Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 06-12-25_THURSDAY_8AM

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

Taking a dive into the new 660 MILLION dollar Jackson County Budget with County Administrator Danny Jordan.

The Bill Myer Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at Clouser Drilling dot com. Jackson County Administrator Danny Jordan joins the program. Been a while since we've had you on the air here, Danny. Good to have you back. And, boy, let's see. Six hundred forty million dollar.

I guess it's actually six hundred forty point five million dollar budget for the next year. It's a lot of money in just about anybody's book even here in southern Oregon and more than actually I think the paper got that wrong that was the current year's budget next year our budget actually grows to six hundred and sixty million okay duly noted okay and so six hundred sixty so it actually grew a little bit. Hey, what is the percentage before we start? I was kind of hoping to get sort of a 50,000 foot aerial view of what is going on with the county.

You don't hear a lot about Jackson County for the most part, at least not a lot of problems usually. Josephine County, of course, also within our listening area, as you well know, just in a world of hurt, given sizing and taxability of taxable land etc etc it's a you know some big issues going on so Jackson County avoiding most of this trouble is that a fair way of looking at at the differences between the two counties right now what say you well I mean there's a big perception out there that Jackson County has all this

money and that we don't struggle but I mean I'll tell a big perception out there that Jackson County has all this money and that we don't struggle. But I mean, I'll tell you, it's kind of split. We do have a lot of money in reserves, but we do struggle with our operating budget, and that's based on the permanent tax rate limit. You know, we talk about the loss of ONC revenue and tax rates. Jackson County's tax rate is $2.01 per thousand. We're in the bottom quarter of tax rates in the state.

With that said, when you look at our $660 million budget, about a little over 48 million of it comes from property tax in the current year. And we collect prior year property taxes of about 800,000. So of 660 million, 49.4 million comes from property tax. If you took what we used to get in ONC payments before they stopped making them a little over $23 million, that would be worth $34.6 million today is how much money we've lost in our budget due to ONC. And that equals about a tax rate of $1.42 per thousand. So instead

of being two dollars and one cent per thousand, we would have the equivalent of another dollar forty two. If we hadn't lost ONC, we'd have enough money to build and operate a jail and do a whole lot of other things. Well I know one of the reasons why Passport ended up hiring you in the first place was in essence to make a lot of that up. Wasn't that? You kind of find a way to to keep the lights on over the years? Yeah, we've been playing catch up ever since, you know, my second week on the job, we had to cut $23 million from our budget and it was pretty tough.

And the truth is, we've been still making that up my entire career here. We have still today in our budget, 75 less FTE than we had when I started 20 years ago. OK, now an FTE is a full-time equivalent, right? That's correct, yeah. Okay, so how fewer do we have now than we did even twenty years ago when you started? We still have seventy-five FTE fewer than we did when I started twenty years ago. Very interesting. How much of that in law enforcement?

It's kind of curious, you know? Law enforcement, we try to preserve. So the way that I approached dealing with this with my board at the time was I went to them first of all with budget policies. So we have written budget policies that have them prioritize services. It talks about what we'll do if we lose money. So for example, we have a policy if we lose federal or state funding, we won't backfill those losses, so we'll make cuts. In budget policies, we talk about having each fund have a specific minimum reserve.

So a whole bunch of, we put budget policies in place, and then I worked with them to prioritize service. So we're going to have to make cuts, but we want to make them targeted, we want to make them specific, and we want to make them actually work towards the revenue we lost, which what we lost at the time was general fund. We didn't need to make cuts in any other funds like the road fund or the airport or health and human services. We need to make it where it impacted the general fund.

So they prioritized public safety, which is primarily general fund dollars, about 80% of the money that we have to spend on operations from non-dedicated operating revenue, or revenue that's not, has to be used specifically for something else, and that we can predict that it's going to be coming annually and consistently, goes towards public safety in our county. Right. Now you have more than a quarter billion dollars in reserves. What is it, 270, 265 something in that neighborhood? Right. It's a little less than that. I think it's about two, what's 133 million in the general fund and about 131 million. So 264, 164 and a half million roughly in reserves. But if you give me just a second, let me make a couple, because this is, you know, this can go right over people's heads and their eyes start to blur when we start talking about all these numbers. But there's a couple of

basic concepts. One of the concepts is the types of revenue we have. So we have four types of revenue. One is operating revenue. That's revenue we get. It's constant. It's predictable. We know it's coming. That's like our property tax base. We can depend on it each year. We have non-operating revenue, which means we don't use it for operations. It's fund balance or reserves or windfalls. If we sell a piece of property, we're not going to get to sell that same piece of property

every year. We're getting that money one time. So, we don't put one-time money into operations because then we'll just make in cuts the next year. The revenue comes either as dedicated revenue, meaning it's for a specific purpose. So examples of that are our road fund where we get gas tax. We have a large fund balance in our road fund that's part of that reserve I told you, but it can only be used for roads. You can't take gas tax reserve and use it for a new jail, for example. Our airport is its own fund, same thing. Any revenues earned on the airport have to be reinvested in the airport.

We can't take, you know, 50 or 60 million in fund balance from the airport and use it towards a jail. Health and Human Services is another one that's that way. So that's an example of, you know, those are dedicated funds. They come for a specific purpose and we can only use them for that. And then we have non-dedicated funds where the purpose is discretionary. We can use it for whatever we want. So what we like, where we get to make the decisions, is non-dedicated operating revenue. When you look at our $660 million budget, and I break it out by those four revenue categories, I told you we like non-dedicated operating revenue, but our total budget, only 10% of the money is

non-dedicated operating revenue. So that's where our board and budget committee get to make the decision about how it's spent. So out of the $260 or so million in reserves, because this is the very common question that I get. We read that you have such a huge reserve. Build the jail, right? This is what I hear and I'll bet you folks hear the same thing. County Commission and you as administrator probably get the same thing. Why don't you just build that jail? That jail is small, it's inefficient and I'll try to explain to people. I said well it's not even necessarily the building, it's inefficient, and I'll try to explain to people. I said, well, it's not even

necessarily the building, it's the operating of the jail that would be a big problem. But maybe we talk about that a little bit here too. How much money is free and clear that the commission could do whatever it wanted to in that reserve fund, in that piggy bank, so to speak, for Jackson County? How much of it, Danny? Yeah, well, okay, so I'll get to that real quick here. So 10% was non-dedicated operating revenue of the kind we like. 33% is dedicated. So what that means is the biggest part

of our operating budget is dedicated funds. We get it, we have to use it for a specific purpose. When you look at reserves, on the dedicated reserve side, that's dedicated non-operating revenue, 34% of our budget is that. So the biggest part of our budget is all dedicated, 33% in operating and 34% in non-operating. So 67% of the budget is dedicated. Reserves that we have in the general fund are about 23%. And like I said, so that's what's called non-dedicated non-operating revenue.

That's general fund reserve. How much money is that? That's the general stuff could be used for anything that they wanted, if they needed to. Yeah, that's what I was gonna talk about. So on that part, about 133 million is that. So first of all, we couldn't build a jail even if we wanted to spend all of our reserves

on that. And I mean, the bigger issue really, Bill, is building a jail is the... I know it sounds like a lot of money when we go out and say, hey, we need 100 million or 200 million or 300 million. That's about 10% of the cost of having a new jail over 20 years because the cost really is in operating it. It's just, it's a hit up front to build it, but the cost of operating over 20 years far exceeds the cost of building it. When you look at our

general fund reserves, I do want to say, yeah, we have 133 million. We take about 17 million of that at the beginning there and we have to set it aside because we need it to operate the county until we collect taxes. So you essentially take money in advance of the taxes coming in later in the year is when they get paid. I remember that. Well, a lot of places have to borrow money to do that. We're fortunate that we have reserves. We don't have to borrow money and pay interest on it.

It's called revenue anticipation bonds. If you look at places like Fire District 5 who struggle, they borrow money to operate the first several months of the year. They have, I don't know what they're doing in their current budget, but they have in the past done that. District 5 who struggle, they borrow money to operate the first few several months of the year. Or they have, I don't know what they're doing in their current budget, but they have in the past done that. So there's places that have to borrow money to operate. We don't because we have reserves.

But we need that reserve every year sitting there. That portion has to be sequestered. And this year it's about 17, a little over 17 million. We also put money in contingency in case something happens. And we have it in contingency because then we can access it just by a board order rather than putting in reserves. And reserves, you have to access it by doing a full-blown supplemental budget. So if we have something that we need real quick, we have the access to contingency. We do that in dedicated funds too.

Like for example, we have money in contingency in the road fund this current year, Friedenburg bridge burned, someone set it on fire, and most places can't go out and just pay for a brand new bridge. Well, we're able to do that. So it's over a million dollars. Most places would have to get their taxpayers to pass a vote to be able to pay to build a bridge. We're able to go out and build it because we keep money in reserves in that dedicated fund. Getting back to the general fund where it's non-dedicated, in that contingency we keep about $22.5 million. I increased that this year because I'm looking at buying down the cost of PERS.

We're allowed to set up a side account. I've done this two times in the past in my career. In 2009 I did it where I took $9 million, invested it in a side account. That reduced PERS cost $20 million over 20 years. So I saved us $11 million on the first time. The second time we did it, we got a state match on it. The state-side accounts were a good idea, so we put $20 million in and we got $40 million reduced over 20 years. So there's another 20 million that we saved in payroll costs doing that.

It looks like the state's going to have another opportunity to do that. So I wanted the money sitting there so we can be able to reduce our retirement costs. So when you net all that out, we have about 93 million in reserves that we can use for whatever we want. We're using 40 million of that 93 million towards a new jail. We have it setting aside. That leaves us 50 million, and people may say, well, 50 million is too much, but 50 million on a $660 million budget is less than 10%. I think it's a good threshold and a good number to have, so we're holding you there.

Okay, I think you did a pretty good job of the 50,000 foot view of it overall then. You know what's interesting is that what cost to build a jail, what's the latest cost? Do we have a new one? Has the sheriff, I haven't talked to the sheriff here for a while, maybe we'll get him back on but I know it's been kind of on hold for a while because there's been no appetite from the taxpayers. They pretty much figured out there's no appetite to pass any additional taxation for a jail. Well, yeah, let me just say this is kind of interesting. While we saved all of this

money over the, you know, this 20 years or so, we also built and paid for 300 million in capital projects. I don't think our citizens understand how unique that is and I think we've become accustomed to us just being able to pay for stuff. We built 300 million in capital projects without any new taxes. The county hasn't asked for general obligation bonds for capital projects since I've been here. And actually since before I've been here, the last bonds the county asked for were the juvenile bonds, which were more than 20 years ago. And I'll tell you that when I came in, we actually paid those bonds off seven years

early. We reduced taxes. We also ended the White City Urban Renewal District early. We hit the cap and were able to reduce taxes from that. And we haven't asked for any new general obligation bond taxes for the county. We did ask for money for all jurisdictions, cities, fire agencies, police, for ECSO to build out new tower equipment, but that's not a county project. The county is just the fiduciary agent. Yeah, and the voters did approve that too from one, right? Oh, they approved it big time. Yeah. Around the 70 plus percent. So the count, you know,

over 20 years, we've built 300 million. We're getting ready to build another 300 million in capital projects, the airport expansion, that's about 180 million. We're doing the multi-use pandemic response center, that's 61 and a half million, which by the way, will make the county revenue. Know a lot of people have criticized that one, but that's a moneymaker for us.

Okay, now I'm gonna get back to that in just a moment. That's another big question that people have been asking, but I can continue with the capital. Go ahead. And we're getting ready to build a new dog shelter at 15 million. We're also on the hook to build a new court, additional courthouse space. We're eligible for six new judges. We got a new judge last year that doesn't have a courtroom and we have no more space, we've remodeled the current courthouse we have as much as we can. So we're going to be on the counties are responsible for providing spaces for circuit courts. And like I said, we're eligible for six new judges, but we don't have space for them. So, you know, those reserves

go go all over the place from dedicated funds like being used out the airport for that project to general funds like a courthouse or a dog shelter that have to be used for that. So when we look at it you know yes we're going to need some help for a new jail but we've been very responsible with taxpayer funds. The biggest growth in our budget in my 20 years, so when in a county budget you have to budget expenditures but you also have to budget savings. So all of your budget doesn't mean you're spending that money. And when we have these reserves for private business owners out there it's like owners equity. And when we have these reserves we're able to do things with them. but the biggest growth in our budget since I've been

here has been savings. We've saved more money in growing our budget than we budget to spend each year. And the good thing about this though is that if we do find ourselves in some challenging times, and I would argue, Danny, that we're probably headed into more challenging times than we might think. And I'm talking about federal transfer payments. Would you agree that we're probably going to be looking at a reduction in grant stream funding? We're already hearing complaints about this via Salem, what's been going on, and one-third of their budget has been from

the federal government in Salem. What about Jackson County? Is that what we're looking at? I don't think we would have had a lot of problems with that. I think that's self-induced by our state being a sanctuary state by fighting with the administration. You know, I don't run those policy issues, but I can tell you that we just basically had to pass on receiving marine funding that comes from the feds through the state because the federal government sent a contract saying that we had to agree to work with ICE.

Well, we can't sign that contract in our state because it's illegal in our state to do that. And then the governor turned around and joined a lawsuit. Those are the kind of things we're dealing with. It's not that we can't get the funding, it's that there's a lot of self-induced barriers based on our state's policies. So we're losing funding that we wouldn't have to lose, but for some of those, as I said, self-induced consequences. In my opinion, we've been following this closely. We have not had a lot of risk of losing a lot of funding. But yes, the state's losing it. But once again, I think that's a lot, self-induced occurrence. So, and, you know, we have policies to deal with that. In government,

you have two options. You'd have to increase revenue or reduce expenses. And if our revenues reduce through state or federal contracts, we have a policy that says we're not going to backfill it. So we'll be making those reductions if that happens. Now you don't hear that coming out of Salem. Salem always talks about how they're going to backfill something when the Fed stops paying something. So Jackson County is completely different. It's the opposite of that. If the money's not coming, we're just doing the cuts. That's what I'm hearing from you, right? That's the way we do it here. Our budget policy, you know, we do make some minor, for example, we received in the Sheriff's office,

money to help us deal with marijuana, a significant amount of money, but it was only for a year, which we stretched out over two plus years. But the Sheriff came to me and said, Danny, I can't hire deputies who know they're just gonna turn around and get laid off in a year. So I said, okay, well, what we can do is we can use reserves so that we lose those positions through attrition across all your departments so that people don't get hired and then believe they're just going to turn around and be laid off.

So we do use some of that money, but it's to smooth. It's not to permanently replace. All right. Hey, I'm going to take a quick break here, Danny, and what I want to find out, if you can think about this, we have talked about the pandemic building over at the Expo. And this being Conspiracy Theory Thursday, we've heard all sorts of claims about this and concerns about it. And I would love to find out what is the, from you then, what is that real purpose? And you hear a pandemic and people are thinking, okay, you know what you're getting at, right? Yeah, I have no problem talking about that, Bill. That sounds great. All right. We'll do that here in just a moment.

And Jackson County Administrator, Danny Jordan, we'll continue that conversation next. The only thing better than hitting the open road this summer is your vehicle looking sharp while you're doing it. So this is the Bill Meyers show. Back with County Administrator Danny Jordan and speaking of the Expo, Expo actually makes the county money does it not? Danny, welcome back. Well I mean the Expo is its own fund. It doesn't make the county money but money that it makes stays and it's fun. It's called an enterprise fund. We have three of those in the county. The airport is an enterprise fund, the expo, and also our parks programs. And they don't receive general fund support. I mean, they're required to basically operate like a business. All right. Now, the pandemic support building that was built a great fanfare. People have asked me

all sorts of questions. And frankly, it's just been something that's been off my radar. I just figured it was something that was ARPA funds coming from the Fed and was probably, okay, we're going to grab the money because it's there and someone's going to get the money one way or the other and maybe we could do something useful with it. What is that all about? Can you explain the purpose of it please? Yeah, so we received 40, I'm going to round here, it's not exact, 43 million American Rescue Plan Act funds. Those funds come with significant restrictions on what they can be used for, really supposed to be used to deal with the impact of the pandemic.

And that's a look, you can broaden that scope out. We had a certain amount of time to spend the money to obligate it and then to spend it. We received about $43 million. We got another $4.4 million, what's called local assistance and tribal consistency funds. It's like ARPA. That money we were allowed to use towards operations. So what I did, instead of using that towards the building where we would have had federal procurement requirements, I put that money towards our sheriff's operating budget, underspent the sheriff's operating budget, and carried over general fund to go toward the project. So it is general fund, but it's general fund that was created from, you know, spending the local assistance and the tribal consistency funding.

One of the things that we did is we got slammed for dragging this project out so far. That was intentional because we're holding this money that we're allowed to earn interest off of. So we earned about, so far year to date, about $5.5 million in interest from the ARPA funds and about almost a half a million from the local assistance and tribal consistency fund. Now that's actually general fund we're earning it on because we use the local assistance and tribal consistency fund. Now that's actually general fund we're earning it on because we use the local assistance and tribal consistency fund towards the general fund budget. So that total revenue is about $53 million. And like

I said, people said, well, why didn't you use that for the jail? Well, first of all, we had to have it obligated by December of 24. $43 million wouldn't build a jail. Secondly, the money wasn't allowed to be used for that purpose when the guidance came out. The guidance has changed multiple times. It's broadened. It's allowed more things. Like, for example, we could use some of the money to replace circulation systems in the

jail. So there were components of a jail we could use it for. And then using it to build a new jail is irrelevant if we don't have the money to operate a new jail. So that was, you know, I know that's some of the questions people have had. We can't just hold the money forever. We have to have it spent by the end of 26. So we're in the middle of doing that.

The project, the total project, 61 and a half million. That includes 4.7 in contingency that we may or may not spend. Now, I'm not promising we won't spend it, but when you back that out, that makes the total project 56.8 million. And as I said, we have 53 million in revenue. So the difference there is 3.8 million. If we spend all the contingency, the difference is 8.5 million. So what we really had to use in general fund net was 3.8 to 8.5 million. So what are we getting for this?

Like this is what people are asking me because they're looking at this as pandemic as looking at this as the next lockdown palace or something, given that there was a lot of a hinky coming from a fed gov and state gov in many cases back then and they get concerned when they see something like that. Yeah. Let me just finish up real quick. So while we were doing this Central Point, was also looking at building themselves a new community center, we approached them

about instead of them paying for and building one, essentially leasing space from us. So while we're going to spend 3.8 to 8.5 million, Central Point is leasing space inside the building for their community center. It's good for them because they didn't have to hire a bond council, they didn't have to get a financial advisor, they didn't have to go in for debt, they were a little less limited on what they could spend and get. So it's a great example of two local governments working together, but it's going to earn us $860,000 a year in revenue for 35 years leasing the space to them. So the amount of money the county's investing is going to come back to us many fold.

Boy, you're almost getting to the point where you almost pay it off. Well, this is what I'm saying. I mean, you know, a large portion. More than pay off. And it gives us a revenue that's constant and predictable. In other words, we get a new operating revenue. And we've tried to be really diligent about taking money

and investing in things that we can earn new revenue from. The RV park is an example, you know, we spent 10 million, but that thing is generating seven to 800,000 a year in revenue to us. It's more than paid itself off. But getting back to this facility, as I said, it had to focus on pandemic response. The name of the building in the contract is Multi-Use Pandemic Response Center because of the funding stream at this point. And it will be used for that. It will be its number one primary purpose is that if we have, you know, we need, we had, we did testing before, we did non-congregate

housing before, we did vaccinations before. When we did all of that, we know, you know, we really struggled with the space we had to make it work. But along with that, we're able to use this facility for other things like when we had the fires and had 3,700 people out at Expo that we had to serve, we realized we don't have a commercial kitchen out here. We don't have a way to prepare food. We don't have enough showers for people. We don't have enough room for people to sleep inside. We had to put people outside in tents. We don't have a way to prepare food. We don't have enough showers for people. We don't have enough room for people to sleep inside. We had to put people outside in tents. We don't have medical breakouts.

So in essence, this could be an emergency response building in general use for that purpose. The issue between us and Central Point is that if we declare an emergency, the primary use is for that. That's built into our agreement. Everything else ceases to take precedence, you know, preference, and we use it as responding. So it's any kind of an emergency. It brings us a lot more capacity to deal with things in our county that we struggled to deal with before. The other thing is, is, you know, it's 120,000 square feet. There's eight full basketball courts in there. And so in addition to the $860,000 a year in lease income the county is going to get, it gives the Expo a new line of business. We're going to enter and partner with Rogue X to do sporting events. Sporting

events make money. They bring people to the community for business purposes. So, you know, this thing is a win-win for us. I know people have been very critical of Weissman. This was, I mean, essentially this $43 million, you know, it was very limited in how it could be used. Would we like to take it and put it towards building a new jail? Absolutely. But we couldn't. So we got creative. We had to meet the criteria. We actually had to write our whole program and proposal. We hired a third party external auditor to make sure that all of our proposal complied with all of the guidelines.

You know, it took months and months. So this has been a project and worked for years. If you go out and take a look now, we actually have steel structure up there and this thing's getting built. We expect it to be completed by, you know, the last quarter of 26. All right. County Administrator Danny Jordan with me. Danny, thank you for actually explaining this. I was trying to kind of go along with tell people, no, this is not like a lock them down FEMA camp sort of thing and why is it. But, you know, you get those people that will call you all the

time and I understand it, okay? Because when you put pandemic in it it rings people's alarm bills okay let us we have time for a couple of calls and then we'll have to cut everybody loose here because I'm just turning into a pumpkin but it's good to have you cover anything on the airport bill what's that now oh did you want me to cover anything on the airport you know I'll tell you what if you can do it briefly here because there's some big expansions going on there too. Okay, and then we got to take a couple of listener calls and then we'll have to wrap this time.

Okay? Yeah, we have, so we have roughly $180 million expansion project planned. It's going to be phased over three to five years. We have three phases. The first phase is about $105 million, $90 million in construction, the rest is soft costs. What we're going to do first is expand the airside concourse, so where people are all jammed up sitting together in the mornings.

We're going to basically go towards the tower. It's going to more than double the size of the concourses. It will allow us to add sky bridges to every jet. So no more walking outside for people to get to their plane. They'll be able to come in and off the plane by sky bridges. We're also going to expand the baggage also towards the tower. So we'll have two baggage carousels, a store to one, and then we're going to add an additional internal working baggage carriage for processing baggage in and off the plane. So that'll be phase one. Phase two will expand the ticket counter and phase three will remodel the current concourse which will allow us to add a new TSA line. As I said, we expect

to start construction in 27. We're negotiating with an architect right now and that's the quick version, Bill. Is there any runway expansion as part of this or just the icon just within the building itself well we've been spending you know funny that the airport was one of my first projects in 2009 the original airport construction was only 500 or 50 million I'm sorry so you know it's more than triple now to just expand the airport but we did rehabilitation of the taxiways BC and the connector taxiways. That was a $10 million project.

We did rehabilitation of our primary runway 1432. That was $8.5 million. Our taxiway north phase, we did 13, almost $14 million. And our terminal parking area expansion, $3.4 million. So we've done all the improvements that we're going to do to make this work and these kind of improvements are things that you know bring people on. When are you going to get Southwest? Well we don't control. We're always in negotiations with Southwest, but these type of improvements help us bring airlines like

that in. Yeah, better facility. All right, we only have time for maybe a couple of calls. We're just going to grab those and then we got a wrap turning into a pumpkin here. Let's go to Brad. Brad, question, comment for Danny Jordan. Got to be quick though. Right to it. Yeah, Brad Bennington. So Danny, you've explained that since you've been administrator, you've negotiated three crises. You had the property tax crash, the great recession of the mid-2000s. You had the Almeida fire and right after that you had COVID and did all that. Well, $300 million of improvements without charging the tax payers at all and this big expansion of the airport. On this

airport expansion, can you explain just real quick why it is so important to local business and so important to our community to have an airport that can handle the demand that just seems to keep increasing almost by the year. All right. Thank you, Brad. Danny? Well, I mean, everybody probably already knows this, but the airport is the main economic engine in our county.

I mean, it brings corporate here, it brings business here, it provides freight. I mean, FedEx overnight, all of these things that people get. You know, we're going to fund this first phase by 40 million out of our airport reserves. So 40 million that's in the airport fund, 40 million in debt, and about 35 million in different kinds of grants. And we, I mean, this is going to take a big chunk of the expansion. I said 105, but it's 115 million. Sorry for misspeaking. But I mean, that is what I would say would be the primary

reason why it's so important to, you know, the local economy. All right, very good. All right, Danny, let me grab a call here. Bob, you've been holding patiently. You had a question about the courthouse and having to expand that because of the Circuit Court, additional judges. Go ahead. Good morning Bill, good morning Danny, Bob, Shandon, Medford. As the county needs more courtroom space, should the federal building downtown on Hawley come up for the auction block? Would that be a good buy to serve that purpose? And I'll say no and I'll tell you why. The cost of acquiring a building really isn't the cost that we're concerned with over time.

It's the cost of operating that building. So if we buy an offsite courthouse, we have to locate a whole duplicate staff there. We have to provide duplicate court security. So we might get a great buy on the building, but over the years, operating it becomes much more expensive. That building's also old. We know at the county that we manage over 100 plus buildings. Some of those older buildings are very expensive to maintain.

Take the county courthouse cleaning and restoring granite, tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars. That building, we have looked at it and it's costly to maintain. It's costly to operate even if we can get a good price on buying it. All right Danny, appreciate the 50,000 foot level. Boy, you're pretty quick with the effects. Do you have that all in front of you? You just have it in your head. You just have to ask. Yeah, no, it's pretty much in my head, Bill. It's what I live and breathe pretty much 24-7. Okay, all right. So AI Danny. That's it. Ad admit it, right? That's what's going on. AI Danny? I wish I was that good. All right, and County Administrator Danny Jordan, we appreciate the take and we'll have you back, all right? Thanks for the look. The 50,000 foot view, 851 at KMED.

This hour of the Bill Meyers show is sponsored by Fontana Roofing. For roofing gutters and sheet metal services, visit FontanaRoofingServices.com. The following preview has been rated EPWaterLab.com. Welcome to the Bill Meyers show on 1063 KMED. Give Bill a call at 541-770-5633. That's 770-KMED. Pretty interesting. A lot of numbers, but hopefully you're able to conceptualize a lot of what Danny was talking

about there on the 50,000 foot Jackson County budget. Not nearly as much reserve funding because everyone would say, hey, they got all these millions of dollars in the bank there. Why can't they build a jail with it? It's a reasonable question and then so much that you find out is dedicated and only a small percentage of that reserve is allowed to be spent however they wish. Okay, Kirk there was a question you wanted to ask and we just ran out of time with Danny and what if you get a chance I'll try to pop him a note and maybe we

can get an answer phone. Okay, what was that? Okay. What was the question that you wanted to ask? Yeah, you're on. Go ahead. I was curious about all these improvements at the airport. What's that going to do? How disrupted will that be with regard to using the airport while that's being done? And then a second question kind kind of follow-up, would be, and how long, I think you said there were three phases, how long is this going to take? I will reach out to him, and I'm sure we'll have an answer for tomorrow, okay?

And I'll do that. Thank you very much. 7705633, we'll grab another call here. Good morning. Hi, who is this? It's Gino. Just wanted to make a comment about the competence and confidence with which that gentleman spoke about his area of expertise. For those of us who have a good BS meter, he definitely knows what he's talking about. Let me say it differently. He spoke from his head, not from his notes. I would have to agree with you. It really was not just... it wasn't off the back of a cocktail napkin, in other words, right? Well, what I'm

trying to say is he has a definite grasp of the intricacies of what he's doing. He wasn't just a poser. It was interesting to also hear about, you know, dragging out projects in some cases, too, just in order to even get the additional interest income from investing it in the time being. It's kind of a smart way to run things. I really admire that aspect of it, rather than just having money sitting in an account doing a whole lot of nothing for the account. That's what I meant by the intricacies of what he does. Most people have no clue about the intricacies of investing in and how, like for instance, somebody who sells Christmas tree ornaments made in China

is shopping for Yuan in the summertime so they can pay their debt when they get the Christmas ornaments shipped. In other words, there's an intricacy in actually buying currencies ahead of time on their dip so that you pay less for what you're ordering in the next year from China. Yeah, and that is certainly the level and beyond of sophistication, I think, that Jackson County Finance has been doing. I think this is one of the reasons why I had hoped that the County Commission in in Josephine County, which has been struggling and they have some real issues there going on,

I think it would be very wise to purchase some time from Danny given that he is a independent gunslinger there. He's on contract with Jackson County, just saying, all right. All right, final wrap up on this one. Danny does tell me though, I don't even have to email him. Danny says, disruption will be there. This is with the airport, disruption will be there, but we will work to minimize it. And we're looking at three to five years for the complete project once we start in 2027.

Thank you, Administrator Jordan. Thank you for listening. And if you have any additional questions you'd like to fire off to the county, you can just do it through me if you want. I'll be happy to do it. At the email, bill at BillMeyersShow.com. Be well, and we'll catch you on Find Your Phone Friday.

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