Our next speaker is Amy Simstead. Amy is a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center. And she's actually stationed in the Wind Cave National Park in Southwest, South Dakota. Her position was created specifically to work with National Park Service Units in the Northern Great Plains, which she has done for the past 20 years. Most of her work focuses on invasive plants and climate change adaptation in grasslands where fire, drought and grazing always play a role. Her title today is exotic perennial grasses are not easily moved, but prescribed fire provides some utility. Please welcome Amy. So by the title, you can tell that it's getting towards the end of the conference and unfortunately you've probably heard a lot of what I'm going to say today, but I add in the utility part because it's a little bit of a different twist. To begin, I want to acknowledge my co-authors, Heather Baldwin who did the lion's share of the work to create the model that I'll be presenting results from today. Max Post-Vanderberg who guided us through that process of building a model. And then of course, our National Park Service, I got this microphone, don't I? Our National Park Service partners, there are too many to name for individuals. There's a lot of programs and parks involved in this project. And it's been a pleasure to work with them to synthesize vegetation monitoring data from some of those programs to be used by all of those programs in making their decisions when it comes to managing their grasslands. So as we all know, Great Plains grasslands are highly adapted to frequent fire. And beginning back in the 1970s, I believe, some of the parks in the Northern Great Plains recognized that keeping that out of the system wasn't a good idea. So they started doing prescribed fires. And then about 20, 30 years later, they realized maybe they should be seeing if those prescribed fires were having the desired results. So they established a fire effects monitoring program. And that's been going on since 1998 in 10 parks in the region. And their monitoring system is a point intercept method where they're measuring the cover of all plants that they encounter. So to the species level, and they measure this one to two years before a prescribed fire and then one, two, five and 10 growing seasons after each prescribed fire. Then in 2011, the park service stood up nationwide a monitoring program called the Status and Trends Monitoring Program. And the idea of that was to have a better idea of what's going on in terms of the natural resources, park wide, not necessarily an effectiveness monitoring program. But in one rare flash of government programs getting along and doing the logical thing, these two programs decided to use the same protocol for collecting vegetation data in the same parks. But they do, so same type of data collected but on a slightly different schedule, but still very compatible data going into the exact same database, two programs working very closely together. After about five years of this park wide monitoring had been going on, we started to look at the data and we were particularly interested in the annual brome grasses because just by our experience in the field, it sure seemed like they were becoming a bit of a problem and the graph on the left confirmed that, we see that some of the parks, there's no trend line because they've always been pretty bad since the data started being collected. Others have seen an increase in annual bromes kind of going from bad to worse, but others started out with almost none and went from having almost none to some areas having more than 50% cover of those annual species. Of course, you're asking why is she talking about annuals? We're here for perennials. So I quick pulled some data from the last 11 years of monitoring to see what was going on with the perennials and saw a similar picture, perhaps even a little bit worse in terms of their relative cover and they're increasing in just the 10 years from this data in some of the parks. But looking at this data, so we realized the issue that these parks have invasive grass problems that weren't being treated. Another second issue was that they had all of this monitoring data, especially in the fire program that was basically only being used to evaluate the effectiveness of individual burns and not really being synthesized back into improving that fire management. So to take care of or at least address two of those issues and inspired by NPAM, in 2017, we set up the annual Brom Adaptive Management Project, which is a consortium of seven park service units in kind of the western part of the Northern Great Plains. So western, South Dakota, western Nebraska, eastern Wyoming, and southeastern Montana. And the parks are obviously a pretty small part of the landscape, but they're important to those of us in this project. So the goal of ABAM, just like for NPAM, is to maintain or attain high quality native vegetation while maximizing the cost efficiency of the management actions. But we call it ABAM for annual Broms, first because NPAM took the better name, but also because we decided at the outset to focus on the annual Broms because the managers had kind of the collective knowledge that the perennials are just really hard to deal with. They wouldn't have much luck in reducing those. However, as the goals here show, it's about native prairie and we wanted to take into account the fact that if you control one invasive species like the annual Broms that are up in the front here, you might actually make it good for something else to move in or you might just flourish, which is the smooth Brom in the mid here. So our adaptive management program wanted to take into account that possibility and avoid it if possible. So structured adaptive management is a cycle of assessment, prediction, management action and monitoring. We had the monitoring programs and we weren't gonna mess those up. So we built our framework around those existing monitoring programs and we had the management programs. What we needed was a way to, like I said, synthesize the information that's coming from those and we decided to do that like N-Pam by building a decision support tool to aid in decision making. And the ABAM decision support tool is considering not just the annual Broms but all of the components of the vegetation and it combines those components into what we call vegetation conditions. And the tool itself is a Bayesian network that quantifies basically the probability of transitioning from a current vegetation condition to a new vegetation condition in various environmental contexts, both static like soil conditions and also dynamic like weather under various management actions after different periods of time. And I'll just note that we use the term vegetation conditions that of state because state has a very specific meaning especially in the range land context and ours doesn't meet that definition. So the probability of being in a vegetation condition and these conditions aren't, you're in one or the other, you have a probability of being in a variety of them and that's because their definitions overlap somewhat and those definitions are based on how much of each of these components up in the column names here are and then also we include the diversity of native species. So for example, when it comes to condition the desired condition of course is high quality prairie which is defined as having less than 5% total exotic cover, a low or a high native species richness and a good balance between native forbs and grasses. A simplified grassland has low exotic cover but it's not very diverse. Exotic annual grassland, exotic perennial grassland and weedy forb mess, you kind of get the idea there. They're defined by their offensive groups. And then low quality prairie is kind of whatever's left. It's not quite, and it's not as bad as the weedy forb mess say but it's definitely not as good as high quality prairie. And I forget what else I was gonna say for this slide because PDF made it all gibberish in my notes. So I hope I don't miss anything important. Okay, so to build our model, we started out by consulting the experts in terms of the, to make a conceptual model of how the system works. And the main idea behind this was at first we thought we were gonna do something like Kami explained and have them put numbers on transition probabilities but we realized, well, wait a minute, we have all that monitoring data, let's use that. But we did want their input on what variables we should consider to include in the model. And this is the outcome of that. I won't have you look at all of that but it includes those dynamic and static variables that I mentioned earlier. At this point, you can see that we are lumping all exotic perennial grasses together. And we realize that that's, we all know that Kentucky bluegrass and smooth bromac differently but because our emphasis was on the annual bromes, we just lump them together, but we separated out the two annual brome species, Japanese brome and cheatgrass. Okay, so we have, we had all that data. So we use that model to plug into an R package called BN learn and use the hill climbing algorithm and that to figure out how many of those arrows that we had in boxes that we had in the conceptual model are actually really supported by the data. And this was the outcome here. And I won't, again, I'm not gonna go into the details of those, but one aspect of this type of model is that it works on categories for each of these variables as opposed to continuous variables. So we had to translate those into categories and we relied on another algorithm to objectively determine where the break points and say high, medium and low cover of each of our vegetation components should be. And interestingly enough, this algorithm which is designed specifically to reduce the amount or to minimize the amount of information that you lose by going from a continuous variable to a categorical seems to pick up that systems with no cover of these either the exotic annuals or the exotic perennials function a little bit differently than those with some of them. And you can see, and I wanna emphasize that again that these aren't necessarily ecological thresholds that would just define a state condition. It's just what was picked up by the algorithm. And you can see they're kind of low compared to some of the thresholds that we might see in ecological site model, for example. Okay, so we have the structure of the environmental variables and the vegetation components. Now we gotta bring in the management. And that of course came down to speaking to the managers and what they thought belonged in their decision making. We decided very early on that the only feasible tools for managing the vegetation in the parks were prescribed fire and herbicides. And of course, the herbicides that we were working with were targeted towards the annual bromes. So not really all that relevant to the perennials because they're targeting either emerging or very young plants. And let's see, something is supposed to appear here. Oh, okay, that doesn't, we had a lot of data for the fire and that's what's relevant to the perennial grasses. So that's what I'll be talking about. But I'm showing all of these other management options because it explains why we basically lumped all fall burns and all spring burns together instead of trying to separate those out more phenologically. Basically, we couldn't have too many actions in the model. Otherwise we'd never get enough information to fill in the blanks. And another reason that it's just lumped into fall or spring burn is that our fire managers were adamant that they didn't want to be told that they should be burning at a certain leaf stage of a given plant. So I think we all know why they were complaining about that. So, all right, so then we used the data that we had from the prescribed fire program to parameterize the model in terms of what management did. And when we used that same algorithm, we found that the only arrows that showed up that the direct links from management to any of our vegetation components were to those exotic components, the exotic grasses, even not the forbs. So that kind of shows in that the native species, fire, that's what they grew up with, doesn't change them much. Okay, so where am I? Okay, so what does our model say about fires effects on perennial grasses in these parks? To answer that question, we basically just summarize the output of the model for three different starting conditions. The high quality prairie with low exotic perennial grass abundance. The low quality prairie with medium exotic component and then the exotic perennial grassland with high, according to those levels that some of you might be able to see down at the bottom. Okay, so here's the results. Again, lots of numbers that are, I'll try to walk you through in interpreting. So the number it's in all the tables that you'll see in the next few slides represent the probability of the exotic perennial grass cover being in the, I haven't been able to get the pointer thing to work. So being in the after column at a certain time step, one, two to three or four to five years growing seasons since the management actions. So the fire either in fall, spring, or not occurring. So this slide focuses purely on maintenance, which means that the before and after levels of those exotic perennial grasses is the same. And the big take home message and the reason that I changed my title to these things are stubborn is because the highest probability for any management action almost in any time step is that you're gonna stay in the same level that you started out with. But you can see that these numbers are not all 0.99 or one. There is, it isn't always gonna stay like that. So let's see if there's some hope of changing, moving things a little and which direction they go. And I'll start with the most invaded areas. So that starting out in the high come condition. Again, the maintenance levels that were in the previous slide are all shown here. But what I wanna look at with now is, is there any chance of getting to that lower levels with prescribed fire and one year or one growing season out after a fall, spring fire, or sorry, a fall prescribed fire, we do see some chances of improvement. And it's actually, you got a 50, 50 chance or better than a 50 chance of improving rather than just staying in that high level. However, that's just one year after the fire. That's the wrong arrow. Two years or two to three years out, the spring and the fall fire are looking about the same in terms of your chance of improvement. But the chances is lower than it was in that one year after. And then four to five years out, the spring fire is looking better. What happens if you're in moderately invaded areas? So starting out in the medium level. Well, the fall fire there is actually being fairly consistent in that you have a higher probability of improving than you do of getting worse, getting to that high level about twice as high, usually throughout all those time steps. So fall fire is looking pretty good for those moderately invaded areas. But in the longest term, spring fire is showing the best improvement. And notably, however, no action is showing the greatest chance of you getting in a worse condition of going up, which we've all seen before. In the least invaded condition, again, maintenance is the most likely thing. Whether or not you burn or not. But a spring fire actually has a fairly high chance of worsening your condition, or it has the highest chance of worsening your condition compared to the other doing the nothing or the fall fire. And fall fire offers the highest probability of maintaining the low invasion in all, but the shortest term. So I guess to sum it all up, in most of ecology, what does fall, or what does fire do to exotic perennial grasses in these systems? It depends. And that's pretty much the same story for the annual grasses, just in case you're wondering. The results are also fairly messy. However, generally improvement is more likely than maintaining that your state or worsening. But of course, it depends on your starting point. And in fact, burning in uninvaded areas seems to have a risk of opening up the area to invasion by the annual species. And it depends on species. So just as, you know, smooth brome and Kentucky bluegrass differ, it's interesting to see that, at least what we're initially seeing is that Japanese brome and cheatgrass are susceptible in different seasons of the year, burn seasons. So given all these complexities and contingencies, the conundrum that we heard in our last talk about helping your native species with a spring fire, or herding native species with a spring fire, but also herding your Kentucky bluegrass, what's a manager to do? Well, this is where the utility comes in part. Our decision support tool doesn't just say what's gonna happen to the vegetation. It quantifies how happy the managers will be with the change in vegetation by multiplying basically their preference for each of these different conditions by the probability of being in that condition. And when you do that, you get a single number that describes your current utility for a given management unit. What will happen, what the model projects will happen if you don't do anything. It identifies the optimal action given your conditions and what your utility of that will be. Or, and then it also compares the action or the utility of doing nothing, or that action or our fall or spring burn actions, because that's the easiest thing to think of on a management wide scale. It compares that to doing nothing. Basically, you don't have to look at these numbers to you don't have to, but the managers do look at these and they can evaluate, will we get the most utility? Will we be happiest by doing something in this management unit versus that management unit? And it's a lot easier way of making, or it makes it possible to make a decision in the face of all of this complexity. So to wrap up, as we all know, perennial exotic grasses are stubborn, but prescribed fire offers some promise of reducing them. And decision support tools can use data or a good way of using the data that we collect to help managers deal with that or complex ecological behavior. We've only actually been using the model for two years, but we have all of that back years data from the monitoring programs. And based on that, we know what we would like to do to improve the model already at this stage. First of all, of course, splitting out Kentucky bluegrass and smooth brome would be good.  We do have severity data for most of the prescribed fires. We can look at weather before and the weather after the fires. And so just dig into it a little bit more, see if we can hone in or to tailor the prescribed fire actions to get the best results even more. And I'm done.


Is it my board docs up here? Would you join me in the Pledge of Allegiance? Please mute your microphone. Pledge of Allegiance to the play of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Why don't we, first of all, if whoever's in the council chambers, if that person could be identified, I know all of you don't have a microphone, but... Hi, Alder, Mary Lendoni. Can I look around the chambers? Could you just introduce who's there? Yeah, so in the council chambers, we have city administrator Todd Wolfe, assistant city administrator Kerry Arons. We have accountant to Lori Cirkey, HR director, Vicki Schneider, deputy finance director, Tara Dewey. Controlling the video is Scott Miliff. And then we have our guest, our auditor, Brian Goodwald from Clifton, Larson, Allen. All right, very good. And then whoever's online or on the call, rather? Alderman, Jim Boren. What? All right, we heard from Jim. Who else is on the line? Alder, Trey Mitchell. Okay, Trey, welcome. Marcus Savalio, Alderman district five. Perfect. Assistant city attorney. Could, who's MH, oh, that's Marty. Okay, very good. All right, thank you so much. And we'll get started here. If I could have a motion to approve the minutes of our August 24th meeting. Second. All right, so I'm gonna call that as Marcus making the motion and Trey seconding. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, all in favor, stay at aye. Aye. Aye. Good post. Chair votes aye. Very good. We will go on then to 3.1, which is a direct referral submitting the comprehensive annual financial report for the city for the year ending December 31st, 2019. And Brian Grunwald, I assume you are up, or Marty, how are you guys gonna do this? Yes, the presentation that Brian Grunwald will be doing for our annual financial report, you'll find on your screen as a PowerPoint. So my screen will be shared so everyone can be viewing it. Another item that you might have had, and hopefully you're able to kind of toggle between the screens would be the actual annual financial report, which was attached to the board docs. So with that, certainly I know we've got a long agenda and some big things, I'm gonna just turn it over to Brian and we'll go through his presentation. All right, sounds good. This is Brian Grunwald with Clifton-Larsen Allen. Thank you for having me here this evening. And I also do wanna thank Marty and Tara and the rest of your staff for the cooperation assistance that we received throughout the audit process. In terms of the discussion here, I'm just gonna walk through the PowerPoint. Marty alluded to the fact that you also had the link for the annual financial report as we get into the financial information, just understand that we've pulled some of this from that annual financial report to try to lay it out in a graph format to give you a little bit more of a trend. But certainly if anyone has any questions on any of the documents, please feel free to ask. Okay, this first slide here, just wanted to give you a summary of the overall audit results. The first bullet point there is focusing on the independent auditor's opinion. That's on the basic financial statements that is considered to be an unmodified opinion, essentially means that I believe that your financial statements are complete and accurate and in accordance with our professional standards. The second bullet point there, as part of every governmental audit, we continue to focus on the financial reporting and the internal control over that financial reporting. Essentially, we're looking at how things are done. We do not issue an opinion on your internal control, but we do use that in terms of risk assessment, planning, making sure that we understand the organization. In terms of the bullet points presented there, there are three items, those are listed as findings. Now I will say that those are similar to what you saw for 2018, those being the preparation of the annual financial report. That one really focuses on the fact that we as your auditors are the ones who are preparing that document. Certainly we do work with Marty and Tara. We ask them to review that document. Certainly want to make sure that everybody's on the same page with regards to the numbers and the information that is presented there. The second item focuses on adjustments to the city's financial records. As part of the audit process, we do work with Marty and their team to verify the numbers. It is common. We have identified adjustments as a part of that process. I do want to communicate that all adjustments that I'm aware of are included in the annual financial report that you have. And then similarly there, the last item, general ledger reconciliations. Again, as part of the audit process, we've assisted with some of that information. Again, just going through the process of making sure that we're comfortable with the numbers and that we agree with the numbers. In terms of the next item there, just focusing on the report on compliance for federal and state programs. From a compliance standpoint, no issues, no concerns with regards to compliance. Any thoughts or questions on that slide before I move on? I have a question on the internal controls. Yep, okay. Brian, I was wondering. Jim, if you don't mind, I just want to let Brian, Brian, how long is your presentation? It'll probably be five to 10 minutes. Okay, Jim and other alders, if you don't mind, I just soon hold questions until we get through the presentation and then we can take the questions. Is that all right, Jim? That's fine. Great, thanks. Go ahead, Brian. Okay, sounds good. Then I will keep moving along. The next slide here, management communications. There is information and standard guidance that we are required to communicate as part of every audit process. This list of bullet points lists some of those items. It's certainly not an all-inclusive list. It should be items that you have seen in the past that the communication has been fairly consistent. Things like accounting policies, accounting estimates, et cetera. Nothing here that I would consider to be unusual or red flag, just more of a standard communication and wanted you to be aware that those topics were discussed and have been communicated. Then moving on to the next slide. This next one just gives you an overview of the financial condition. And there are additional slides that support these bullet points here, but the first one focuses on the general fund balance. From a fund balance perspective, continue to have strong reserves. You've had a strong year financially. Your reserves did increase. We'll see a slide that highlights or emphasizes that. The second and third bullets focus on long-term debt. I just wanted to give you some perspective on long-term debt, the amount presented in the annual financial report. And this is only your general obligation that is 49 million. There is a footnote disclosure in there. There were some discussion about the statutory debt limit. And then the third bullet point is really focusing on the debt that you have looking at repayment. Obviously that's based on the terms that you agree to at the time you enter into that debt. One of the things financial consultants and rating agencies look for is when they look at financial condition, how much debt do you have? How is that going to be repaid, et cetera? So that's what that's focusing on. The next bullet point focuses on the sewer system, looking at your cash reserves as well as your equity reserves in terms of sewer. Both of those actually increased 2.7 million. So again, a strong year financially for the sewer system. The last, the next bullet point there focuses on working capital for health insurance and workers' compensation. I have another slide that walks you through that. You do have strong reserve balances and working capital in that fund. And then the last bullet point, the Harbor Center Marina. Certainly we've been focused on the deficit that's communicated and presented within the annual financial statements. Just did want to point out that the deficit, the amount of that deficit did decrease from 2018 to 2019. Okay, and then just moving on to some of the detailed slides. This slide presents your general fund fund balance. And I always like to look at your trends. So this just gives you a snapshot of your overall general fund fund balance or your overall reserves for your general fund. Again, looking through the trend, you can see back in 2015, you were at approximately 23.5 million. If you work across fairly consistent through 2017, you did have a planned use of fund balance moving into 2018, bringing you down to right around 20 million. And then from 2018 to 2019, you'll see a slight increase in the overall fund balance. That's the $1.7 million increase in your fund balance reserves for 2019. If you get into the details of the individual category and the table beneath that, a couple that I like to focus on, the unassigned, and we'll talk more about that. There's another slide that focuses on the unassigned. That is the amount that has not been earmarked or set aside for other purposes. It's available for things like working capital and contingency reserves. And I know you do have a policy that addresses that, this is just giving you a snapshot of your balances. And again, you can see as you work across that graph, 17.9 million at the end of 2015, and you can see 17.7 million at the end of 2019. The assigned and committed, those are really, again, I refer to those as your planning categories, amounts that you've identified to be earmarked for different purposes. There is additional information with regards to the detail of those on pages 72 and 73 in your annual financial report. This has just given you a summarized presentation. And then the last item there, the last line focusing on your non-spendable. Those amounts are non-spendable because they're not available. Really things that have been tied up or committed with things like long-term receivables, you haven't collected the cash for those yet, or things like inventory and prepays, where from an accounting standpoint, those dollars have been set aside for those purposes or invested in those purposes. And if we move on to the next slide, this slide just gives you some perspective and focusing on your general fund again. But in terms of your total fund balance, as well as your unassigned, how much fund balance do you have in dollars in comparison to the amount of expenditures that are flowing through your budget on an annual basis? Certainly when you work across the graphs and fluctuation there, you do see a little bit of a downward trend for both the total and the unassigned. I always like to look at this. The message that I guess I'd like to leave you with is when you look at this and particularly focusing on that blue line, that unassigned, you're ending the year at 48%. I mean, that is a very, very strong number. There's additional information or additional disclosure on page 74 in your financial statement that does get into your policy, which references 25%. So certainly from a fund balance perspective, I mean, you've had strong reserves, you continue to have strong reserves. Certainly, I think that's evident in this slide. Then I also wanted to give you just a snapshot of some of the other funds. And just keep in mind that these are summarized by the fund type, special revenue, capital projects, debt service, et cetera. I'm not gonna get into a lot of detail here. For the most part, the categories are fairly consistent, meaning your fund balance reserves in those different fund types are consistent with the exception of that green category, the debt service. There you can see the spike in 2018, and that's really just due to timing of a debt refinancing transaction that occurred at the end of 2018 that carried forward into 2019. Essentially, you had received debt proceeds and not made the payment to pay down those funds until early January of 2019. So that explains the spike there. Really nothing unusual with regards to your other balances there. And then also wanted to step back from a special revenue fund perspective. Certainly, we've talked about the marina in the past. This slide just gives you some perspective on the marina and that marina deficit. Again, as you work across the slide, it is in a deficit position. You have been coming out of that slowly. If you focused just on 18 to 19, the amount of that deficit did decrease slightly. You still continue to have a fund balance deficit of approximately 2.5 million there. But I know it's something you've been dealing with, certainly nice to see it moving in the positive direction. And then this next slide, wanted to give you a snapshot of your general fund. This is, or excuse me, your general obligation debt. And just keep in mind that this is net of the reserves that you have within the debt service fund balance. Again, we're looking through 2015 through 2018, fairly consistent for the end of 2019. You did have approximately 48.1 million of general obligation debt outstanding net of that fund balance in your debt service fund of 11.5 million, leaving you with a net of 36.6 million in terms of your overall debt. I'd say just keep in mind, I know we're in the September already. I mean, this is as of 1231.19. And then also wanted to give you some perspective on the sewer system and their net position or their equity reserves. Again, as you work through this, there is a slight increase in your equity reserves over time. Again, the highlight here, I think, is the increase from 2018 to 2019, that $2.7 million increase in your overall net equity. And again, it is also an increase in your cash balance. And you've looked at the individual categories, the ones that I really wanna focus on, the last line presented there, that unrestricted component. Again, that's the amount that's available for working capital. You can see you're at 6.8 million at 2015. Again, moving across the table, you can see that just over 7 million at the end of 2019. And certainly the point there is you do need to continue to obviously understand your rate structure, continue to think about how you're going to continue to reinvest in capital. But from 2019's perspective, certainly a strong year financially. And I know I'm going through this pretty quickly. I also wanted to just give you a snapshot of this is just focusing on two of the internal service funds, the green component focusing on your health insurance and the darker category, the darker blue focusing on the workers comp. You can see the fluctuation there. Again, I think my message would be is if you calibrate the line and understand the amounts that you have there, from a reserve perspective, the health insurance or the green category, you're at approximately 4.1. If you relate that to the amount of expenses flowing through that fund, approximately 6.6 million in expenses, certainly a strong relationship in terms of your reserve balances in comparison to the amount of expenditures. And similarly for the workers comp, your expenses flowing through that fund for 2019, approximately 440,000 versus 2.3 million in reserves. And I know I went through that pretty quickly. That's all the financial information that I had prepared. I mean, maybe just to recap, in terms of the findings and the internal control, I know there was a question that's going to come up on that, but those are repeat findings and conditions. Certainly that doesn't mean that there hasn't been any changes or progress on that. We're just, our requirement is to disclose the conditions that exist during that audit year. So technically those conditions do exist. When you step back and think of that slide with the financial overview, really a lot of positive financial information there financially, your fund balance reserves in particular for your general fund are certainly very strong. Okay, that being said, I'll turn it over. Any questions? Go ahead, Jim. Thank you, Madam Chair. Brian, first I have a general question and then I have a couple of specific questions. When you're dealing with your municipal clients, city of Sheboygan and other ones, corporations, LLCs, and this general question dates back to the CLA report that you did for us back in February. And if you don't wanna give any specific advice for Sheboygan, I guess that's fine, maybe you do. But my question is, in your experience with all the different types of governments, corporations, LLCs that you deal with, do you generally recommend to those clients that their employees be fidelity bonded for all employees that handle cash or other types of payments? So I just wanna step back and clarify that. So in terms of my role with CLA, I'm with our state and local government practice, meaning I do spend approximately 90% of my time working with state and local governments, that's county, cities, other types of government. I also do spend about 10% of my time with nonprofit organizations, but that's the limit of my exposure with our client base. I do not work on the private sector side or whatnot. In terms of your question, this is my personal opinion. Certainly I think you do have to be conscious of the fact that you are a public organization. You certainly need to maintain the public's trust. I certainly would, I think your question is very valid. I think you certainly should consider the risks associated with your internal control structure and your internal control environment. And I think bonding is certainly a part of that discussion or consideration. Thank you, Brian. My specific questions on page 54 of the audit, when you're talking about inter-fund transfers that were made, first one for the municipal court was $296,000 and the transfer from the ambulance fund into the general fund was $1,919,670. In information that I got from the fire department today from Deputy Chief Butler, the grand total of the collections, the actual collections for the ambulance service were $1,306,850.58. My question is the 919,670 that was transferred into the general fund, why the difference? Would that be because some of the collections in the 1.3 were not in when the transfer was made? I mean, certainly that could be a factor. Now, when I think of the ambulance fund and there is a separate fund within your financial statements that presents the ambulance, some of what you're talking about is we record accounts receivable, there's a timing process between billing and collecting, so you gotta get the cash in the door. Then you also have consideration of what other expenses do we have that may be recorded in that ambulance fund that get paid before we transfer money back. The amount that you're referring to the 919, I mean, that's simply the net amount that is, that truly is, it's the amount transferred during 2019. Alderperson Bauer. And then on page 17. Alderperson Bauer and this is Marty, if I could also elaborate a bit on that. One of the discussion points that took place during 2019 and early into 2020 was whether we would be transferring everything out of that ambulance fund and into the general fund. Rather, the thought was to keep some funds in there for future ambulance replacement, maintaining some of the fund balance and cash position should we decide to purchase some of these aging ambulances through that fund rather than doing it all through the capital projects. Okay, maybe that's part of the answer to my next question. On page 73, where it gives you the general fund balance that was committed to the following for the municipal court, it was 29,937. For the ambulance service, it was 521,208 dollars. I guess my question is the 521,000 dollars, is that part of what you talked about Marty or is that just seed for the year 2020 until funds start coming in to the ambulance fund? Yeah, you're correct in that we did maintain some, in a sense, seed in there for the potential to purchase some of those. Some of the transfer in the previous year in 2018 was not fully completed either. So there was some adjustment in 19 for transfers over. But the biggest thing was to try to estimate how much do we try to maintain as a reserve balance in there for future purchases? Okay, and one other question on the ambulance service. I know Daryl, I think at least Daryl talked about it and possibly you did last year that there was gonna be at least one more employee salary and benefits going into the ambulance expenses. Was that, I don't believe that was done yet in 19, was it done for 20? And is it gonna be done for 21? It was not done for 19. It has not been done for 20 as of yet. And we have not completed the budget process to the point where we would get to that stage of determining that. And that will be a discussion though that Administrator Wolff and I and Chief Eric Maniano will have. All right, thank you. Those are my questions. Does anyone else have any questions for Brian? Hearing none, we would need a motion to recommend to the council to accept and file the document. Don't move, Warren. Second, Mark. All right, is there any further discussion? Hearing none, I'll in favor state aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. Brian, thank you very much, appreciate it. Thank you, have a good day. And I will say if any additional questions do come up, certainly you can work through Marty and I'd be more than happy to try to answer those as they come up. So thank you. We'll move on to 3.2, which is a resolution. I'll put out into the barrel of approximately $11,190,000 in taxable general obligation refunding bonds. And who do we have up to that? Is Carol on the line? No. No, Carol, this is Madam Chair, this is Marty. Myself and Administrator Wolfe will take this. Carol did have a different engagement this evening, but she assured me, should any older person have a question that Todd or I could not answer, we could easily get the answer from her. So if you'd like me to start kind of going through this, what I guess I would encourage each of those remote to call up the report on refinancing that was attached to the agenda. This document was the report that Carol put through. Had she been present, this is what she would have utilized to present off of. I'm not going to read through it, but I guess I'm gonna touch on some of the highlights and certainly Administrator Wolfe will add in some additional details. What we are looking to do is in advance refunding as we've mentioned regarding the 10.49 million dollars worth of NANs, those were taken out in June of 2018 to purchase land and make improvements to roads, public utilities, grading, engineering, inspection, landscaping, signage, and capitalized interest out in our tax incremental district, 18, our enterprise campus, the business park. The maturity of these five years would be June of 2023 with a call date of June 1st, 2021. Currently the NANs are having, they have an interest rate of 3.625. What we are looking at right now would be what's called an advanced refunding, which can only be done via a taxable refunding. And there's several components that we probably would have gotten to that point regardless of some of the criteria. The reason we're doing a taxable is because we are greater than 90 days in advance of that June 1st. Anytime you're within 90 days of the advanced, or of the call date, you can do a tax exempt refunding. But because we're beyond that, we have to do a taxable, but the reason we probably would have gotten to be a taxable as well is to allow us to do some capitalized interest. Capitalized interest cannot be done on a project that's complete unless it's a taxable refunding. So we are looking at capitalizing a little bit more interest on this. And the reason for that is the slowness or timeliness of the development in that taxable increment district. I believe many of you have been made aware of some of the revised proformas that Ellers had put together. And Carol Worth was also utilizing that to put her structure together for how we would construct a refunding. With the refunding, with capitalized interest, it would look to be along the lines of borrowing $4.35 million. And the true interest cost on that is around 1.93%. That's based off of some of the current market sales that Carol has had in the last several weeks. Obviously those are all subject to change based on changes within the market. The borrowing would be for 20 years and it would be structured in a framework of what's found on page four. And often what Carol generally tends to do is a level debt restructuring. However, in this instance, we did it a little bit different. Again, referencing the Ellers report that has I guess an average aggressiveness to it on how we believe we will be able to develop and generate some tax increment within that district. I guess at this point, like I said, I don't wanna read through every aspect of the document that was attached. What Carol did do is include not only the structure of this specific debt, but there's also a page in there on page six where it does show all of the debt that's already on including this new revised debt so that you can see what the debt service on our tax incremental district 18 is. And then slide seven or page seven was where the revenue tax increment projections were put into place. Chair. Minister, do you have anything to add? Yes, I do, thank you. As Marty had pointed out, there's a couple of things that I just thought I'd add. First off, I believe that we have a really good schedule here. Marty brought up the fact that going off of Eller's recommendations from what we had recommended, we're looking at the first couple of years being a little bit soft, mainly because of development being where it is today. Also the recalculation of the South Point Enterprise, we're looking at it to allow us to have a little bit of a soft start in development. So that's been taken into consideration with this geo compared to the NAN. I also wanted to point out that Moody's is actually very positive in changing a NAN to an actual geo. So this will be a very positive situation. The other thing I did want to point out is that we won't actually have to go through a Moody's full review because we just had a review less than a year ago. So that we'll still maintain the exact, from my understanding, the exact rating that we had before. And the other point that I did want to point out is obviously with the rates, the way they are, we're again going to save money on interest going from a NAN to a geo. Thank you. Questions for Marty or Todd? Yeah, I've got one question for Marty, Madam Chair. Go ahead. Marty, what Todd just mentioned with our interest payments going down between the two, I know you shared with me earlier this year what we owed in interest for 2020. I don't have it in front of me. It was at five or $600,000. What do you estimate the difference would be in our interest payments by making this change? What would you predict it would be for 21? So on page four of the document is where we've got the estimated interest for just this portion of the, of TID-18's debt. In 2021, it's projected to be at $186,113. Previously, we were paying every six months the $191,000. So it's about half. Thank you. So my question is probably for Todd. I'm glad that Ehlers has a moderately optimistic view. I guess I'm not, I support this. I mean, it financially certainly makes sense, but do you have another Marina on our hands here except on a, maybe a grander scale? Madam Chair, I understand where you're going with that. And I really hope that we don't have the dry dock version. We do have, we do have the development that opportunities are still out there. It's just that because of COVID, things kind of slowed down as we know. We also know that we were being very aggressive because the market was hot when we developed the South Point Enterprise. So with Ehlers, we obviously recalculated that to be more realistic. And then with the changing the NANDs to a GEO, we tried to reflect that and also reflect the payback according to having approximately three years of a soft development cycle. So we're trying to take that into consideration and we do know that we still have some opportunities on the horizon. I hope I answered your question. Yep. Other questions? Another person at Donahue? Yes. One point of clarification I think for Marty. Marty, is this the correct version of the resolution? I know the original amount was the 11.19 million of refunding and it looks like there's a little bit of discrepancy in the documents. I just want to make sure the right thing ends up coming out of committee. Thank you for pointing that out, Assistant Attorney Thomas Cameron. Thomas is correct in that there was an original resolution for the 11.19 million and based on the revised amounts which included that extra year of capitalized interest, you will find a revised resolution or an amended resolution as part of your documents attached to board docs. So when we do get to the time of motion, however, Thomas or City Attorney Chuck Adams would like to advise us on the easiest way to amend that so that the recommendation can include the amended resolution. Well, just so I'm clear, are we talking about the resolution for the sale of 11 million 435,000? That is the amended dollar amount. The original resolution that went through council that was referred was 11.19 and there should be that original resolution as well as the drafted amended resolution from Corals and Brady for the 11.435. All right, so what we're looking for here is a motion to recommend that the council adopt the resolution to issue sale of approximately 11 million 435,000 in taxable general obligation refunding bonds. Is that correct? That's correct as long as we don't have to do any type of verbiage for the amendment. The amendment since you have a different document in front of you, so probably somebody moves in seconds to approve the RO and then it gets a, or not the RO, the resolution and then it gets amended to reflect the new resolution which is in board docs, as I understand it, is that the one that's attached to the IFC, Marty? Yes. Okay, and so then the motion to amend can just simply be to swap out the original resolution for the resolution in the IFC and then go ahead and approve it. I'll make such a motion, Boren. All right. I'll second that. If whoever is taking the minutes understands that. So our amended motion, it is not an amended motion. The motion is... The motion would be first just to simply approve the resolution. It sounds like you got a motion and a second for that. Now somebody should make a motion to amend the resolution to swap out the language of the resolution that was referred to committee with the language of the resolution that is contained in the IFC. All right, so what we need then is an amendment. We need a motion rather to amend the resolution on the floor to reflect the amount of 11,435,000 dollars. Is there such a motion to amend? So moved to amend, Boren. Second, Marcus. All right, so we will vote on the amendment. Are there any questions before we vote? Hearing none, all in favor, state aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. So we have on the floor a motion to approve the amended amount. Is there any discussion or questions with respect to the main motion as amended? Hearing none, all in favor, state aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. All right, very good. What's a few hundred thousand dollars here and there, huh? So let's go back to our agenda. And we are looking at 3.3, which is submitting for our information, the revised 2021 budget schedule. Who would like to take that, Todd? Thank you, Madam Chair. It's basically just a revised schedule after my two months of tenure in this position. We, Carrie and I and Marty, we reviewed the dates that will be coming to council, just to give everybody an update on the progress that we're making so far. We don't need any action on this or do, yes we do. There's a request that we recommend to the council to receive and file the document. Is there such a motion? So moved, Chair. And would there be a second? Second, Marcus Covellio, district five. All right, any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, state aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. Very good. All right. 3.4 is a claim from Brian Wunch for damage to his vehicle. Chuck? So the motion here would simply be to file this claim has been denied. It was denied because the claim had to do with road damage and it does not fit under the types of claims that are required to be paid for road damage. So the proper motion would be. Do we have a motion to file? Move to file. Second. All right, any other discussion? Hearing none, all in favor, state aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye.  The fund has just begun. We are now at 3.5, which is a resolution authorizing the city officials to execute a whole harmless agreement with respect to using Wisconsin Bank and trust building as a polling place. Thomas, is that yours? That is not mine, I believe. Chair? Chair? Mary Lynn, this is Todd. Oh, Todd, go ahead. I probably can speak to this. I asked Chuck to actually put this together. And due to the situation and status of the senior center, I took it upon myself to contact Paul Weaver, the owners of the A Street Investments LLC and they were gracious enough to allow us to have the voting in November at their location and the city will use the facility. So this is basically just boilerplate to allow them to allow us to use the facility, but not to hold them harmless, obviously. Any questions or concerns? Could we have a motion then to recommend approval of the whole harmless agreement? Don't move, boring. Second, Marcus. Any further discussion? Very none. All in favor, state aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. Thank you. We're going to move on to 3.6, which is a claim, a notice of claims from American Family Insurance with respect to damages to their insured molly lefine. Chuck? So on hand for you to file, this has been kind of sitting out there while we were waiting for a release, but we did authorize paying this in the amount of $3,845.69 back in May and it was just sitting around waiting for the lawyer to get the release to us. So the proper motion would be to file. And do we have such a motion? So moved. Marcus. Second. All right. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all in favor, state aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. 3.7 is a notice of claim and injury for damages of Curt Klessig. And check what we've got here. And actually you can take 3.7 and 3.8 together if you'd like. Okay. Happy to do that. So these are the claims that were filed in relation to the police involved shooting at the bar, a Union Avenue tap a while back. There's been a federal lawsuit filed. The claims themselves were under state law and the time has passed for them to make to pursue any potential claims they would have under state law. And so the proper motion on these would be to file. Doesn't impact the ongoing federal litigation which is sort of stalled in federal court. Okay. Got it. So we need a motion to file documents for with respect to both Klessig and 3.7 and Heitzman and 3.8. So moved. All right. And is there a second? Second. All right. Any further discussion? I just have a quick question for Chuck. Chuck, then if this is now a federal lawsuit, then there still could be some exposure to the city depending on the outcome of that lawsuit. Yeah, potentially it's just that the claim itself really was related to the state law claim and there is no longer any liability in the state law claim. All right. Thank you. Perfect. All right. All those in favor state aye. Aye. The opposed chair votes aye. All right. We need a motion to convene in closed sessions pursuant to 1985 sub one sub G of the statute for the purpose of conferring with legal counsel for the governmental body who is rendering moral or written advice concerning the strategy to be adopted by the body with respect to litigation which is likely, it is likely to become involved with to an accurate repairs LLC versus the city of Sheboygan. Do we have such a motion? So moved. Born. All right. Is there a second? Second. All right. We need an individual vote. Alderborn. Aye. Alder Savalio. Aye. Alder Mitchell. Aye. And I will vote aye for the motion passes and we are in session. Madam chair. This is Marty. Before we go into closed session, I'm not sure if city attorney Adams and or if Scott Miloff can assist us with this because this is where we ran into our challenge last time where we could not close our meeting because of how we went into closed session yet still being able to broadcast with the potential of coming back with possible action needed after. So I'm not. You will need to come back into open session. So Scott should not leave. We just need to go off the air. Okay. And come back on the air when the closed session is done. Okay. Thank you for that clarification. Because yeah, there we will be back in open session. So I don't see the chambers that we emptied out of those. So we need a motion to assume settlement of the case referenced in resolution in the amount of? 91,627 dollars and 38 cents. Is there such a motion? Don't move, Warren. I get Marcus. All right. Any further discussions? Hearing none, all in favor, state aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. Motion passes. So we are scheduled again for September 28th. Do we have any quorum issues among our members here? All right. Motion to adjourn would be in order. Move to adjourn. Second. All right. All in favor, state aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Chair votes aye. We are adjourned. Thank you all. That was a pretty productive meeting. Thanks.


Stacking but didn't mount.  Yeah How much gold for tip? Okay Pretty sure these is ugly. They was like me. Yeah, it's your girls. It's barf priest human rock. I Scatter sleep Please every scatter sleep on like I I'm gonna drink it up. I think okay, we're okay. Nice. I saw him I'm running running running running. I burned priest. I Keep rock just feel the field you got the field. I'm just gonna line not risking anything. Yeah. Yeah, full line I'm blind.  It's good. I use new suit up. He wants you shot going to me I think I still have some for him still have a reason should be fine Reservation priest is fair nice. It's fair in the field. Yeah. Yeah I can still form. Yeah, do it. Do it. Thank you. I think I can I use it to use routine road Sure, I'm trying to run beat the spelling rope. Nice Gonna hit them please any priest. He's stoned for do you have a wife in store? No, yeah, yeah, okay, maybe if I hit one more fair on priest we can we can why of it him Yeah, I guess drink it and it's cut in the slow trap. Okay Yeah, yeah, sure. Just keep running. I keep running. I'm drinking her Okay I'm pushing to fanny. I'm trying to use my deterrence for shot of him. Okay, is this Gage me look where I'm facing you I'm gonna fair. I'm gonna fair. I'm gonna fair. Yeah. Yeah, he's you won't come on Then I double priest drink it you can why been full Hit hint I'm trying to sleep him. I sleep him. I don't give you your cloak. Yeah I don't I don't why I'm I'm trying to retrop chicken retrop chicken retrop chicken retrop. You see chicken retrop. What's this chicken?  Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. He will nice.   This is really nice. I Can drink it's all I'm gonna drink it rogue my can you flare rope? He cloak on PS Burning priests used to run Blind me I'm gonna trinket no blind for you Yeah, yeah, yeah Just line priest Yeah, if he loses nice, I'm gonna root rogue You feel it I got gauge I got gauge I can't fit he didn't do it. He didn't do it. I don't know why We're in priest rock trinket big heels on you big heels on you don't need to yet Yeah He has fiend yes fiend don't I'm wanting him just getting damaged on him you can stone form after this, okay Yeah He has blind for me, okay last chance for them to win Good No major I got will and trinket from rogue. Yeah, I think you buy it. Okay. I should have given Yeah Okay, it's fine. Just hit rocker. Okay, right off here. I'm off here. Maybe First time I hit rocker. Oh Okay, I used to Yeah, that's So here now hiperia kidney 10 seconds. I can use like I have fair in three seconds Okay, don't give him step, okay ice flare ice flaring. Okay, I'm gonna slow him They're both there by the resistance or take care He is last vision I'm full blind. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Dread gonna try it next up in a second 10 seconds Okay, I wait for your fear Vanish I do it now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, I think it's a nice thing to play walking crippling really nearly falling Fella fella fell nice. It's my routine every global routine won't earn a life Bash on me. Yeah Got the enemy got the innovate nice got clone. I have fear, but he will try and click the sphere Okay, no, maybe not. Maybe not. Here's what?  Yeah routine. I do it now on his step. Do it mate. Do it mate. You need it. You need it Yeah, I'm walking. I wrote him one second. Maybe I'm gonna treat your crib. I just pump slow him gouged Eight seconds for fear I just don't form aggressive still trying to prove putting him on time alive Still trying to prove it still trying to prove it No crib no crib no crib running through it in it as well. I still excuse she's gonna claim me, but it's fine I think there's a root rock. Okay. I can double CC now. You should be fine. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I see see You're not gonna need this one. I'm drinking I gonna slow rock after yeah, I'm just sitting route to region drinking actually as well Yeah, slow rock. Yes, zero vanish. She has blind. Watch out. Okay. Don't waste drink it. Yeah I'll have my trinket as well. He's gonna hit pat him. Be careful. Yeah I'm trying to keep rock, but he might be I swear I showed it Yep, you can push on bro. Let's drink it back now. Watch out. I'm gonna drink it You fear or yeah, yeah, my fear fair and cross fair and cross I've rooted his step, but he will go back to me. What happened? I Think he resisted me Three dispels on route. I'm piercing. He didn't come off. I'm not drinking it Yep Stone form stone form stone form he doesn't have step I'm running Burning druid He doesn't have innovate I'm gonna jump here nice route nice route Step kidney Drink it and for both you can buy for druid. Yeah I see rock now. Okay. Yeah, lightning drew I'm drinking. I'm drinking. Ignite is top Just play defensive until next drink it. Okay. He's still don't have anything. I want you in 25 second Yeah, I'm not giving him step druid fed and cast a nice Yeah They want to see see you and give me but I'm fine. I'm fine. I can see see rock, but druid made it now Okay, yeah, you're going to eat. I'm just take take your time. Take your time. You got stone from sea. I see see now Yeah, I'm not gonna eat this one drinking during great. Maybe I got it. I got it. I got it. I got the polish Viper, yeah, it's cool. Okay. Okay. Fuck. I did not put on the Rude rogue. Yeah, I Have to see rocks on your thing in 25 bash me going me now. I'm gonna I'm going to see I just learned to put you on your money back. I see rock now scatter I'm trying to fear maybe druid. I can't turn through it. Okay. I feel I feel I feel nice I am I turn and the cast biggest damage biggest damage. Can you keep road? I will try I will try I will try Being done good. Yeah, I have to push on this guy now pushing with you Look him Row great. Nice. Nice. Nice. Nice. Nice. Nice. I Gonna rock in second. I still form aggressive busy one second. I Didn't get to get I still have I still have it. Yeah, hey, we'll have to get it if you're normal being yeah I'm slow right now. I'm going to warl to me.  Please don't run into me. Please. Please. Please Disgusting. Oh my goodness. Oh my god.


In the evening of August 4th, 2021, the Northern California Mountain Town of Greenville found itself in the path of the Dixie Fire. In roughly 30 minutes, this community of around 1,000 people was destroyed. And I'm watching it and just knowing how many of our people are affected, like, you know, we know our school is burned down, we know that staff and students have lost houses. What do we do? During the colossal devastation, Cal OAS immediately got to work executing an unprecedented recovery mission to get Greenville on the path to healing and restoration. It's rare, fortunately, that we see the true loss of an entire community, an entire town like we have here in Greenville. And with the cleanup of this magnitude came new challenges. Enrollment in the state's debris removal program is typically limited to residential properties with businesses and commercial properties included on a case-by-case basis. This wouldn't work in Greenville. We knew when you lose an entire downtown like we lost here in Greenville that that approach wasn't going to work. So we made the decision early to include all types of structures, consolidated community-wide cleanup is so, so important to allowing rebuilding to happen at community scale. But less than a year later, debris removal is nearing completion. We have close to 50 commercial parcels of the 400 parcels that are enrolled in the program. So about 350 residences, nearly all of those have been cleared to date. Clearing sites of wildfire debris is one component. Another key component to ensuring properties are safe for the public to return is the removal of hazardous trees. While crews are still hard at work, it's clear this town is close to the rebuilding phase. Big lift, the truck traffic, the heavy equipment, most of that is in the rear view mirror at this point and we're very proud and happy about that. This property, for instance, has already gone through all of the debris removal. The trees have been assessed and then the last step is once the erosion control is put into place then this property is ready to turn over back to the property owner. It's a blank canvas and they can begin building their new dream. Rebuilding Greenville also means reinstating the town's critical infrastructure. You see a building and the process of being rebuilt. This is a gas station, critical infrastructure for this community. This is a remote community and the ability to fill up their tanks, get those basic commodities and services here is crucial. And in an ironic twist of fate, the Dixie Fire that took homes and businesses also burned down local emergency services. The Indian Valley Fire Department Greenville fire station and one engine were lost in the blaze. Cal OAS quickly secured a site that would serve as a temporary home for staff and equipment. Your funding and support and help paid for all this to be flattened out, brought in for fill, put in an office for work out, not just fire department but our water and our sewer, our infrastructure. If OAS wasn't there, I didn't know what we would have done, be honest with you, by not having the station, having an office to work out of, a small training we would have worked out of and being able to haul our engines over there in freezing weather, not even frozen. Cal OAS also deployed a new fully equipped type 1 fire engine to Greenville, ensuring the firefighters could continue their efforts in keeping the community safe. We put it right to use and manned it, it's superior than anything else we had in our fire department. The Plumas County Sheriff's Office substation was also lost in the fire, but efforts are now underway to make a permanent base for the fire department and sheriff's office. Plus, for the first time ever to support displaced Greenville residents, Cal OAS secured temporary housing using state dollars. After a successful rollout, the program is now being managed by Plumas County. As Greenville finally looks to the future, residents can't help but remember those dark days after the flames were extinguished. It was very traumatic for everyone trying to re-assimilate and ground after that kind of crisis and try to hold everybody together and we were holding ourselves together for the kids a lot. Those children in Greenville also felt the devastation from the fire. When Plumas Charter School lost its Greenville Learning Center, teachers and staff decided moving its 50 students wasn't an option. Cal OAS teamed up with other state agencies to find classrooms and create a safe space for the children. Knowing that people care, knowing that their journey is validated in that way and then knowing now they have a safe place, I think that's been a very powerful journey for them. State representatives who we've never met, never dealt with just swooping in and kind of saving the day is how I felt and it was just, it was so profound for our staff and for me in particular to just feel that support. The building now sits in nearby Taylorsville and hosts three classrooms, two bathrooms and an office space, comparable to the previous school in Greenville. Most people see the outside the building, they don't maybe understanding what's underneath that, the sewer, the water, the well, the electrical hookup, you know, running into the septic. There's a whole almost city in this little square by Cal OAS taking care of that infrastructure and building piece. We got to focus on programming and curriculum and social-emotional learning and all of it. Getting these students back in the classroom is a symbol of progress. Just been like holding on in a corner, like we really have thrived and our kids have thrived. They've done activities that most schools do in a normal year. We are finally going, we did it. As families start planning for a future in Greenville, they haven't forgotten to preserve a little bit of Greenville's unique history that dates back to the Gold Rush Era. Cal OAS worked with locals to salvage pieces of the community's past, collecting bricks from historic buildings in downtown Greenville. It's a really important effort, typically, you know, a lot of this stuff that we're clearing from parcels that ends up in landfills. As the community feels that progress, laying a new foundation, brick by brick, it's a sign of Greenville's tenacious spirit and relentless resilience in the face of the community's most catastrophic disaster. To learn more about our recovery work in Greenville and statewide, go to news.caloas.ca.gov and follow us on all our social media platforms.


Item number, SCP-544. Object Class, Euclid. Class updated after event 544-423245 by order of 05... Special Containment Procedures. When not in use, SCP-544 is to be kept in a standard one meter by one meter by one meter locked storage container. When in use, the bearer of SCP-544 is to be under visual and auditory surveillance at all times. In the event that SCP-544 is to be removed from a bearer, it is to be only done by legally deaf staff in Auditory Safe Room number 524264. Description. SCP-544 is a 30 centimeter tall handheld radio microphone made of polished metal and black plastic. There is no evidence of wires or electrical plugs of any kind on the object. The object's surface reveals significant but superficial damage, presumably from everyday use. When jostled, the sound of a non-metallic object can be heard inside the device. Requests to disassemble SCP-544 to identify this object have been denied. When grasped by the neck of the microphone, the bearer will gain a subtle but significant compulsion to keep SCP-544 in his or her possession at all times. This compulsion begins as a simple dislike for the idea of letting go of SCP-544, but inevitably culminates in a desire to keep SCP-544 in a pocket or other carrying method at all times. Attempts to retrieve SCP-544 when the bearer is asleep have generally resulted in separation events. See below. After two days of bearing SCP-544, it will begin to speak for its bearer. Through methods unknown, the sound SCP-544 makes is identical to the bearer's original voice, and the bearer does not seem to notice that this voice replacement is occurring until explained. As time passes, more and more of the subject's speech is replaced by SCP-544, and the vocal tone of SCP-544 becomes much more electronic, with a comical and jovial tone. Within two weeks, the bearer is completely voiced by SCP-544. Attempts to remove SCP-544 from the bearer's possession result in what has been dubbed a separation event. SCP-544 will produce a screeching tone in order to incapacitate those that wish to gain SCP-544. The decibel levels of separation events have ranged from 140 to 150 decibels, causing significant discomfort and pain. The original bearer of SCP-544 is somewhat affected, but to a severely lesser degree. Incapacitating the bearer before attempting to acquire SCP-544 causes the same separation event. After the event, its original bearer recovers normally, with the exception of being unable to speak at all. Autopsy of bearer's brains revealed near-complete atrophy of posterior inferior frontal gyrus section, commonly known as Broca's area. Because of the risk to personnel nearby when separation events occur, 05- has ordered that all operations done to retrieve SCP-544 are to be done in auditory safe rooms, ASRs, rooms specifically designed to mitigate and reduce sound-related issues. Addendum 1. Interview with SCP-544-Bearing Subject Interview Date 04-12-2000 Interviewer Researcher Subject D-7899 Current amount of time subject has borne SCP-544 One week, two days. Please note, by this time, a significant percentage of D-7899's vocalizations come from SCP-544. In the interest of clarity, sections in which SCP-544 is speaking will be written like this, in keeping with SCP-544's higher electronic voice. As is standard with this effect upon its bearers, D-7899 does not notice, or does not seem to care, when he stops using his mouth to stop in the middle of a sentence. Researcher And how are we today, 7899? I see you've taken to stuffing SCP-544 into your pocket. D-7899. Yes, it was getting a bit annoying having to hold this thing in my hands. Plus, it fits pretty well, don't you think? Researcher. True. But, have you considered returning it to us? What are you using it for? D-7899. Shrugs. Nah, why would I want to give this up? I like it. Believe it or not, most of the other D-class folks think I'm higher up on the food chain because I've got this thing.  They think owning an old-time radio microphone is some version of a gang sign. Would you believe that they occasionally try to take the expletive thing when I'm sleeping? Expletive and racial insults. Have they forgotten that they're in friggin' jail? This isn't Detroit for God's sake. Researcher, let's refrain from racial insults, 7899, and mind your tone. You're in jail with them too. Tell me more about what happens when they try to take it from you. D-7899. Fine, fine, sorry about the cursing. Anyways, I'm a light sleeper, so the minute I feel their dirty little mitts unzipping my pocket, I'm awake. Then the metal noise starts up and they start clutching their heads like it's a bullhorn. They back off and I go back to sleep. Researcher, metal noise? D-7899. You know, that noise it makes when someone tries to take it. You guys installed it, right, so that nobody steals it from me?  Um, like that, but more synthetic. A lot quieter too. I have to give you boys credit. It's a perfect stop touching my expletive alarm sound. Winces. Sorry, sorry, I know. Don't swear. Force of habit. Researcher, ah yes, that metal noise. We made that noise for military discouragement operations. What would you say if I told you that you keep alternating between speaking with your voice and that microphone speaking for you? D-7899.  You guys told me to randomly talk while looking into what you guys said was a mirror. Of course, it wasn't a mirror, since I stopped talking a few times and the does air quotes. Reflection. While I kept talking, freaked me out a bit, but then I realized you guys just recorded me standing somewhere doing nothing and used that fancy CGI expletive to make it look like I wasn't talking a few words. Nice try, doc. Addendum 2, Event 544 Alpha. On 05-24-2000, at 3.42am, the current bearer of SCP-544, D-4232-45, was asleep in his bunk. While undisturbed and remaining asleep, SCP-544 began to speak seemingly random phrases. It was initially assumed that D-4232-45 was simply talking in his sleep, until SCP-544 began speaking things which could not have possibly been dream-based. Later, bearers of SCP-544 repeated many of the following lines in their sleep. For a full listing, please see file 544.fulllog.353. I was slumbering. I was waking. Flames. Fire. Burning. I slumbered again. There is no. There is no. There is no barrier. The slab groans. I groan to match. We rise together. When. When. When. I dreamed until the dawn, but then it was not dawn. It was false. Dawn that was not a dawn. Dreams turn to dust. The number was expunged. The number is expunged. No. Not time. Not yet. No. Wait and dream. Wait and dream. Event 544 Alpha, in later similar situations, has caused the Foundation to re-evaluate SCP-544's nature. It is currently not understood how SCP-544, or its multiple bearers, have a knowledge of SCP-544. Much less, how SCP-544 has anything in common with SCP-544. More startling is 544's mentioning of the specific latitude-longitude of Foundation Overwatch. In response to Event 544-423245, SCP-544 has been upgraded to Euclid status. Addendum 2. Event 544 Beta. On 09-15-2014, at 4.01 a.m., the current bearer of SCP-544, D-64349, was seen walking around the medical cell he had been contained in due to a common illness. Conversation with D-64349, speaking through SCP-544, began shortly thereafter. To date, there have been attempts to forcibly recreate the events of 544 Beta with no success. Doctor. Up and about 64349. Feeling better? D-64349. Long pause. Buried. Doctor. Excuse me? D-64349. Unintelligible. Doctor. Please repeat yourself. D-64349. Long pauses between words begin here and continue throughout the conversation. Perversion. Corruption of the method. I am trod under those who exist to serve me. Doctor. Realizes he's not talking with D-64349. What method are you speaking of? Does the person I'm talking to exist to serve you? D-64349. Touch the stone. Become my voice. Speak my truths and my rules to the people. I warned them. Popocata Petal was the warning. Warning. Of corruption. Arrival. Destruction. Note. Popocata Petal is a volcano located in Mexico. Doctor. What happened? D-64349. Extremely long pause. My voice was not protected. Pretenders to my glory usurped me. Shattered. Disregarded. I slept. Doctor. And what caused you to wake up? Do you remember when? D-64349. Shake's head. Shard of me. Not enough. The serdos. Treated like. Unknown. Translation suggest bearer of wooden collar. Blasphemy. Touch the stone. Become my voice. Touch the stone. Spoke for them. Rapidly. Alternating between Nahuatl, Spanish and English. Arrogance. Arrogance. Arrogance. Arrogance. Arrogance. At this point, D-64349 awoke. Presumably by the sound of SCP-544. He turns to face Dr. who startles him. D-64349. Jesus wept, Doctor. Do you get your jollies off watching patients get up to take a piss? Doctor. None of your business, D. Goodnight. Lesson complete. If you missed the previous orientation, go watch SCP-543. Noise. Right now. Or for the complete course, watch this playlist.