This the one we're presenting on today is that first layer that cash reserves. They allow the district to move quickly on uh critical repairs. We have some other tools at in our toolbox as well. Um insurance protects us against any costs incurred by damage and financing allows us to um spread that spread the cost over multiple years. So even if we do have to make a large spend we can then finance that and spread that cost over multiple years. Uh now we'll go into the financial score or financial facility scorecard. Um our overview and methodology. Um so the facility scorecard really what I wanted to do when when I created this tool uh with the help of our buildings and grounds team as well as
007industry partners was to um really put a number on everything instead of just saying okay we think we need about a half a million dollars. So we're actually going to go through each and every uh part of the building give it a score and then attach a dollar amount per square foot to that score. Um like I said the methods we did internal internal assessments guided by industry standards multipliers is a very important part of this. Um so we looked at what are the critical parts of our building. So we determined that um our envelope, our roof, our electrical and our plumbing are critical uh to our building and therefore carry heavier weight than some other um things like interior finish and grounds. Um our inputs were the age of systems. Uh this is especially
008important for say roofs or HVAC looking at when did we do the repairs last? How old is the mechanical equipment um work order trends. We have a work order system. So every single time we do a repair, someone says, "Okay, we have a leaky roof or it's it's cold in my room." We we actually track all of those and we can see trends by school, by room, even by equipment. it gets that granular um on where we're spending the most time and the most money compliance uh is largely related to ADA and accessibility and then staff and industry partner input. Um so I went through and assessed these buildings myself. I also worked with our our supervisor team. They went through and assessed the buildings themselves. Um and then we worked to with the people
009actually working on the equipment. they assessed them and we talked to building level uh people like custodians where they thought the biggest issues were and uh they gave their ratings as well. Um and then related to this in your board packet is I didn't want to put it up here because it's a bunch of pages is a facilities assessment tool. So it really breaks down what the numbering means. So we're all giving the same ratings. So we can say a two on plumbing means this or a three on HVAC means that. In addition to that, we worked with some industry partners. We have some great industry partners including um the work that Icon and construction engineers did on our facilities assessments as well as working with uh other outside entities uh like specifically a roofing
010company. They do um some assessments for us as well as other uh design and construction partners. Um if you'll bear with me on this one, I'm actually just going to walk through all of these so we just so we're all on the same page when we when we're talking about them. So this is these are the systems we assess our envelope which are our exterior walls, windows and doors. They protect the building from outside elements. HVAC, heating, cooling and ventilation. It regulates our indoor climate and air quality. Roof just generally the upper protective cover of the building. Also means things like overhangs and um any any type of shelter on the front of the building. plumbing, our water supply, drainage and restroom in infrastructure, electrical, power systems for lighting, outlets and equipment operation. Um, interior
011finishes, visible interior surfaces such as floor, ceilings and paint. And I just this is a good example to if I can go back to plumbing interior finishes too would uh consider say we have a bathroom that has a bunch of fixtures in it that work perfectly well but look really outdated to me on this in this case that's an interior finish because they're still functioning as they're supposed to. The plumbing is good. The interior finish may not um match where we want it to be. Safety are our fire protection systems. alarms, communications, and building security, including um as we're working through our safety and security portion of the referendum, our controlled access. Accessibil accessibility uh is compliance with ADA standards, but not just that, just ensuring um access by individuals with disabilities. There are some
012things that are uh by the book ADA accessible, which are still burdens to people with with a disability. So, we make sure we look at that as well when we're rating these. The grounds are our exterior site areas, including landscaping, paving, parking lot, walkways, um you know, our trees, our bushes, uh flower beds and then we'll move on to our facility scorecard. So, uh as you can see, there's a lot of numbers up there. Um so, overall we did pretty good. Uh I I thought anyway. So, we have um very few schools that are not in the excellent or good rating. Two of them are Twining and Valley, which were our two lowest rating graded schools, which makes sense because they're both slated for replacement. Um but then we also have three that are in
013the fair condition. We have Central High School, Shrader Middle School, and Wilder Elementary School. Um and those all have um some some deficits as you can see. Plumbing is a big one as well as with Shraider uh the roof and the HVAC. Uh any questions at this point? Has this been shared? Uh this has been shared with the finance committee only. So the summary of this 11.1% of schools rated poor critical which were we had no critical but we had poor uh valley middle school and twining like which like I said are slated for replacement and districtwide our average was 7.24 or a good rating. Um, as we replace those schools, our rating will go off or will go up. And as we do our safety and security projects and ongoing maintenance, the idea is
014to bring that bring that number up and to bring them all into a good or better than good condition. Uh, walking through our critical systems averages, we have our envelope was at a 7.69. Our HVAC was a 7.19. Roof was 7.44. Um, our plumbing was by far lowest at 5.56. It's often one that gets neglected because you don't see it and it's not a doesn't seem like a problem until really it's too late. And electrical at 6.75. Um, and I'm actually going to back up one for one second. If you look at the bottom there, you can see those multipliers. That's what I talked about um at the beginning. So, each one of those carries a different weight um in this in this score. As you can see, envelope roof carry the most. HVAC's a
015little bit less. Plumbing, electrical, safety, um, a little bit less, and then things like interior finishes and grounds are even less, less than one. Just a couple follow-ups. Uh, first of all, I love this. It's very easy to understand. It helps us establish priorities. I Well done. Well done. Well done. Um, any idea if how projects that are already in the hopper might address some of these? In other words, if you could put an asterisk by some of these numbers to say I'm going to say Shraider HVAC, right? Uh, you know, in two years we expect this to be right. I mean, almost a hot map of which and maybe this is coming or or a conversation for a different day. Uh but in a sense um if you could highlight the eight lowest numbers
016in these cells to say we're already on top of six of these. This is just this year's workflow. This is next year's workflow. Any sense of how close we are? Let's just say um and I'm just going to choose an arbitrary number. Um that all the threes and fours become fives and sixes. Could could you just walk us through briefly what's what what's most likely to to bump these up in the in the short term? Yeah, I don't have a great answer for that now. Um I I'll give one anecdote, but first I'll start with that's really what uh what we'll talk about more at the end is this is going to um inform our facilities plan and kind of give you guys the tools to say hey these are our priorities. Um, you know,
017I can look at a building and say, "Yeah, this is my priority, but my priority is going to be very different, say, than the board's priority because I'm not interfaced with the public every day." Um, so, but a good example is on here, Lewis and Clark actually was a fair. Um, and then with the replacement of our communication system, it brought the safety up and that brought it to a good, leading to a reduction in the reserve need of about $30,000. Great. I think that's a fair answer. And then then my 1A is how often will you revisit this type of evaluation? What's the what's the sequence? Yep. We will be doing this annually and um I I'll get to that in a few slides if that's okay. I I'll break it down a little
018bit more. Actually, I think that is the very next slide. Uh into the this is into the building fund reserve recommended minimum. Um so right now our reserve target is 1.62 62 million. It's a per square foot reserve based on uh conditions. Uh the condition reserve tiers are critical $15 per square foot, poor $5 per square foot, fair $1.75 per square foot, good 80 cents per square foot, and excellent uh 50 cents per square foot. And how we got to these numbers is really we kind of worked backward. Um because there there's a lot of um we'll say art more than science in this where it's like okay we think we need this much as I alluded to earlier. Okay, I think we need $1.5 million in there or whatever. And so we I worked
019with our building um our building staff as well as our construction partners say what what about do you think we need? And then I wanted to create um an exponential curve for uh for the conditions. So as you know it's more from from fair to poor to critical each time uh it exponentially that the reserve goes up. Um so yeah we I think we landed at about $1.5 million and worked backwards work backwards from that and we ended up with 1.62 million based on our square foot. uh our condition and reserve review. The facilities are assessed annually. Um and we will we will go through these in the same in the same manner each year and as project as we complete projects to update these scores and then the reserves will be adjusted annually based
020on federal reserve data. The federal reserve has very good data um that is called the producer price index and they actually get very granular on construction costs. It doesn't go so far as saying school construction costs, but we can at least get an idea of how construction costs have changed in the last year. Any questions on that? Go ahead, Mr. Cleven. Yes, you may. All right. Uh, so you started with a number in mind. Mhm. And then kind of allocated that money based on those reserve tiers. Yes. Okay. Yeah. And this and and this will be um evaluated. Like I said, it's it's a this is a starting point. We'll review this and see if this is uh prudent to what we think the reserves should be. Um but that's that's kind of how we
021got to this point. And then the adjustment annually is so we're not necessarily forecasting these numbers multiple years ahead of time. We just update them every year. Correct. Okay. Thanks. Y Miss Flynn on the phone. Anything you want to ask about? No. Okay. Okay. Uh the min minimum reserve results. Uh like the facility scorecard, we have a lot of numbers here, but this actually breaks it out by school. Uh how much reserve we should be holding for each each of those buildings. As you can see, schools like Central very high because it's a large school in fair condition. Even Red River in good condition, very high. it's just very big. Um, versus say even a Wilder that's in fair condition, only $40,000, it's only 23,000 square feet. Um, so we ended up with a total
022of I think I had a math error cuz I got two different numbers there, but I think it's 1.617613. I think that's the right number, but I will double check on that. Oh, no. We're looking at area square feet. Okay. So, yeah, 1.617 617 million approximately. Uh, and then we're going to walk through some example expenditures and I'll put it on there. These are not actual numbers. This is just a a uh walkthrough of how these numbers can change in the future. So, we'll start up with these example uh this example building fund expenditures. So, our reserve is 1.62 million. Our maintenance budget is 1.5 million. improvement budget 500,000. Um, and if you'll allow me to misuse the word maintenance, I'm just breaking maintenance into saying that's what we need to maintain our current um
023our buildings where they currently are. And the improvement is say, hey, we're going to up we're going to update this and it's going to um increase our scores. And these are just example numbers. These have no basis in reality. I just want to um underscore that. So the conditions are a 10. We we aim to get a 10% reduction of reserve needs in years 1, 3, and five, assuming a 3% escalation of costs uh year-over-year. Our maintenance budget remains flat. That's just simply to uh reduce variables. And then our reserve savings will be placed in that improvement bucket. So in year zero, as you can see, 1.62 million, 1.5 million,.5 million. Year one, we get about $113,000 that we reduced from the uh uh reserve amount that we could put into the improvement amount. Year
024three about another 60,000 and year four about another 113,000. Um so the results are we we moved our res our reserve down from 1.62 62 to 1.35 million and we our improvement budget up from $500,000 to $773,500. And uh again, just to re excuse me, just to reiterate, not actual numbers. This is just an example of how how this um these buckets can change as we improve things, as we reduce them, we can allocate more of that money um toward improving our facilities. So the what uh what we ended up with was a 16.9% reduction reserve needs and a 54.7% increase in improvement budget. Any questions? All right, next steps. Um so we have some key deliverables here. This is the first one. We're bringing this building reserve uh conversation to the facilities committee today
025and then we will in the future in on finance committee on June 3rd we will bring it to the finance committee for discussion um and then to the board June 9th for uh approval. So that will actually be an action item and then uh we will use that going forward starting next fiscal year. Um, and like I said, that will allow us some guard rails um on what we can spend um in our maintenance projects. And just with the understanding that this is kind of the minimum we need, we may dip below that, but we are we would make the promise that if we would ever think we would need to dip below that, we would we would uh expressly inform the board of that. Um and then that will inform our facilities plan. Um,
026Cindy was talking about it earlier, kind of possibly changing the cadence of this meeting because our uh our goal is to have a draft of a facilities plan in place by September 22nd um and then come back with a revision on November 24th. Any questions on that? So should we take that to mean that in the agenda it had our next meeting to be determined but now we have a possible how do we want to handle that do we want to leave it as to be determined and that's just yeah these are okay leave it is to be determined thank you any other questions Dr. Dr. Hodc. Yes, I have a comment and um a concern. Um first of all, excellent work. I mean, I am I would have loved to have had a tool
027like this when I was teaching facilities at the university. Um 2015 16 I ended up um going back to Lamore to be their high school principal because they couldn't find one. My first day on the job, the senior class president came in to see me and he said, "We have a problem within our school and it has to do with facilities." And you talk about a group of students so highly impressed. Um, it put the board totally in shock, but they actually had a video that they played and they showed us all the areas that weren't being taken care of, weren't being maintained. And so that kicked a lot of priorities and goals um because we were seeing it through the eyes of the students. So my question to you is especially on that part
028is when do you ask the principles or the school administrators of that building whether they would agree with that whether it was fair good. I think your process and everything else is excellent, but I would encourage you to somehow always ask those that are living it and walking it daytoday about that. So, it's just a comment, but again, I just absolutely am very very impressed. I appreciate the uh the question and the comment. Um, we did not ask for principal input on this for from a uh building level. We did go to the custodians as they uh in our minds know the building best. Uh, but I will say um without without revealing too much at this time, we do have a plan to engage principles on the facilities plan and make sure that they're
029um their priorities are outlined. So, I I'm not prepared to present on that today, but we do have a plan in place for that. And one last comment, they also helped us at develop tools for our custo. Thank you, Mr. Cleven. John, that was a good segue to a question I had. Oh, I thought I was talking loud enough. I guess not. Uh thank you. Okay. Well, anyways, so the building reserve fund is is what you've established as the financial resource and the predictor for finance, right? And then back to kind of what Sherry was alluding to, the facilities plan is how you plan to spend the money, individual projects, prioritization of this or that. Do I have that sequence right? Um partially. I'm actually going to back up a little bit here. Um, let's
030see here. Actually, yeah, let's go here. So, what we're looking at this this reserve, and I apologize, I didn't do a great job explaining this. So, our reserve, uh, we're looking at this is our our bottom. This is what we hold in the bank in case something catastrophic happens. Um, anything above that, we're still going to do projects. We're still going to maintain our buildings. We're still going to improve our buildings, but we want to know based on the uh condition of our buildings as well as um the dollar amount of of the systems, how much do we need to hold um in case one of those events does happen. Um obviously this 1.62 million, if everything on the list went wrong at the same time, isn't going to cover that. But if we did
031that, we wouldn't we would never do any facilities projects because we'd need $30 million in reserve. Um, but this this allows us to um hold enough money based on the odds of something happening to uh act quickly on that. Does that answer your question? I think so. Okay. May I offer Yeah, please. So, one thing to underscore that was an earlier slide of course is that this is just one tool. He just said it, but insurance is in place. You know, other things just in case, but there's also financing. Now that's not we don't want to finance maintenance but when it comes to a strategic you know facilities plan five years out these are big conversations these are boundary line conversations these are other things that other tools need to be considered like financing like
032public referendum things like that so when we take the step from this tool to the conversation in the fall about a five-year facility plan it's a lot more when we take that step this here is not just about spending down that balance or controlling it is knowing this is one tool that needs to be maintained in our overall facility, you know, tool belt. Yeah. And just to add, it just allows um Brandon and I to look at, okay, when we do a proforma, um this is how much we think we're going to get in tax revenue, how much do do we think we can spend two years from now on projects? So, it allows us just to plan plan better in that aspect. Mr. Palino. Yeah. I think what the 1.6 Six also does is
033keeps us from dipping into the general fund. So if there's an emer like we had to do five years ago, three years ago when we had boilers going out in different locations, we have money available to correct those. Other questions? I'm going to turn it to Miss Flynn on the phone one more time. No, thank you. Other questions or comments from board members? Just very nice. Very nice job. Thank you. Thank you. And then I'll I've got one final and this is just kind of to reiterate um our timeline. So we have our reserve approval. We go to the facilities committee finance and the board and then that will inform our facilities plan development uh which we will bring to in se bring to this committee in September and November. Um and then again I
034have a slide for questions. Any other general questions? Anything else I hear? Thank you. Is echoing through the room. Any other questions? Please. Mr. Bombck, I apologize. I don't recall if this is in the memo. Just looking, but I was a little too slow. Did you want any formal action from a facilities committee the whole on this endorsing the tool? A part of stopping at each of these finance each of the committees and then going to the board would be an endorsement of this this you know ending fund balance. So, we don't have an item for action on our agenda. I if I think it's going to finance, it's going to finance and then they could send that recommendation. Correct, Brandon? Sorry, I was trying to listen in with my bat ears. It didn't work.
035But I I would think that you could take action on this if you wanted to take that action. FI finance could do the same. and it may strengthens that by the time it comes to the board if it's if it's something that you're uh worth endorsing today. Another idea, just one second please, Dr. Lun, would be uh we could take a motion uh for this board to direct the finance committee to use this tool and move forward. We could do it one of two ways. So I if if somebody wants to make a motion, we can do we can do that at some point. But Dr. L. Well, my my only concern is some of us are on finance, so we're well, we've we've talked about this a lot of times. There's some people on
036this board that they're hearing this for the first time, and I think it might put them in an uneasy position to to endorse it with seeing it and endorsing it, you know. So, that's my only concern is, you know, I feel comfortable, but I've I've sat through how many meetings of this. So, and it's not like I mean it eventually has to go to the board for final approval, which is this same group here anyway. So, I just don't want to put somebody feeling uncomfortable having to make a a decision that they feel rushed because they haven't had time to digest it. Fundamentally, this this just kind of feels like a administrative tool to administer the policy that's already been established. I actually don't think we need to take any action on it. I think
037that's very fair and I appreciate those comments and I'm very very comfortable uh whatever you'd like to do tonight. The the goal for the board memo would articulate, you know, administrative recommendation that you do set a building fund minimum balance and ending fund balance to provide us a guideline similar to what the guiding change document has done for us in the general fund. It just helps keep us administratively going in that direction. The tool itself helps us get there, but it's the ending fund balance. Then I can ask, might as well ask it here rather than at the full board meeting. So where do we come up with that 1.62 million or is that something that you develop over time or did I miss it when I had to step out to take a phone
038call? We can back up. Yeah. Um I I don't remember what what you were here for or not. So, I essentially I'll reiterate that I I worked with our uh building level staff, our uh maintenance staff, as well as some of our construction partners thinking about about how much money do you think we need? I we came to about $1.5 million and then um we created tiers in a exponential in an exponential way um based on square footage. We wanted to really get granular and say per square foot, how much do we need to how much do we need to hold? So, it's just a very um a very unbiased way of looking at things. No, I understand that. What I'm saying is, okay, I I I want to have $10,000 in my bank account
039for my house. I have to come up with that $10,000 somewhere. So, what I'm wondering from Brandon, where do we where do we come up with that 1.62 million to put in the bank for this or is that something we build up over over years or whatever? Yeah, we're doing well. We're in the middle. We're still working our way through the career impact academy project. So these numbers need to work out, you know, but currently in the in that fund right now is a balance of 5.2 million and that'll still get paid out and come down. So where we had an original estimate would have been ending this year with even 2.3 million. And the reason that changes is even in that project we've budgeted, but there's contingencies and things that you hope not to
040use. So we're in a good spot there. And just to reass you, reassure you too, uh it's a goal, you know, we may achieve that and as Jonathan said, sometimes things will come up and we need to break that, but every single expense out of the building fund requires board approval. So, it'll always come back in front of the board and this is just one more thing we're going to be able to bring with any request, say, here's our balance. How are we doing against our goal? That that's helpful. I just I just didn't want us to be passing something in June that you guys then had to scramble for the money and stuff. I I didn't I didn't want us to set set administration up to have some problems and it doesn't sound like
041that's going to be an issue. Thank you. And this is 10 mil levy property tax levy funded fundamentally uh 20 20. Okay, I I just have to jump in because you brought that up there. There was there was a gap. Uh so I think it was from like 2015 to 2021, we only had 10 mills to work with. We had 20 prior to that and uh it was challenged all the way to the Supreme Court and we lost that. So when we did uh Discovery, Red River Theater, uh redoing the Central Theater, Kushman, um the 10 mills didn't even cover our debt. So 11.5 million came out of our general fund to pay for those catastrophic um boiler boiler failures, uh two relocatables at Viking. Those were really tough lean years, you know, that took
042our general fund down. So, but starting in 2021 when the voters who went to the poll and approved those 10 approved the 10 mills, we're in good shape now. Better shape. Any other conversation, discussion, questions? You have the final word. All right. Well, I appreciate your guys' time tonight. Um, so I'm happy to to meet with any board members if they need clarification. Uh, so feel free to reach out. So, thank you. Thank you. [Music]