By Nicole Barde
The agenda for this meeting can be found HERE, County Manager Pat Whitten’s summary HERE and a recording of the meeting HERE.
Before I begin…. CONGRATULATIONS to Jason Van Havel! He was selected to be the new Public Works Director succeeding Mike Nevin who is retiring at the end of the year. Jason will be drinking from a firehose of information for the next two months trying to learn what he can from Mike.
This was a fairly procedural meeting and Pat Whitten’s update covers the main points. I just have a couple of amplifications.
Agenda item #9 was the “Review and possible approval of Tahoe Reno Industrial Center (TRIC) audit of project revenue and net revenue of the TRI Public-Private Partnership for the year ended June 30, 2015”. First of all I don’t know why it’s taken over a year to get this done but maybe it’s always been this way and I haven’t noticed. Anyway, in a nutshell, since the county didn’t have and still doesn’t have the money to build out the required county infrastructure for TRI, they build it then turn over the asset as well as the costs to the county. To date we owe TRI about $47 million.
According to the agreement there is no interest on this “loan” which is a good deal for the county but there are conditions for the payback. The county pays TRI back 35% of all revenues generated from TRI above a certain revenue threshold. Simplistically, if we don’t meet that threshold we don’t have to make a payment, if we do then a payment is made. This audit is the accounting of all revenues collected from TRI companies and the subsequent payback. It was all fairly procedural except for a statement in the opinion regarding the hiring of an outside consultant to look at additional sources of revenues. I asked about this and was told that the county has been collecting various fees and taxes that were not being considered as part of the TRI revenue and that there will be a report of those findings in an upcoming meeting.
Item # 11 was “Approval of modification and extension of Collective Bargaining Agreement between Storey County (Employer) and the Storey County Employees Association AFSCME Local 401 Comstock Chapter (Union)”. This was pretty cut and dry in terms of the actual contract but there was also a salary adjustment component. The salary adjustments were done as a result of doing a compensation study of other counties for similar positions. I will ask for a listing of the positions to see which were affected.
That’s about it…short and sweet