Travis County Commissioners Court

July 10, 2012 - Item 27
Agenda

Number 27 posted to begin at 1:40.
To receive briefing and take appropriate action regarding presentation from Capital Area Planning Council of Government, CAPCOG, on economic development incentives and we have Mr. Reese here to give a presentation to us and this was given to the CAPCOG Executive Committee recently.
And we thought it would be a good idea to have it here for the Commissioners court.

>> Thank you, I would like to express my appreciation for having us out here.
I would like to talk about some of the tools that we have that might benefit Travis County.
So I'm going to start with a relatively high overview of what we see traditionally as the goals of tax incentives offered by various jurisdictions.
Generally it's to promote a specific goal such as increasing liveable wage, employment within the community, encouraging redevelopment or infill development between underutilized or blighted area, to come up with a specific type of physical development, so imagine that you've got near transit site and you want a specific type of development there, you may incentivize that to get the desired outcome, to spur environmental or green building standards.
Another really popular one is to fill in a gap in the local economy.
If there's an industry that's community is identified as a source for future growth.
You may offer incentives to try to spur development within that industrial sector.
Which is related to the next goal, supporting industry sector growth.
This may be something that you currently either have a strength in or you sort of see a future in.
Or there definitely are opportunities in which the economic impact is so large or the project is so big you may use incentives to sort of seal the deal.
I'm going to speak, also briefly, about some of the experiences of my executive director, betty voigt.
She has consulted with san marcos on some of their incentive policies.
They basically have significant numbers of properties near i-35 that were underlize utilized and brighted and they wanted to either redevelop those sites or just improve them to fit with the community goals.
And so they looked at certain things related to tax incentives such as performance based goals, so that if developers developed any specific type of way, they also made sure that there were serious claw backs within the provision, if the developers did not hit those goals, those could be goals to build by a certain date or build a specific type of building or just employment numbers.
So one of the tools that capcog has, that we make available to communities within central Texas, is a program called web loci.
Basically, I will get into specifics in a minutes, but ultimately it helps sort of determine the cost benefit of offering incentives and it helps the community understand sort of where they will break even and sort of how far they can go with incentives.
You know, even in circumstances if the community has decided that they are going to incentivize a project, it's often very important to know sort of what their break even point is.
It also gives you a little bit of confidence in negotiating where you realize or sort of understand the point at which you can't really offer incentives above because it would be a net loss to the community.
And it also helps you just understand how a project may specifically impact a community's fiscal health.
As we'll see in the program, it does sort of -- sort of break down the costs and the benefits along fairly discrete elements and it finally incorporates a lot of local information.
Traditional when a company comes in, they may have some sort of broad based strokes of what they see the economic impact is.
Webloci allows you to taylor that analysis to fit the local community.
It's a pretty data intensive analysis and requires a pretty comprehensive set of data points on not only your community but as I'll get into in a second, also some of the neighboring jurisdictions.
So webloci involves two components.
When a community wants to run an analysis on a project, the first element of that is community.
So -- so this -- in this instance you would set up one component that would be all of the information about Travis County.
It would include a host of economic and demographic indicators, sort of measuring the economic and demographic activity of the county as well as a pretty in-depth examination of the fiscal dynamics operating within the county financing.
So where revenue is expended, where there are expenditures, where revenue comes in, that is then merged with a project component.
This includes all of the details of a specific project to be located within the jurisdiction.
So it will look at things like what kind of bill time you are sort of like looking at, the construction employment, the employment once they are fully operational, what kind of wages they're paying, as well as sort of other potential areas that nitrogen rate revenue and -- might generate revenue and costs.
In the city of Austin, for example, what they anticipate the company might be a high user of energy.
You can sort of build that into the model that all right you're going to see revenue on the tax side, but you are also going to see revenue from the sale of electricity, wastewater treatment, et cetera.
So this is sort of a crude or simplified overview of the benefit and cost elements within the project that it will look at.
On the benefits side, again, this will be revenue coming into the jurisdiction, you have everything from sales tax, property tax, business licenses, liquor license, alcohol beverage tax, fees and again revenue sources such as electric power and solid waste.
This program was built by a group of professors at georgia tech who had access to a pretty remarkable data set going back, I believe it was 10 or 15 years, sort of understand the relationship between when you hire somebody not only is the community directly capturing tax revenue for things like property tax, but then how do those people then spend the money throughout the economy and how does that trickle down to things like increased let's say alcohol beverage tax when you see restaurants and the like open up as a result of that.
The second part -- this is arguably the most important part, there are several economic impact analytical tools out there.
Most of them focus primarily on the revenue generating side and we'll see what that looks like in a second.
There are fewer programs available that actually try to break down the costs specific to a project.
So similarly when -- when -- when the researchers looked at things like benefits sort of how they flowed down from -- from that company moving in or expanding their operations from the community, also sort of how costs are divvied up and that includes everything from education costs, public works, general social welfare, health programs, pretty much any cost that is borne by the municipality or the county, so we have -- we have two examples of analysis now sees that we ran a couple of years ago.
Again, traditional, in an economic impact analysis, you would just see sort of this side of the equation, which is the benefits, this is for the samsung expansion.
It was an existing fall, so there was very little leadup time for construction, they turned it around pretty quickly.
That's why in year one you don't see that many benefits because at that point there's just a relatively small number of people employed with the construction to help with that expansion of project.
In year two, however, it comes online and you see a tremendous rampup within that fiscal not the net but -- but the growth benefit leading up to almost $20 million and this was an -- an analysis over a 20 year period.
You see it sort of slowly increases over that 20 year period.
And again this is something that you are sort of less likely to see in a lot of these types of analyses, these are actually the costs which again are relatively small during that first year, during the construction phase, then they ramp up and it's not an

>> [indiscernible] amount of sort of cost associated with the project, building roads, maining facilities to serve this -- maintaining facilities, runs to about 15 million a year.
Gradually increasing in year 10.
The analysis that we had run, sort of assume that the level of incentives would actually drop after year 10 so the costs associated with that drop as well.
This again is the net benefits over the 20 year period of time it comes out to about $42.5 million.
Again, this is important, though, because I think traditional sort of that first number again was just the benefits saying oh, it will be 100 million or $150 million in benefits.
While that's accurate.
It doesn't capture the costs.
Which are not insignificant.
We also looked at something this would definitely be sort of an example of the community trying to get sort of a specific physical outcome with incentives.
A lot of those companies and retailers, normally may not offer incentives to, they are not always particularly well paying jobs and some of those jobs arguably existed beforehand.
However, in this example, the community was going for a more mixed use.
Type of development.
Unlike the samsung project, this had a multi year construction phase again so you see sort of -- less benefits in the first couple of years, again this was also done on a 20 year basis.
The benefits are a lot smaller.
About $1.2 million in year 4 once the domain came online.
The cost again ramp up in year 4 once it opens.
And then in year 15 when some of the incentives fall away, the costs go down.
The net present value of the domain project was about $2.1 million, so it still was a net benefit, although you can see most of that benefit is fairly far along the time horizon.
You are getting even -- that -- I won't say even in year one you -- net fiscal impact -- it doesn't become particularly significant until year 15.
This requires a pretty extensive collection of data points, particularly on the community profile standpoint.
Webloci does include all of the demographic and economic factors, in this case if we were working with Travis County of Travis County, but also requires the collection of information for all of the surrounding communities.
One thing that is often in sort of the news and is also just sort of a part of having an integrated regional economy as there is going to be money that flows both in and out as a result of particularly commuting patterns, we are going to have people, particularly if you are sort of the central county like Travis County is, who work here and make -- make incomes here but may actually live in outside jurisdictions, this helps track that as well to sort of see some of the leakage and sort of identify where the true costs and benefits are of those employees.
So that -- so that requires that annual profile.
Again, you would do one profile each year.
It's for that sort of calendar year.
You could run as many projects with that community profile as necessary.
I then, the following year, that community profile would be updated to reflect new demographic and economic information as well as updated information from the fiscal budget of the county.
The final thing that I will say, there's also a tourism impact, we haven't really talked about this because we haven't really -- I have run it in other scenarios of something like south-by-southwest would be a good example in which you are seeing a lot of the economic impact actually being sort of tourism, that's sort of a different animal than almost every other thing.
You even occasionally get something like a corporate headquarters facility.
I was working with a professor doing an analysis of this type in georgia and they had a -- an atm manufacturing firm.
They did a lot of training, they trained a couple hundred people a week.
So over a period of a year that actually does lead to a pretty significant tourism impact, particularly if you are a community that has a hotel and motel tax.
That can add up to be a pretty significant positive impact.
There's generally less costs associated with supporting something like that.

>> How does this -- I wasn't quite following this table.

>> So to run one, you would -- the fee is $4,000 for that annual community profile.
And again this could be used as many times during that calendar year as you have projects.
And then for specific projects, it would be one thousand dollars.
I helped do this for the city of Austin for example in January every year, me and the city get together and sort of update all of the data and then they actually have the staff where they then run their own project analysis.
But it requires fairly basically entirely separate data sets.
The annual profile is something that I can do entirely on my open, it's just sort of -- on my own, sort of drilling down into the county finances as well as information generally from me to the u.s.
Census bureau, the bureau of labor statistics.
The project profile requires a level of cooperation from the company that you are thinking about incentivizing, generally they are willing to do that since you can make that a condition of awarding the incentive so they have to provide this information so you can run the analysis.
Basically you come up with sort of a sheet and it's significantly sort of smaller than the community profile.
I think that you would probably have to ask for 20 or 30 questions of company that's looking to have incentives, they would fill it out and then you create that component.
And then again you sort of join the community and the company profiles together into a model and then the webloci runs the analysis based on that combination.
So again you would have the annual Travis County profile for 2012 for example and then a project profile for company x, company y, company c.

>> In terms of running webloci, webloci is a comparison of do nothing against the project, against do the project, but it doesn't analyze the -- the -- this project or other highest and best use in the same, on the same piece of dirt.

>> I mean, you can.
If you had sort of a -- sort of a rather detailed envision of what you saw the highest and best use is, you could run that.
But generally speaking, you know, you could sort of say well we're going to -- with this piece of property, right, we have this prospect, they're going to come here, we have all of their numbers we can run through the net benefit of that.
If we have this other use, you have sort of outlined what employees you see, what industry they're in, you could run that against it and see arguably, though, that is a little bit more sort of speculative.
And you can do that but it's -- it's -- it's less informed by I guess sort of like real constraints.

>> But if you were -- if for instance your economic development incentives goal was to redevelop blighted areas, you could say, you know, for this specific blighted area, you've got a commercial block that given nothing happening to it, it's staying exactly the same, you run this webloci.
But if you are looking at it saying we could either try and attract corporate headquarters there or we could try and attract mixed use development, which is the -- which is the better, could you run webloci for that?

>> Yeah, in fact, I have not done this, but I have been in discussions with san marcos about doing something along those lines, for them it's actually about land use considerations.
They adopted I guess a comprehensive plan, I think 20, 25 years ago.
And it's been changed pretty significantly over that period in sort of an ad hoc fashion.
At this point I think they've -- at least some people in the city staff believe that there's way too much residential zoning, that a lot of the commercial and industry property was zoned too residential over the years.
And so comparatively they don't have sort of sufficient land zoned that way and so one of our discussions was to try to sort of draw a line to preserve that you would do something like you were saying is that the city basically can't afford to do more residential development.
They need to preserve that industrial and commercial space, generally, when -- when a prospect comes in, generally speaking, commercial industrial property is a -- is a huge win, particularly from a property tax standpoint.
Generally speaking, companies pay a lot more in property tax and they demand less in services than residential neighborhoods generally speaking residential neighborhoods are hard to make work financially unless it's very high end.
Simply because the property values are generally lower and the demand for services significantly greater, particularly with something like education.
It's a little different in Texas since you have separate school boards, in georgia, for example, where I've done work this is a huge problem is the county and school districts are one in the same and the county will basically rebate, give away crazy incentives because 08% of that -- 80% of that money was going to go to the school anyway and they don't get to vote on it.

>> Oh,.

>> But yeah you could do something along those lines where you could say again given these two projects, again, if you have pretty informed incentives that a big box retail or typically, you know, square footage of the employees and the salaries versus, you know, x project, maybe business and professionals versus which one is going to come out ahead.

>> Uh-huh, okay.
It's their ability to go back in -- is there ability to go back in time to check a webloci analyses to see if -- because of course webloci is relying on a certain set of data.
What if that data changes?
For instance, alcohol bench alcl beverage tax there's consideration about sweeping it from the state.
The general fund in which case we wouldn't see the benefit.
If that were to go away, the benefits would change, not hugely, but some.

>> If it's a policy or taxing issue, that's relatively easy to correct for.
You know, let's say you decide -- let's say that the city of Austin you have a hotel occupancy tax of 10% and you change it to 12%.
You just go in the model and correct for that and you see a corresponding raise in revenue.
It's much harder to go back and sort of analyze some of the indirect benefits.
That's sort of the nature of the indirect.
Clearly if you look at sort of Austin's economy over the last 15, 20 years, there's been a tremendous amount of sort of indirect benefits, that's one of the reasons that you've seen sort of the bifurcation of job growth, you have low wage job, high scale jobs.
That's clearly the result of general growth of this region that is generally fueled by the high skill, high wage employment.
Going back, sort of retroactively to try to identify all right what part of this person's job is dependent on this company, it's very difficult.
Generally what you want to do is again going back to sort of the claw back provisions, one sort of to simplify the process on your end after incentives are awarded, you would do something like tying it to a specific number of jobs, the model based on that, your analysis hopefully was informed by that, then you have sort of in your policy over this 20 year period, x amount of employees at this particular salary in this year.
And you could ask for benchmarks, do it annually, every five years that, you know -- something like a retail, let's say the domain that's going to have a pretty long buildout period that you assume that they're going to have at least 500 employees by year five and a thousand employees by year 10 and you double check with that, if they haven't hit their marks, then they wouldn't be eligible to receive the incentives that they initially were set to receive.
So there are ways to sort of verify this and again you sort of -- you could have that annual profile.
You could update that and say all right if we changed our tax structure, how does that affect what our initial analysis was.
It's a very -- the amount of people that's worked with this program, it's a very divisive program I would say.
A lot of people hate it.
The reason they generate hate it is because it requires so much information.
It's not difficult information.
Generally, to obtain.
It's just fairly exhaustive.
But because of that, it's much less of a black box than many of the programs that we have used before where you can really go in and customize discrete components that you can't in a lot of other simpler programs.

>> Thanks.

>> So if you wanted to find the best possible way to measure cost benefit, you wouldn't use webloci, you would go to another one.

>> No, I actually would go with webloci.
Because you can customize it to such an extent, I think it would be applicable in that standpoint.
The only caveat you have to sort of keep in mind there has to be some sort of reality check, I would say, I mean, you could easily sort of say all right what's the highest best use, it would be sort of a 200 story high rise that has like, you know, hedge fund managers working in it and making $300,000 a year.
You sort of need to sort of look at what exists in the community and sort of base your calculations on that.
That generally speaking a lawyer's office, you know, has 15 employees and they make these kind of wages versus, let's say, a big box store.
But if you have sort of informative and accurate assumptions, there's no problems in running that type of analysis.

>> Okay.
Does the webloci approach assume that the company would come with an incentive, without an incentive, or does it --

>> No.

>> Not address that.

>> It makes no sums either way.
It -- no assumption either way.
You could build in zero incentives, right.
You could say all right company x is coming in with 200 jobs, they're going to generate this impact and basically the incentives just sort of subtract from that benefit.
If it was going to generate let's say $100 million in positive impact and you offered $10 million, well that $100 million in positive impact becomes 90 now, so you can run this with zero incentives.
It's generally sort of two separate by complimentary processes here, right?
You have sort of the technical analytical framework offered by webloci, then sort of a policy discussion that is separate from that -- you know, are we going to offer incentives?
If we are, sort of what are the guiding principles behind that, what are the requirements?
Those sort of assumptions and policy discussions are not addressed within a program like this.
This basically just tells you the numbers of, you know, are you going to make money on this project or are you going to lose money from a fiscal standpoint?
I've even seen projects that make sense that they may lose money in the first couple of years.
Particularly if you have a neighborhood that's severely blighted, that's been sort of a net drag on a community for if not years decades so a community is willing maybe it's a mixed use housing -- housing complex that will have housing for sort of low income people with a retail component.
The developer cannot make the math work on the retail component, but the community says, you know, we want this and it will probably be profitable let's say in year five or year 10 and the community decides to sort of incentivize that, even though they know that they are going to lose money in five or 10 years because they have sort of a broader vision for what they want this development to be and they are willing to incentivize the developer to developer something along the lines that they have that may not be profitable without a level of incentives.

>> Historically, we have looked at two things to determine whether to provide financial incentives.
One has been the capital investment and the second one has been the number of jobs and average salary.
So -- so those would be listed as part of the benefits list?

>> Yeah.
And part of that is just because that's how you get tax revenue, correct?
I mean to figure out what the property tax revenue generation is going to be with the project, the model needs to know what is the tax rate, what is the capital improvement amount, that feeds into it.
The same thing with jobs.
You tell them how many jobs, what the salaries are going to be, that tells you sort of the net income that's going to be distributed within the community for labor.
And then you probably are going to subtract out depending on the jurisdiction.
Some people who don't live in the community, they will still spend some money here, they are not going to spend as much money if they live and work here.
Don't let those people out.
Then you have to sort of look at the type of industry and wage to see the direct and -- I'm sorry the indirect sort of spinoff of that.
You know, if you bring in sort of high-tech, high wage jobs, they generally, one, just because of their nature, of being high wage, they spin off a lot more in direct jobs than sort of a low-wage employment.
And then there's basically sort of the holy grail of all of this, which is probably actually manufacturing jobs, because they arguably have the highest spinoff effects because they not only distribute money directly to their employees and tax revenue associated with a the although of capital improvement, but they also tend to often source locally and get a lot of their sort of primary components within that community as well.
If you look at san antonio that's been one of the hallmarks of their success.
They not only got toyota, but they also got dozens of other companies that feed into toyota's supply explain.
Supply -- supply chain.
This takes into account, if you have a manufacturing facility, even if it doesn't have higher wage it's a much broader impact than any other industry.

>> We were told that the high tech companies have pretty much the same effect.
That the ripple effect is --

>> They do in regards to sort of salary, a lot of times they don't have the associated capital improvements.

>> You don't think they have suppliers that try to locate near them?

>> They do to some extent, no doubt.
It's a lot less tangible.

>> How would you quantify that.

>> So you actually can put it in there that if the company sort of said like we're going to source x, y and z, right?
If we're -- a lot of times you will actually see this in manufacturing, even if it's high tech.
But if it's services you could actually, you could feed that into the model and say all right well your designing a website, you are going to need graphic designers, you agree to high a graphic design firm instead of buying physical components from a subcontractors, you are basically subcontracting services and begin providing spinoffs.
A lot of sort of the it industry does work in a similar way, a lot of subcontracting, boutique firms that feed into a larger supply chain.
But from a tax policy perspective that's often a lot more difficult to tax than sort of physical real property.

>> It also would require --

>> Two or three more questions.
The economist who claim to be able to measure this, would look at different projects and say the economic impact is this amount.
And when you ask them how they arrived at it, how the high tech company, I have samsung in mind, they kind of point to companies that we're not here before -- that were not here before samsung came, but who located here after samsung opened and who provide a whole lot of the materials, equipment, supplies, that samsung needs.
So should we discount that or --

>> No.
I mean I think you can reconcile those two sort of stand points.
I think the difference is it's not directly measurable.
You include that maybe when you are thinking about incentives, sort of on the fence about whether or not it's appropriate.
I think that could sort of persuade you if it's a positive thing.
Again it's either a large project, samsung is the largest source of foreign investment here, it's also remarkably good with the image of not only Texas but the Austin region, I think there's two -- there's two facilities in the world that make -- the chip that runs the iphone, one in south koreary I can't, the other one here.
Having said that the ability to measure the benefit of that is extraordinarily difficult if not impossible.
There's something to be said for that.
If you look at last week air bus announced they are going to build their first facility in america, they are looking at alabama.
Alabama sort of got its start by offering massive tax breaks to mercedes benz, demonstrating that you can operate here and you will be successful.
I think samsung here has demonstrated to global companies you can make the innovative products in Austin and do it profitably, and that's not for nothing.

>> Two more questions and then I'm done.
The early tax abatement projects that I recall sort of located on vacant land.

>> Yes.

>> And we looked at what tax revenue do we get from that land today?
And in a couple of the cases it really was sort of ag land and while we were getting more than zero, it wasn't much more than zero.
But when you put $100 million facility on it sort of overnight, the tax revenue greatly increases and then you add the number of jobs to that and the number is big.
So I guess the benefits in the webloci model would factor, would include that, too.

>> Absolutely, yeah.
And in fact kind of a -- Commissioner Eckhardt was saying, you could run these two things right.
Business as usual with nothing on it and that way it wouldn't even be theoretical because you have the tax records right and you could run sort of that.
There's probably some marginal services that, you know, you need fire and police maybe in that area.
Doesn't demand a lot of services, but some and sort of say, you know, you are lucky to break even right now.
And when you come in and build a $100 million facility you're going to see $10 million a year sort of in that positive impact.
But you can definitely sort of compare the before and after scenarios that would not be difficult.

>> Okay.

>> Finally, when I look at the cost to the county, it's kind of modest, but when I look at the school district, when you factor in a number of new kids at the school, I guess it could be much greater.
On the other hand the school district's tax rate typically is much higher than ours and often they don't give financial incentives, so there may be a wash there.
The city of Austin, I guess, is a little different.
When the samsung located here, they located on a state highway.
Rather than a city or county one.
City of Austin looked at I think sales tax revenue and utility costs and came up with some pretty big numbers.
So when you determine the costs, you look at all of the governmental entities, you know, I guess that I would be primarily concerned about Travis County because that's where I am.
But would we also factor in costs to the city of Austin, the school district?

>> Not necessarily, honestly, those would be -- they are wholly separate about but complimentary analyses.
This would take in the financial impact just to Travis County.
As you cited those are due to taxation ability, a lot of times very different and service requirements very different cost benefit analyses that must be done.
So for the county, for example, you don't have to worry like you said about school costs, that's not a factor.
No matter how many kids need to be educated fiscally that doesn't have a direct impact on the county.
Now, if the school board needs to also look at this, that would be a very different picture.
They would have different tax revenues and they would have very different service allocations.
And then again if you are looking at the city of Austin, you get sort of other areas, you have sales tax, again hotel/motel tax and sort of -- sort of service improvements that the county just doesn't -- the city has different ways to generate revenue, they also have different things that they are going to pay for.
So you actually run all three of those, but unless they are sort of engaged in the process, too, you wouldn't necessarily run all three.
At the end of the day, you know, you are trying to make sure that it works for your fiscal health.
It may be up to the city of Austin to decide if it works for them and there are -- you can actually sort of envision projects that may make sense to one person and one entity and not necessarily to the other.
Finally, as you said, I think, you know, this is a rather complicated analysis and it's obviously not free, but I think relative to the generally the amount of money involved, from the community standpoint, kind of seems like a no brainer to me, talking like millions of dollars in incentives.
It seems like it would be prudent to try to sort of analyze that and, you know, sort of have confidence that you have determined that it is outside of public policy considerations that you understand the true fiscal impact of that decision.

>> Court members?
I'm wondering if for instance, we have heard a lot about growth not paying for itself.
I'm wondering if there is a way in webloci in taking a look -- you were speaking of san marcos struggles with figuring out their mix between residential and commercial.
I'm thinking at the intersection of 2222 and 620.
There was no incentive from the county for 3 m to locate where they located but because they located there, there's been a tremendous growth in residential density on a grid that's inadequate.
And so I'm wondering if there could be a utilization in public policy for webloci in looking at the tradeoffs there.
Because that was a green -- a green fill build but in a compromised area, you know, in all frankness, we didn't have any ability to stop it.

>> [laughter] but -- but -- but it would be interesting to quantify it.

>> So this is something I think particularly in Texas is sort of an ongoing issue that people like me are still trying to sort of work out.
One, there isn't a lot of power to stop that so your policy tools hopefully -- something like webloci impacts your public policy as far as offering incentives and sort of who you are going to give them to and how much you're going to give, something like residential development, there's not a lot that you can really do to influence that.
Secondly, webloci isn't particularly well built for a residential analyses.
It may take some time.
I'm hoping that capcog's sustainability grant that we got from h.u.d., it's hopefully going to be able to do some of this type of stuff with less sort of commercial industrial analyses.
But you are correct.
Generally speaking, outside of either relatively high end housing, that is just extremely expensive, or let's say a retirement community, where you don't have -- education is really sort of the bare end service provision cost, generally speaking residential communities don't really pay their way.
That's one the reason you see sort of bedroom communities sort of trying to fight to get businesses is because that's really sort of the cream of the crop is to have, you know, something like a downtown Austin that generates spectacular property revenues and comparatively few service provisions sort of at the macro level.

>> Thanks.
The first part of your presentation was different than ours.

>> Was it really?
Travis County -- we want you to be transparent down here.
We want to have you back.

>> All right.

>> [laughter] I would send you.
Do you just have -- does it start here?

>> We missed the first page and then missing the fill-in.

>> Oh, I'm sorry, we start at this right here.
So we missed the first two or three pages, right?

>> Yeah that's sort of the background I apologize for that, I'm not sure what happened.

>> We thought you thought we wouldn't catch that.
Get it to us when you can.
If you just send one of us a copy, that one person can copy the others.

>> I will send that basically that's sort of the background, I apologize, this was originally actually two presentations.
The policy discussion side and sort of the approach to incentives in general and then a second presentation specifically focused on webloci and fortunately --

>> We are a dues paying member of capcog and in good standing.

>> We're very thankful for that, sir

>> [laughter]

>> Can you just send us the presentation electronically.

>> Absolutely.

>> That would be the easiest.

>> I actually took it out this morning because I didn't know the -- what the -- what the computer capabilities were going to be looked like.
That's blanked out because I had animation, it doesn't print well.
I will send you a print appropriate company either later today or tomorrow morning.

>> We appreciate you coming back.

>> Thank you, sir, have a lovely afternoon.

>> Really appreciate it, john.

>> Thank you.

The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.

July 3, 2012: Travis County Launches New Video Playback System

Our new streaming video system uses a single video clip for each session and items are linked to specific locations on that clip. Some browsers and mobile devices do not recognize the location information and display the entire clip. If this happens the "start time" will help you find your item's video within the larger clip.

If you encounter playback issues check out our video playback help page. If you still encounter problems let us know.

On July 3rd, 2012, Travis County began leveraging free resources by posting Commissioners Court meetings on Youtube. Previously every video clip was edited separately and hosted on the county's video server. The old system also required RealPlayer to view the video clips.

The new systems save time and resources -- and that saves taxpayer dollars!