Facilities requests $50,000 for landscaping and asks that utilities be billed to departments

Lane Rose, with facilities, told the Davis County Budget Committee that facilities is submitting a set of additional budget requests and that the department has restored utility charges to individual department accounts rather than holding them centrally.

“We have now put that back in the department's account for this year,” Lane Rose said, describing a move to make departmental utility costs visible to the departments that use the buildings.

The change, Rose said, reflects actual usage and follows a 12-month lookback that the facilities team used to project costs. Rose said departments previously received an allocation that covered utilities; facilities paid the bills and kept the allocation centrally. The department has now distributed the actual utility expenses back to departmental accounts so those departments must review and approve the bills.

Rose identified two operational increases the department is requesting: an extra $1,900 to cover rising uniform and linen costs tied to staffing changes, and an increase for custodial supplies to keep pace with ongoing price increases for cleaning products.

On capital and one-time needs, Rose asked for $50,000 to replace aging and dying landscaping across county facilities. He said the work has been part of a multiyear plan to improve sustainability and water savings and to create facility standards for new projects. Rose also asked for $10,000 to replace corroded egress lighting between the library and the cabin building, and for funding to replace three aging ice machines in county buildings. The services and parts for a newly built, roughly 120,000-square-foot building were flagged as a $20,000 ask to increase building-and-grounds maintenance coverage attributable to that new facility.

Rose said elevator maintenance and communications is another area with increased cost: three new elevators at the Western Sports Park must be added to annual service contracts and to the elevator communications plan so the county remains code-compliant and can summon help when users are trapped. He said some of those costs should be covered by increased allocations from tourism funds for the facilities associated with tourism operations.

A committee member noted the county transferred $8 million out of capital projects into the animal care operating fund last year to assist with a building. A committee speaker proposed reversing that transfer so the building would instead be funded directly from capital projects, which Rose supported as a way to increase transparency over project expenditures.

Committee members and staff discussed moving to a predictable allocation method based on a 12-month actuals period so departments know in advance what they will be charged. Rose said the team used a 12-month period (from August to August) to set projections this year and suggested continuing that approach; a committee member suggested using a July-through-June period for future allocations to provide stability.

Rose said the facilities team expects to return with clearer allocations and that some midyear budget adjustments could be necessary if accounts diverge from projections. No formal vote or committee action on these requests was recorded in the transcript.

Less-critical items discussed included prioritizing which floor would receive a new ice machine if the committee funds fewer than three (Rose said the first floor would be the priority) and options for lower-cost ice-machine models. Rose described the uniform request as a recurring shortfall tied to inflation and a recent hire at the Western Sports Park.

The presentation lasted under 10 minutes, according to committee remarks, and drew no immediate objections; committee members described the requests as straightforward and indicated follow-up work on allocations and fund transfers would be needed.