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County Manager's• - Memo To: Board of Commissioners From: Jonathan B. Marshall, Deputy County Manager CC: Mike Downs, County Manager and Kyle Bilafer,Area Manager Date: 8/25/2017 Re: Deferred Tax Fund Staff discussed the Deferred Tax fund with the Board of Commissioners at the work session on July 3, 2017. The BOC instructed staff to explore moving forward with the Capital Improvement Program for planning and engineering infrastructure improvements at the Lomax Incubator Farm property and to propose a system through which applications may be made to use funding from the Deferred Tax Fund. Staff has moved forward on these items and this update is being presented to the Board. There are current uses for the Deferred Tax Fund that are included in the annual budget. The Soil & Water Conservation District is provided with up to $125,000 in funding each budget year for preservation of prime farmland. Those funds are initially budgeted as $25,000 for legal fees and $100,000 for the purchase, or services necessary for the purchase, of prime farmland or prime farmland easements. Funds that are not expended from this account are carried over to the next year and additional funding is provided to bring the total available back to the original 25K/1 00K amounts. We released a Request for Qualifications for engineering firms to assist in the feasibility and cost estimation of providing needed infrastructure improvements for the Lomax Incubator Farm property. There were no submissions in response to that RFQ so staff followed procurement policy and contacted Kimley Horn & Associates to obtain a proposal. They have proposed a scope of work to include project meetings, determination of needs, preparation of a preliminary site and utility plan and opinions of probable construction costs for two alternate methods to complete the work identified. The cost for this work is $27,000. We would propose that the Board approve use of the Deferred Tax Fund for that project. Once that stage has been completed, we would bring the results/costs back before the Board with a recommendation on whether we should proceed with construction documents. Representatives of the County Manager's office, Planning & Development Department, Active Living and Parks Department and Cooperative Extension met to discuss a process through which applications for use of the Deferred Tax Fund could be evaluated and recommended for Board of Commissioner consideration. The proposal would be to have applications (similar to those used in the ALPs cost share program) be processed through the Planning & Development Department. They would be presented to a group made up of two representatives of the Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Supervisors, two representative of the ALPs Commission and two representatives of the Agricultural Preservation Board. That group would evaluate the applications based on the original intent of the Deferred Tax Fund program (farmland preservation and support of local food production)as well as the larger goals of open space preservation, acquisition of passive park land and whether the proposed use of the funds supports the concepts of the present use tax value program. The representatives of those boards would provide funding recommendations to the Board of Commissioners for consideration. 1 Attachment number 1 \n F-1 Page 19