Hudson questions Kristoff on percentage of capital needs funded

Thank you so much, Chairs, and I appreciate it.

I had to run to another meeting, so apologies.

And please do tell me if these questions have been asked.

But I do want to just...

Jump in on the capital piece.

I don't know all of the questions that Chair Areola has already asked, but just want to say that in your testimony you referenced some capital dollars in this fiscal year as well as the out years.

And by my count, the funding would go towards the renovations of about eight buildings or so.

And I was just curious to know what percentage

that represents of your entire physical infrastructure that needs repair, stations, firehouses, any other properties?

So I think the things that were mentioned in the testimony were probably the roofs that were just funded.

Yes, six roofs, I think.

And then there were a few projects that were accelerated.

But those are not the only projects funded.

There are many more projects actually funded.

Those were just the ones that were changed.

Many more that are...

Are funded.

Yes, many more.

Many more capital improvements that are funded already?

Yes.

So of your total capital needs, how many of the projects would you say are funded?

Like 50%, 80%?

I mean, our capital needs are significant.

Are great, I know, that's what I'm getting at.

I'm trying to help you.

But we do have, as I said, $994 million across the 10-year plan for capital, and $553 million of that is in the first five years of the plan.

So almost half.

Yes.

Roughly?

About half.

So if that 994 was a number?

Yes.

994 million is completed, then all your capital needs are taken care of?

No.

I mean, as I said before, given the number of our facilities and their current state of repair, our capital needs go beyond our existing funding.

Okay, so I'm just trying to figure out what of the existing funding that's been allocated to address capital needs, what percentage of that, what percentage is that of the total capital needs you have?

I would have to say it's about 25 to 30%.

25 to 30%.

Okay.

I'm not going to attempt to do quick math in my head, but $100 million, roughly speaking, or $994 million, you said, is about 25% to 30% of your total needs.

Or is it the 500 million?

I believe it's the $500 million.

The $500 million is 25% to 30% of your total capital needs.

I don't think we have it quantified that way.

I think, you know, we have 400 or so buildings.

Many of these buildings are a century year old.

Yep.

Those capital projects will continue to pop up as we go forward.

I don't think there's any...

Any place where we could say all our capital needs will be secured and done if you give us this amount of money because it's a it's a rotating thing it's you know as the buildings age yeah more and more things pop up

so that's i think that's what you see and like why we're struggling to try to give you an actual percentage um the the money that we have

is the money that's going to go towards the capital, the most needed capital projects.

Good.

Okay.

Yeah, I was just going to add for context, I mentioned this earlier, but I don't know if it was when you were out.

So we have seen our capital funding for facilities increase pretty substantially in the last five years.

If you looked five years ago, so in 2021, our facilities funding was only about 37% of our capital budget, and now it's more than half.

It's 52% of our capital budget.

It's grown by nearly $500 million.

Okay, that's great.

There's still a lot of state of good repair needs that we have to address, but we are.

are seeing the budget move in the right direction towards funding those state of good repair needs.

And another component of this is really having the bandwidth in terms of civilian staff to actually execute those projects.

And so the 84 civilian positions that we got in this budget are instrumental towards doing that, both staff for facilities and for procurement to execute on those design and construction contracts.

Okay.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

And I'm, you know, not trying to be difficult, just I'm trying to get down to the fact that I would argue you could use far more capital dollars to address the needs at all of your buildings.

And so I think you could probably agree with that sentiment, perhaps.

More money would solve more problems.

There you go.

Okay, great.