Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 06-09-26_TUESDAY_8AM

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

Jackson County Administrator Danny Jordan talks with me about how challenges are rising at funding public safety - wages and benefits soar, taxes into the county, well, not so much. Open for Business with Lisa McCleese Kelly from Network in Action

This hour of the Bill Meyer Show podcast is proudly sponsored by Klausur drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for more than 50 years. Find out more about them at Klausor drilling.com. Now more with Bill Meyer. Five minutes after eight, and we're getting together here with Jackson County Administrator, Danny Jordan. Danny, had a pleasure of viewing you in action yesterday over at the chamber lunch. Welcome back to the show. Morning. Yeah, thanks.

Glad to be here. You know, one person said on my Facebook page last night when I was mentioning what you were, you know, discussing. And one person said, you know, Bill, I was sitting behind you. And the one thing I never knew about Danny's, how funny you are. So you have another job if you ever leave the county. You can become a stand-up comedian, a comedian comic. You joked about baldheads always go over well. Okay, well, I suppose so.

I suppose so. But in all seriousness, though, it was a good talk. and it was really interesting looking at where the money is coming in, where the money is going out, and also what things are looking like here in the future and some of the challenges that are going to be coming up here. And first off, I just wanted to give you kudos on your ability to, along with the board, be able to prioritize actually adding assets to the county and that are able to generate income. And that is something that has allowed, you know, taxes, well, been able to do the job without having to raise taxes or fees too much, I guess. Would that be a fair assessment of what the goal has always been here?

Yeah, I mean, that's really a focus on our general fund reserves or fund balance. People, you know, say, well, you have so much reserves and fund balance. And I think this year it's around close to 280 million. The big portion of that is dedicated, which means we don't have discretion about what. where it gets used like our airport fund balance is pretty large, but we're planning to do an addition at the airport's $190 million project. In the general fund, we're talking around $80, $90 million, and our goal there is to try to invest that money in things

that reduce our operating expense. I talked to us today about purse-side accounts being huge, where we've invested $45 million and got $108 million in reductions in purse costs over 20 years. That's allowed us to keep a whole lot of positions at the county where other local governments aren't able to do that because they don't carry the kind of reserves and fund balances or make investments in revenue generating opportunities. And I mentioned yesterday the RV park that we made investments in. That's paid itself back and earned us about 800,000 a year. This new building that we build out of the Expo, we're generating about 860,000 a year through a 35-year lease. And by the way, what is that officially called?

They talk about being pandemic, but pandemic is really about the funding source of it, I think. We haven't named it yet. The project's named after the funding source. It's the multi-use pandemic response center, but that's directly tied to the federal funding stream that we primarily use to build it. And not only we would generate the rental income from the city of Central Point, that's about 30% of the facility, we're going to generate over a million net a year once we get up and running from the other activities. So, you know, that's $2 million a year in operating revenue. That's constant predictable. It's revenue we can depend on for services. If you look at our $700 million budget, only about $288 million of that is for operations. The rest is fund balance, debt service. And then fund balances we have to carry for things like self-insurance, medical insurance, the general liability, so on and so forth. So we sit in a good place with fund balance, and people think we do a good job because we're carrying fund balance, and we're making good decisions about how we use that fund balance. I didn't mention we obviously also use it to cover emergencies or gaps.

fund or those kind of things. We just don't put it into operations because once we spend it, it's gone. It's not sustainable. And if we build operations on that, we have a huge cliff. We fall off once that's gone. Well, all you have to do is just look at what happened with Almeida, as an example. One good wildfire, earthquake, disaster, or something. You need some contingencies. And so that makes a lot of sense. We all have to have some savings account. What happened with the jail that the basement had to be closed of the jail? So that's budgeted for the coming fiscal year, which is July 1st, and that's a decision by the sheriff. The sheriff's budget increased this year, just like it increases every year, but the sheriff's costs are outpacing the budget increase.

You know, we're limited to 3% growth and value. We usually get around 4% increase in our property tax base, mostly because of new construction coming on the rolls that add value. So our issue at the county government is for general employees, our inflation is about 7% a year, and then for public safety, police and fires, it's about 7.5. And that's in a normal year. We've seen much larger growth than that recently. And I talked at the Chamber specifically about the Public Employees Collective Bargaining Act and specifically with regard to strike prohibited employees.

So this is a lot of Oregon laws that go into this. I tried to focus in on one that is challenging for us. And when you talk about strike, prohibitive one, these would be like the firefighters, the fire districts, the firefighters, police, sheriff officers, things like that, the jail employees, I would guess, would be prohibited from striking. We don't, the county, we don't run fire. But for us, we have a newly formed sergeant's union that is their separate union. We have the Jackson County Sheriff's Employees Association, which is basically our whole sheriff's department.

and then FAPA, which is our parole and probation officer. So we have three strike bar units. And it's really unique here because it requires binding on arbitration under ORS 243-742. So if people wanted to look that up, they could go verify this. In breaking down a whole bunch of laws to make this as simple as possible, essentially an arbitrator, in the end picks the county or the union's proposal. and that's based on a set of legal criteria. So, you know, we're kind of forced into this situation if we don't bargain to an agreement that we go to an arbitrator and they have to pick one of these options.

It does look at the county's ability to pay. That's somewhat subjective. The law does say that we can't be forced to use reserves in the evaluation of that. So, you know, the fact that we have money, one-time money sitting in the bank is not supposed to be a consideration. But does that always work that way, Danny? Not necessarily. I mean, you know, an arbitrator can have other reasons why they believe the county has the ability to pay. I mean, I've seen arbitrator's rule, well, you could go out and ask the taxpayers to create a levy or a district, so therefore you have the ability to pay.

Even though they haven't done that yet, you could do it, right? Oh, yeah. That's really funny because Jackson County and Josephine County, also for the same way, property owners are so willing to go out there and just vote themselves new taxes all the time. Happens all the time in your experience, right? Pretty much not. Yeah, exactly. If you look at overall compensation, so they don't just look at salary, they look at wages, benefits, insurance, they look at comparison. And this is where it gets tough for us of compensation to employees of counties with similar populations.

So, you know, the county closest to our county is Deschutes County. I kind of covered Deschutes County in depth yesterday to really show how difficult this is for Jackson County. An arbitrator standard is 50% up and down of population. So in our case, typically when we bargain with the strike bar units is Deschutes, Lynn, and Douglas are the counties that we compare to. It looks at our ability to recruit and retain employees, which we have not really had an issue with. And then it looks at CPI as an inflationary index. So just at a minimum, you're going to have to keep up with what CPI is. What I talked about yesterday, you know, when you look at Deshutes County versus Jackson County,

we have a higher actual property tax base than them based on our property tax rate, which is, you know, we're in the bottom quarter of the state for property tax rates at $2.1. I talked yesterday about how much we've lost in the O&C revenue, which is the equivalent of buck 33. So overnight, we lost, you know, a huge portion of our tax base. And that was one of the reasons why, truth be told, what, you were brought in in the first place, you know, by the passport, to bring you in to try to figure out that problem to thread that needle, wasn't it? Well, I mean, two weeks on the job, and I got told we had to cut 20% of our general fund and 30% of our road fund overnight. So, yeah, I got dealt that pretty quickly. We have a White City Enhanced Law Enforcement District that we generate some revenue.

So if you look at our total tax revenue, we're at $58 million. If you look at DeShoots County, as I said, their general fund property tax base is lower than us, but they also have a countywide law enforcement district, a rural law enforcement district. They have transient lodging tax and, you know, people go to Sun River and all over Deshutes County. Make money from that. Yep. Sure. They make money from that. They also have a 911 service district that pays for all their 911 services. And in our case, we pay for that directly out of our general fund. So they have about $117.5 million in revenue. We have about $58 million in revenue. So there are more than double us, more than double. Yeah, they're more than double us in revenue. But the arbitrator considers us the same, as far as we're concerned, we're the equivalent of DeShoutes County, right?

Well, in terms of, you know, having to compare to other counties with similar populations, yes. And I'll tell you, we've had an arbitration where those are our three comparable counties, and we believe we're within the market because we're in the market average. and the arbitrator has ruled, well, you're the biggest county of all those counties, so therefore you should pay the most. We don't have the most money, but we're the biggest in terms of population. We beat Deschutes County by 15 or 20,000. So, you know, and these are subjective findings to some degree by the arbitrator. Like the arbitrator could have said, yes, I agree you're in the market, but in that case.

We typically have three-year contracts when an arbitrator rules, those, whatever findings of arbitrator rules, to apply for those three years and then we start over again when we begin to bargain a new contract. The issue for us in the county is one that the current contract with our biggest strike bar unit, which is JCSCA, which ran from 23. It will end the end of June of 26. So patrol deputies get a 17% wage increase plus those that were eligible up to 3, 5% step increases. So that was 32% for patrol deputies, a max of 32%. For corrections deputies, it was a 19% increase with three, five steps. So that was 34%. Over how many years is that, Danny? This was over three years.

Over three years, but still, those are pretty healthy raises when you look at it from the head. 32, 34, 32%. And here's the thing. During that time, the state tacked on paid leave organ, cost us another half percent, and then our per's rates went up. So those 32, 34, and 32 percent increases resulted in almost, in some cases, 40 percent payroll increases over three years. Now our property tax base, which is about $55 million for the county-wide, that's about $250 per capita, is limited to that 3 percent, and we generally earn about $2 million a year. So I guess the question is how do you pay for sheriffs and jail deputies, let's say, getting anywhere from, let's just use broad-based numbers, 25 to 40% compensation raises over three years, let's say, and how do you square that with 3% or 4% a year of the money actually going up coming in to the county? How does that work? Yeah, yeah, I will explain that. Let me just back up.

a little bit and talk about what got us in this situation, especially with public safety. In our state, you know, we have a defund, we had kind of a defund the police, a hard error with COVID. You know, we had a mass exodus of police across the state, and this is kind of nationally, to be honest with you just didn't happen here. So what happened is you had counties and cities all over our state competing for a small pool of officers. What they do, they raised salaries to recruit people. They paid bonuses to recruit people.

In our county, we didn't have as big of an issue as, say, they had up north, MoMA County area, but our employees benefited from that because we're tied to other areas for compensation. This never ratchets down. So when we finish our contract and we see these raises, the next contract's up for bargaining. And guess what? Then they turn around and say, well, but now we're the lowest paid and now we need these raises. So in my 22 years of bargaining contracts, in Strike Barclare units, it's never, ever ratcheted down, ever.

What we're forced to do in our county, we dole out all of our operating revenue every year. We don't hold operating revenue back. That is our death by 1,000 cuts because we grow at 7 to 7.5% but we only get 3% increases. So every year we're making minor cuts all over the county and the general fund portion of the budget, which is about $65 million of that $700 million budget.

That's the only place we have discretion. 80% of that gets spent on public safety. And that's happened because over the years, our board and budget committee has said, hey, public safety is our number one priority, almost blindly. Okay. So what we did in order to fund that over the years is we pulled money from everywhere else. We pulled money from the park system that used to get $2 million a year. We pulled money from the Expo that used to get $500 or a million a year. To be able to fund this over time, and we made those departments that aren't mandatory services, be able to be able to fund.

to stand on their own while we funded and took from everywhere else to fund public safety. We were able to do that and we were very effective in doing that over the years, but now there's no place to go take the money from. So now we're in a position of when this happens, we're making reduction. So if you look over the last three years in the Sheriff's Office, there's been about 29 full-time positions eliminated. The issue for the union is no one saw a layoff because we planned those through attrition as vacancies became available or positions. opened up, we didn't fill them. So no one was laid off even though we cut positions. And that's what we're in a position of doing. We're bargaining two contracts right now with the sergeants in

JCSCA. And if we pay more than we're, if we're forced to pay through arbitration, through arbitrators ruling more than we can fund, we're going to be making more significant cuts than just closing the basement of the jail. Because you've run out of other departments to be able to squeeze in order to pay for, well, the law enforcement officers, essentially, right? Yeah. Now, all those 29 positions didn't just come from reductions or expense increases in our general fund. Some of them came from, we lost some funding for marijuana from the state, right?

So when we have a budget policy that when we lose state or federal grants, we don't backfill them with general funds. So if we lose the grant, we're cutting the service. We're not putting that on the back of the general fund. So some of those positions in the sheriff's officer from that. Some positions were budget as FTE, but unfunded. They were budgeted as FTE, so the sheriff had room to be able to recruit, actively recruit all the time, to have people available to fill positions when they came open,

but we intended not to fund those positions. We just had them for the purpose of recruiting. So not all of those represent cuts and funding, and let me be very clear. The sheriff's budget in my tenure here has never taken cut in their general fund allocation. We have made reductions that we've offset with other funding, but every year their budget has went up. So this is not about a budget cut. It's about expenses outgrowing the increase in revenue we are able to provide. Okay. So what does this look like then when it comes time to, well, have patrol officers or is this one of the reasons why, in the example,

the basement of the jail is going to be closed down in July. That kind of thing. Yeah, that really is a sheriff's decision. I mean, he could choose to make cuts wherever he wants. He, you know, he chose to close the basement of the jail. The reason I believe he did that is there's other significant cost increases associated with that over the last couple of years. We've seen jail medical costs increase a couple million dollars. Now, remember, our entire property tax base goes up about two million a year. So that one line item in our budget increased $2 million over two years, that eats up, you know, half of a two-year increase in our budget just by that one thing. Also in the sheriff's budget, risk costs have went up significantly. He's had a lot of lawsuits.

Lawsuits, yeah. I was going to ask you about that. In the millions of dollars, we are self-funded, so we do carry a reserve that departments pay into, but when you have millions of dollars of claims from actions, of deputies or otherwise, then those things get allocated back to the sheriff. They get put in the form of an actuarial. We spread that cost out over seven years, less what we've reserved ourselves for to pay the claim. So it doesn't hit them all at once, but it does increase their risk charges. And another big one is just motor pool, you know, I mean, the increase in fuel costs,

I mean, just the increase in fuel costs alone outpaces the increase we get in our tax base. So, you know, cities outlet for this as they go and charge surcharges, public safety surcharge, wildfire parks, whatever. Counties don't have that. We could potentially charge a search. Let's say every, we're the only entity that provides a jail. So could we assess a surcharge across the county? Probably.

But we have no way to enforce collection like cities. Cities can turn your water off if you don't pay the bill. The county's not turning water off, right? So it's really not a feasible means of generating revenue for a county like the city has. So cities hum along and they add staff and they are able to cover all of these things really without a vote by imposing fees on citizens. And the county hasn't done that. Yeah. I hope you don't have to.

My question, I'm speaking, by the way, with a county administrator, Jackson County Administrator, Danny Jordan this morning. Danny, where are we then? And are you looking for legislative help? Is that something that the county board and you were perhaps looking to do? Because you had talked about what was the name of the state law, once again, the collective bargaining law that you were? The Public Employees Collective Bargaining Act, there's a whole set of statutes around that. And I cited specific statutes with regard to, because this covers things like, you know, the rules differ. So like if you're in a city with a population of, I think the cutoff is 300,000 or a county with 400,000, then you have to compare out-of-state, right?

So there's different rules for different counties. If you're a city with a population of 325,000 or more, which is pretty much Portland, right, it includes out-of-state cities of similar size. If you're a county with a population of 400,000, it includes out-of-state. for us, you know, I gave you specifically for us what that means. It means different things for different employees. But as I said, this is the Public Employee Collective Bargaining Act. Yeah. And my point being about... I'm the public employer. Well, yeah, you're the public employer. What makes it clear, though, is that the law has been structured to that if there's any question about what pay and benefits will be for any collective

bargaining, a public employee collective bargaining unit. It's either A, you know, let's just say heads or tails. Heads, the union gets everything they want, or B, the taxpayers get screwed. And there's no consideration about that. The county and the taxpayers get screwed. There seems to be very little balance on something like that. And that in and of itself is not a sustainable, is not a sustainable financing formula, is it? Well, well, not with the limitations we have on revenue generation.

And, you know, frankly, we're managing the public trust. We're the fiduciary agent for the public, the county government. And in this case, you know, here's the issue is why would a union not ever go to arbitration? Because they're always going to get at least what we're offering and might get what they want that we're not offering. The county representing the public doesn't have that same option. We're going to arbitration and we're going to pay at least what we're offering. So, you know, we try to be fair in our offer and we do want to be able to recruit and retain employees. And these are hard jobs.

I mean, a lot of the public doesn't know this, but I worked in public safety for nearly 15 years before I've spent 22 years being the county administrator. I was basic intermediate advanced certified. I was supervisor middle management executive level certified. I went through the Oregon Executive Development Institute, which is sponsored by the FBI Academy and the State Sheriff's Association. I was the president of the statewide directors association. I worked in this field. I understand it's a hard job.

And really, it's hard to blame anyone for seeking to get the best compensation they can. In my case, I started in Eastern Oregon, and I didn't like the compensation. I didn't push the county to the brink of not being able to fund services. Instead, I picked up and moved where they paid more. But are we getting to that point in Jackson County that the county can't afford to have these people, these individuals, as many as we would like? Well, you know, we work hard every year to make the budget work. We're closed in the basement of the jail this year.

And that's the sheriff's choice. But one way or the other, the sheriff had to choose to make cuts. And, you know, it's when you have to make reductions, it's not fun. And, you know, this is probably small. I mean, you'll remember when I first started, I had to close all the libraries. That was $8 million of $23 million that I had to figure out how to make reductions for. And we've lived off those reductions ever since I've been here. I mentioned yesterday when I first came on, we had over 1,200 FTE.

In this budget, I think we adopted 945 FTE. Yeah, so you have about 300 fewer employers, or employees rather than you did back then. 22 years later. Yeah. Okay. So the county's not grown out of control. Now, you can back out the 100 employees that we had for the library when the counties ran it. But still, even if you add those back in, we're at 1,045 and we were up over 1,200.

So over 20 years, we've not even got back to the baseline. Okay, well, does the state legislature need to make it something as simple, which is that, all right, we have a 3% limitation with measure 50 on tax assessments that public employee compensation can't go be, on that ability to pay? I mean, is there something, is there going to have to be some kind of dramatic action taken over time? Because you just can't just keep going saying, hey, you're just going to pay more and paying more, especially with the private sector being forced to support this, Danny. I think you would understand that. No, though this is very difficult. And I'm not a fan of the situation that we have to bargain under. What I try to explain to

people is it's not like we willingly proceed with authorizing, you know, these significant pay increases. Like, this is really structured in law. And the subjectivity is in an arbitrator's hands. And, and, you know, that's problematic. And, you know, yes, we're limited to 3% growth, but you can't, one, you know, if you've seen one county, you've seen one county. Every county isn't the same situation. And in Deschutes County's case, they're not limited to the 3% because they have two, you know, two plus times the revenue we have to pay. So I think it's a very difficult task of legislating and to take out as much subjectivity as you possibly can probably is the goal. And, you know, there has to be, there is attention paid to ability to pay, but it's not the

only factor. There's multiple other factors. And that's where, you know, an arbitrator can leverage one over the other. There is one essentially that is supposed to, you know, that is supposed to Alashina Mall, which is the public interest. And, you know, in my opinion, of course, I'm managing the side that has to pay. And I think the public interest limiting the growth and wages to inflationary costs is reasonable. I don't think it's reasonable to try to come up with 32, 34, 40 percent payroll increases over over three years. But once an arbitrator rules, we must implement that arbitrator's decision. That's the law. Yeah. And that arbitrator, by the way, isn't elected or accountable, right?

No, I mean, you know, how it starts off is if, you know, the parties can attempt to select their own arbitrator, which I've never had happened in my whole career. And if we haven't selected one, then within five days after we notify the Employer Relations Board, they're supposed to initiate an arbitration. And then we get lists of people that we each get to essentially mark off the list until we get down to the person who's going to be the arbitrator. So not similar to jury selection. But they're not elected. They're basically contracted through the Employee Relations Board. But essentially Jackson County and every other county really, for that matter, is irresistible force-meat immovable object, public sector unions, right? Public employee unions.

Yeah, cities too. I mean, I know, you know, I heard you talking about Central Point, maybe last week or the week before, it's the exact same situation. You know, and like I just explained, what cities are able to do is add a dollar on to their public safety fee or $2 on. And the public generally doesn't, you know, when these fees first started, I mean, there was a backlash from the public about a, you know, a $5 fee. If you live in Medford, like I showed yesterday, you're paying $440 a year. If you live in Jacksonville, you're paying $1,200 a year in these fees.

Yep. And this is why. This is one of the reasons and one of the primary reasons. The county doesn't have that. Our option is to make reductions, and we're required by law to balance our budget. We can't have a budget that doesn't balance. So we don't have more operating revenue if the cost exceeds our ability, which, as I said, $2 million a year in general and property tax increase. That's for the entire county. That's not just for the sheriffs. Yeah, but just the gasoline for the trucks and the squad cars is more than takes care. We're 2,800 square miles. Yeah. And talk about the cost of a squad car. I mean, we're spending, you know, 100 grand. So we were part of a study with Portland State University that looked at total cost of compensation for public employers. There's a phase one and phase two of that report.

If you look at that report, the total cost of compensation for public safety workers is 110%. So if we pay someone 100,000 a year, that position cost us 210,000 a year in total compensation. That doesn't include buying $100,000 car outfitting it with $50,000 worth of, you know, so on and so forth. So one deputy sheriff can cost us up around $300,000 a year. You have to look at the total cost. I appreciate you raising the alarm here. Is there a way out in your view? Because you've had, and the board have had the amazing ability to pull a rabbit out on a hat over the years.

But are we running out of rabbits? We are so limited by revenue, Bill, that, you know, we're going to be making reductions as we move forward into the future. We have been making reductions over the last 20 years. Or here's the thing, being creative about generating new operating revenues or reducing operating expenses. That is what has got. You know, one thing I've talked about before is moving our county to self-insurance for medical. That cut out a big insurance's profit margin. It cut out the taxes they pay on it.

It cut out state licensing fees. So then I'm able to offer the same health care under a big insurance contract, but we pay the claims directly. We also take on the risk. Yeah, but then you told me that if you reduce the cost of your insurance, then the unions just come back and say, well, we just want that would have gone to insurance. we want more pay. Isn't that what happens? Because they look at the total compensation. Yeah. So if your insurance plan costs me $3,000 a year, $3,000 a month, and I can get the cost down to $1,500 a month, you can turn around and argue now your total compensation isn't as high as everyone else, even if it's the same benefit, right? So the other thing that we did is open an employer-sponsored

health clinic where our employees and their families can go get health care. And we don't charge them, but the reason why we don't charge them is we're buying it wholesale. It's cheaper for the tax. for me to have someone go to my clinic and fill a 30 pill prescription of amoxicillin where it cost me a buck 30, then to go to Albertsons and pay their $10 copay and then bill the taxpayer of $40. So, you know, these are all things that we've done. These are things that have saved us millions, and I'm talking millions. You know, the PRS side accounts, 40, well, 52 million with the state match saved us to 108 million. I can promise you you're not going to find another county or city that has done some of these things I'm talking about. This is how we've got, been able to get by. But, you know, it's a law of diminishing returns now, and now we're moving into negative equity. So now we're going to be making more cuts than we were making.

Danny Jordan, the administrator of Jackson County, I know you have to get back and do the rest of your day job there. I appreciate you taking a few minutes and sharing some of the thoughts. And we needed to hear the truth about what is going on behind the scenes that doesn't necessarily get a lot of reportage. Okay? Appreciate the call. I have you back. Okay.

Yeah, thanks. We'll take care. All right. Be well. Administrator Danny Jordan. Wow. It is 836. You're on KMED. Hi, I'm Rob. And I'm Debra. And this is our Timber Tech story. We built the TemporeTech deck.

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Because the goal isn't to react, it's to stay in control with a plan. To learn more, visit pressurepoint roofing.com, where peace of mind starts at the top. News Talk 1063, KMED. This is the Bill Myers Show. Sorry about that. Going to the phones and couldn't get my headphones back on here too. So Scott, go ahead. Morning. What are you thinking? Well, I'm thinking there's not much going on down in the basement.

So I think that's probably a wise thing to close that down to save some money. No, the basement of the jail actually has jail beds in there. There's a couple dozen or more down there. I've been there. I've tore down in there. So there isn't a lot going on usually at the jail. They process people and they send them back out really quite quickly. So that's a good choice. I think that is a really good choice.

And most people that come in, they don't even need to be in the jail in the first place. They need to be up in the mental board. So, yeah, you know, we're going to work on a system. I've actually seen firsthand how that system does, how they process people, they bring them in, they book them, they stay overnight, and then they go back out, and they pick them up again. Well, you do understand that there's a limit to how long, or how many people are allowed to be. in there. Right, right. Okay. I mean, there's Friday and Saturday nights, you know, the kids go out and they go party, they get in trouble. Uh-huh. They end up in the suicide, not suicide. We're going to work on the suicide.

Well, I'll tell you what, what can you bring to the conversation then, Scott? You know, there's a system that is just very expensive for the county that needs to be worked out. And coming from a point of view of managing a plastics company in White City, And I think there's a different way to do this, and we're going to be working on this in 2028. And even before that, and I do encourage the county commissions to look at the system and go in there. All right. We'll do, Scott. Appreciate the call.

Let me go to Brad. Brad. Good morning. Good morning to the award-winning Bill Meyer. What a great statement with Danny Jordan. So he pointed out in the 22 years that he's been here, what they've been able to do is essentially through really, really sharp, financial management, they have lowered operating costs in these other areas to pay for what? To pay for this never-ending march upward in the public safety budget.

If there's one thing people need to understand is that when it comes to signing the check on public safety, the only thing that administration gets to choose is the color of the ink. It's the unions that decide everything else. What he just said that a new sheriff's deputy with his vehicle and operating costs a third of the million dollars a year, These are real numbers. The four cities in California that had to declare bankruptcy for Vallejo, Stockton, San Bernardino, which, by the way, is where we got our last city manager from, and Mammoth Lakes. And it was the public safety budget that sunk all of them.

But what Danny explained is, is cities are able to add on a fee to their utility fee. And they do that in Medford, and they do it in Jacksonville. And Danny mentioned that. but he said we can't do it at the county level so every year every single year bill these public safety costs are going up and what danny said is is they're getting to the end of their efficiency optimization this is a this is a very very serious issue that you guys are talking about this morning yeah and it's a and it's not going to be uh sold anytime too anytime soon from the from the sounds of it but the state law the state law that he had mentioned here is is really

kind of at the root. And it's obvious that public employee unions own the state of Oregon. And because of that, they own this process. And in other words, it doesn't matter how much the system can afford to pay you. This is what we are going to demand and the arbitrator will more or less, the arbiter will more or less say, you're going to get it. It is from the way it sounds like from what Danny talked about. And that doesn't, you know, where is the

Where is the honest negotiation? Where's the ability to honestly negotiate if you can force this? I don't get that, Brad. I just don't understand it. Doesn't work. Yeah. Appreciate the call. Yeah, at least you know a little bit about what's going on.

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a tiered plan maintenance program for home and business owners. Details at Myadvancedair.com. State 46. Well, a good conversation this morning on how they're paying for things, both in Josephine County and Jackson County. And it's looking a little rough, a little rough around the edges. Citizen Krebs. Welcome. What are you thinking?

Good morning. Morning. Again, elections have consequences, right, Bill? Yeah, that's right. Now what? Well, if we think about how the state actually runs, the state. state has always been employee-specific or employee think that they represent the little guy. And the employers are left holding the bag.

Well, the employers in this case are the taxpayers. So we taxpayers, we have no way to negotiate with these arbitrators who are in the back pocket of the state. So, you know, it's a perpetual type of thing. Until we actually find a way to get people to vote these knuckleheads out of office, it's going to continue. And frankly, I think it's getting even worse. We have to get people to get engaged and get them to vote these morons out of office. Okay, which morons are you specifically referring to?

Well, the ones in the public employee sector that don't care about the employers. They only care about the employees. All right. And their own pockets for that better. All right. Very good. I appreciate the call. Thank you for that, Citizen Krebs.

Hi, KMED. Good morning. Hello? Good morning. Yeah. Hello? Me? Yeah, it is you.

Go ahead. I'm very sorry. I can't hear the buzz. I think what citizens need, well, for one thing, we need it. need a Danny desperately down in Josephine County. We're going crazy down here. But citizens need to realize that when they go to these meetings and somebody votes for a three percent change, a three-cent change. It doesn't sound like very much, but when you say that's three cents per thousand, get your calculator out, you've got to say a half a million dollar house. That's going to be

$100 added to your taxes every year. Yeah. And people don't want to get that. They say three percent, boy, that doesn't sound like very much yet. Let's vote for that. Let's go. The other thing I would like to point out is that, you know, we have a lot of people that are calling themselves Republicans, but actually vote like Democrats. And that is done by design because it's hard to get elected down here unless you're a Republican. So people need to take a look at what these people are doing, adding employees, adding costs. In the last two weeks, including, I think with our election, which isn't completely certified yet, but with the election, we've added 20 cents to everyone's taxes, 20 cents per thousand, which roughly ends up to, you know,

$100 more. Yeah, yeah, just with the extra expenses that are going to be, you know, floating in to Joe County, right? Yeah, that's a good point. Holly, I appreciate the call. And, yeah, being a little choosier would sure help at the ballot box. That is for sure. Thank you. It's 11 before 9 at KMED.

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Open for business, we talk with locally owned and operating businesses, and we have another episode today with Lisa McLeese-Kelly Network in Action. Hey, Lisa, how you doing? Good morning. Yeah, great to have you here. And one of the people you also brought this morning is Michelle, I want to make sure you get this right, Miliki, right? That's right.

Okay, got that right. What are you with, Michelle? Rogue organizer. Rogue. Okay, I'm going to ask you. I need the organizer. That is for sure right now. Lisa, let's just break down what it is that you, what service you provide for businesses here in

Southern Oregon before I talk with Michelle here about network and action. For those that don't know, what is the professional aspect that you end up providing and giving them here that is maybe different from other services? Well, there's a whole lot that's in. in that question. But basically we're a group of business professionals and business owners that come together once a month to learn to grow personally, professionally, and then, of course, help refer each other. What are some of the agendas? Because every month you say, you know, here it is network and action. We're going to have this agenda this month. And it's going to be the next agenda,

you know, next month. One of the various ones. It gets an example. Give us an example or two of this. So we have quite a few. So we've got a disc. I'm a certified disc trainer and that's a behavioral styles, personality styles. So we've done that. We now have Mary Hambleton from Soul Canyon and she's going to do colors, which is also kind of the same thing as disc. The book, The Gap and the Gain, which teaches people how to set goals realistically so that they're not setting themselves up for a failure. We've done that. We've focused on the book, Unreasonable Hospitality, which is going way beyond customer service. Financial February, we had our CPA giving, I'd say, over a thousand dollars worth of advice to our clients.

We had our financial advisor. We had our bookkeeper who's also a trained CPA, all talking to the business owners and teaching them how to regulate their finances, what to do in their business, what to do in their personal life. I mean, we do a lot in these meetings. Boy, it does sound a lot. And this is, you know, providing help that really you're not getting anywhere else out there for the entrepreneur, you know, that you know.

And what does it take to actually join? Because I know that there are, you only allow certain types of businesses in or like you won't have competitors in the same groups, right? Right. So what we're looking for really is somebody just to reach out to me and they can do that on s0 networking.com. And then also down have coffee with them. And if I think it's a good fit and they think it's a good fit, then we move forward from there.

This is not a put butts in seats type of organization. It is a, are you the right fit? Can I bring you value? can you bring value to the rest of the members and then we'll move forward. And then the idea is that if you're bringing more value to them, they bring value to you, actually we bring more customers to everyone, right? Well, they bring clients, they bring value, they bring peer support, they bring advice. I mean, it's not just me giving advice and coaching these people.

They're doing it for each other. All right. Let me talk a little bit here and we'll switch over to Michelle Milicki. I'll get this from Rogue Organizer. Now, rogue organizer, is it just what it sounds or is it something different? Tell us a little bit about it. It is what it sounds. I'm a bit of a rebel. So I think outside of the box. So it's not just because I live in the Rogue Valley, but it's because I like to do things a little bit differently than other professional organizers. So take the perfection out of it. You'd assume perfection when you think organizer. And I'm just trying to get people to where they can live in life and not take care of their stuff. You know, what kind of organization? You know, is it one of those things where you come and you look at my garage as an example, then scream and run away. One in four Americans cannot park their car in their garage.

And one in three people aren't having people over to their house because they have too much stuff and they're embarrassed about it. Guilty. Yes. All right. How do you approach this then when, because is it about organizing life or organizing stuff or both? It's about letting go of perfection, letting your guard down and being able to be open and honest with somebody about why you're collecting all of the things that you have and life events happen. People have health issues. people have, you know, marital problems, and it gets you into a space where maybe you've had to pause

and you haven't been able to take care of your house for a long time, and then it just accumulates, accumulates, accumulates. And Amazon keeps coming to your door. Oh, boy, you got that right, too. Well, you know what happens with me is that listeners already say, hey, my husband died and he was a radio guy and here's radio tubes and things like that. It's just like, I can't see them go into the dump. Yeah. How would you help me? We would talk through a lot of that. But I have ways that I'm connected with the community, also through my NIA, where I bring people's things away for them for free.

So a lot of that is you don't have time to get your stuff out of the house and where it needs to go. And I do that for you. All right. Now, do you actually do the boxing and the garbaging and taking it? What kind of service do you provide there? So I typically don't make dump runs. I usually hire somebody else to do that.

But I do take all the donations. And so that's a big, huge part of people getting rid of things in their homes. So I do help box. I also help unpack people because usually if you've done a move, you're so exhausted for moving from one house to another. You're just throwing things in drawers and they don't go where they really. Well, you know, Michelle, you know, the thing with this is that, you know, it's just you start feeling imprisoned by your stuff sometimes. And I bet you have to, you almost have to work psychologically on people.

Oh, 100%. And if you have too many things, you can't even use those things. you just spend your time managing your things. So you can't live life. All right. So how can people know that they're ready for you and how can they get in touch? When they don't want to go home. Home's supposed to be a place where it fills you back up again and you don't want to go there

because you feel like you have so many things you have to do. You avoid going home. And the word overwhelm and stress. Being at home is stressful for you. Yeah, you don't want that. That's for sure. How do they get in touch with you though? Rogueorganizer.com is my website and my phone number is 541-261.

112.1. Yeah, buried in stuff, want to get your life back. Get in touch with Michelle. Final question I would have for you. How has network and action helped you? It's open doors for me. Lisa has opened doors for me, but also my other members. We've built great relationships.

And through those relationships, doors have opened and confidence is built. And my business has grown a lot from just those relationships with my other member. So it's really been in help. It's not just showing up and having coffee and cookies then. I literally look forward to it because it's a close group of friends. It doesn't feel like some kind of a business meeting at all. All right. That's really good. It's good talking with you. Thank you, Michelle. And organize on. Thank you. All right. Lisa, you get the final 20, 30 seconds of this and, you know, make your elevator pitch on who and why somebody's getting in touch of you and how you do that. So really, again, just go to s0networking.com.

If you are a business owner and you're tired of doing this alone, there are other people out there who are tired of doing it alone as well. And we don't do it alone. We do it together. And we're there to help you. All right. And your SOT networking.com. Right, there we go. It's 9 o'clock.

This is KMED and KMED. H.D.1. Eagle Point Medford. KBXG grants pass. What brought down a U.S. helicopter remains under investment. investigation on Lisa Brady. Fox News. It happened near the Strait of Hormuz, an army attack helicopter crashing early today. The two crew members rescued by a drone boat. Sent com's spokesman, Captain Tim Hawkins, confirmed to Fox News that the U.S. crew members were rescued by an unmanned surface vehicle, a sea drone. This was an operational first for the U.S. military, Hawkins

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