City Council - Regular Meeting

Thank you.

All right, we're ready to get started. Today is Tuesday, May 26, 2025, and this is our work session. I'm calling this meeting to order. Can we have roll call?

Mayor Daggett? Here. Vice Mayor Sweet? Here. Council Member Aslan? Here. Council Member Garcia? Present. Council Member House? Here. Council Member Matthews? Here. Council Member Spence?

Here. Council Member Spence, would you lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance?

Yes, please rise as you're able.

The mission of the city of Flagstaff is to protect and enhance the quality of life for all.

The Flagstaff City Council humbly acknowledges the ancestral homelands of this area's indigenous nations and original stewards. These lands, still inhabited by native descendants, border mountains sacred to indigenous peoples. We honor them, their legacies, their traditions, and their continued contributions. We celebrate their past, present, and future generations who will forever know this place as home.

Thank you. Next up is open call to the public, and I don't see any. So then next up is May work anniversaries.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Shannon Anderson, your Assistant City Manager. As Mayor mentioned, we're going to talk about our May work anniversaries. We've got our first year work anniversaries in our Human Resources and Risk Management Division, our library, which is part of Economic Vitality, Management Services, Grants and Contracts, our court, our Municipal Court, as well as PROS. water services, and then planning and development services. So all of those divisions have a member on this list celebrating their first year anniversary. Moving on to our five-year anniversaries, Alec Latino is a project manager within our city engineering division. We also have Angie, who is our payroll manager, as a five-year anniversary. And then in our 10-year anniversaries, we have Heidi Derryberry, our new budget director. We also have a 10-year anniversary in our fire department with John Jaramillo. He's a fire engineer. And Krista Snow, who works in our water services. It's regulatory compliance is the group that she works in in water services as a supervisor. So if you can join me in congratulating those May work anniversaries, that would be terrific. Thank you very much.

All right, next up we have Downtown Curbside Assessment.

Okay. Do we need to make sure that they're online or is everybody good?

I can see them.

You can see them? Okay, great. Great. We have someone that will be sharing. Oh, there it is. Okay, perfect. Good afternoon, Honorable Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Council Members. I'm Gail Brockman. I'm the Parking Program Manager for the City of Flagstaff. And this afternoon I'm super excited to introduce to you an amazing group of individuals that we've had the pleasure of working with. over the past six months or so. They will be giving a brief presentation and sharing some draft recommendations from the curbside assessment that we've been conducting six, seven months now. But before we get into that, sorry Vanessa, I did want to give a little bit of background, a little bit of history. When the program was implemented in 2017, the primary goal was to create a better experience for residents, visitors, and the businesses by managing parking in the downtown area. As we all know, a vibrant downtown depends on parking that is not only available, but has a good turnover rate. So since then, the program has evolved and we've adjusted as needed. And over time, it became clear that effective parking management was more than just managing pay to park spaces. It was managing the entire curbside. This included loading zones, pickup zones, ride share zones, oversized parking, and much more. We've also realized that in order for the program to evolve and to grow and to thrive, as well as the downtown, we needed to take all of these elements into consideration and look at the bigger picture. And to do that, we needed to bring in a consultant. We needed subject matter experts to evaluate our curbside and our program. So we went through the RFP process and we selected Dixon Resources Unlimited to assist with our assessment. As a part of the study, we've been super busy. We've conducted parking counts, we've looked at turnover rates, we've held stakeholder meetings, we've reached out to local vendors, we've talked about delivery issues, and we conducted an online survey. The study is still ongoing because we are continuing to collect spring and summer parking data information. We are continuing to gather feedback from stakeholders and the public, and we wanted to do all of this before we bring you final recommendations this fall. But in the meantime, we did want to share with you what we had right now. So I'm very excited to introduce to you Vanessa Soulsby and Dixon Resources Unlimited to present our initial findings, some draft recommendations, and we'll have a discussion afterwards. So Vanessa, if you're ready. Great.

Thank you so much, Gail. Appreciate it. Good afternoon, Mayor and council members. On behalf of our entire team that has been working on the curbside assessment, thank you very much for having us this afternoon. Next slide, please. Our team at Dixon works with municipalities and universities across the country, and many of us have been responsible for directly managing parking and transportation programs ourselves. For the past 18 years, I have worked both in the public and the private sectors. Most recently in the public sector, I was parking, transit, and fleet services manager for a tourism-based community in Colorado with a similarly sized program to park flag. Next slide, please. As your consultant partners on this project, we have been tasked with the following project goals. Evaluate existing parking and curbside programs and service offerings. recommend strategies to optimize curbside access for all users and to do our work within the context of resident, visitor, and other stakeholder parking and access needs. Next slide please. The curbside assessment includes six key tasks and our final deliverable will be a curbside management action plan that Gail just described. Plan recommendations will be supported by industry best practice, the local Flagstaff context, and community input, all combined to create a data-driven and adaptable roadmap for future investment in Park Flag as a vital part of the downtown ecosystem. Next slide, please. This slide just provides a visual representation of the project tasks from the previous slide. illustrated along our project timeline. As Gail mentioned, we have done a lot of work to date, but we are still headed into a summer that will be busy with additional activities. And our presentation today includes highlights from what we've learned, what our process has entailed thus far, and where we think we might be headed with the curbside action plan. And as you'll see on this slide, we've woven stakeholder checkpoints along the way with another opportunity coming up at the end of June for community members to learn more about draft plan recommendations. Next slide, please. So our first major project task was the curbside needs assessment. And this task included a desk review of all of the programs, policies, organizational history, founding documentation, and structure of Park Flag. We also conducted job shadowing and ride-alongs with the Park Flag field team, visited with city staff in other departments, planning, finance, traffic, just to name a few, risk management, sustainability. And we really want to recognize Park Flag for their strong customer service orientation. organizational transparency and communication. Over the past few months, we've observed that the important characteristics of a strong parking and curbside program are here in Flagstaff. And most importantly, you have a staff team that is eager and willing to grow and learn and do the best at their roles. And as you'll see on the next few slides, the opportunities for growth that we have identified should be considered more as tweaks or refinements to your current program and service offerings, not a large scale overhaul of your system or big significant changes. We really view our work as refining and moving forward upon the strong foundation that your staff team and your community has built with the introduction of parking program. Next slide, please. With data collection and analysis, we are looking at where people are parking, how long they're staying, which areas of the park flag service area is the busiest, and which parking areas have additional capacity. And I can't say this strongly enough, but data collection, understanding your inventory and how your parking is utilized on and off street, That is the foundation of our work together, and so we are including not only one round, but two rounds of data collection to make sure we account for the seasonality of Flagstaff. In our second round of collection, the spring slash early summer collection is currently in process and will be wrapping up in mid June. Next slide, please. And so, while it's important to wait until we fully complete data collection to share any conclusions or results that will again guide our final recommendations. we've included a sample image from our winter collection to illustrate the type of output that you'll be receiving as part of this project and. kind of the short cliff zone version of what you're looking at we like to see that rainbow of colors because if we see too much read that high occupancy. that means there's not a space available for that next parking customer and you're not getting that turnover that Gail mentioned. If you see a sea of blue, that means there's really not a lot happening in the area and maybe means that parkers are not there and or regulations have become too strict. And collecting and understanding the data is really important because parking management often, while there's some science involved, it feels more like an art sometimes because we are trying to apply parking management strategies within the context of an often competing stakeholder priorities. That curb space is limited. It's a public right of way and everybody wants it and likely for a different reason. And so we're trying to manage these competing needs, provide access for all users and not do so in a way that is too intense or over managed. And so we scare people away and make parking too difficult in your key commercial areas. Next slide, please. Our stakeholder process offers various checkpoints, as you saw on the timeline along the way. We just want to make sure that we hear from different points of view, from residents, visitors, if we can. Always a very hard group to capture. And then business owners as well, because they all have different perspectives about how that curb space should be used, as I mentioned on the previous slide. To date, we've used the following strategies that you see on the slide in blue, and we've just gathered a snippet of kind of the most frequently mentioned comments also on your slide as well on the right hand of your slide. And I think the most notable thing for us is that kind of slider bar you see at the top, your experience with Park Flag. This comes directly from an online questionnaire that was completed earlier this year. And we heard really positive feedback from the folks that participated about their experience with your parking management team. And I have to say that's really exciting and exemplary because, as you might imagine, even in the surveys that I did when I was a parking manager on my own program, when you ask people about parking and the people that manage parking and their experience, you're generally not going to hear positive things. To see that slider really skewing towards positive is extremely representative, I think, of the customer care your team has taken. Next slide, please. As part of our technology review task, we looked at functionality, ease of use for staff, and the customer experience for all of the technologies you see in the green boxes, from pay stations and mobile payment to the more internal processes and dashboards that your staff are seeing. And in short, the city has made some really great investments and is taking a pragmatic approach to ensuring that your existing technologies are well-maintained and they are performing to their fullest potential. And I will note that increasing the use of the very convenient mobile pay option and improving the customer experience at the pay station, which is something we heard through our stakeholder checkpoints, are two key areas that have been included in the recommendations we will be talking about here shortly. Next slide, please. So over our final few slides, again, being mindful of our time allocated today, we're going to share a sampling of where we're headed with our draft curbside action plan. Again, this is going to be your staff roadmap that shows recommendations, where to start, implementation steps, magnitude of cost, timing. We really want this to be a usable document for your staff team. And what we're going to do over the next couple of slides is we'll touch on each of these seven focus areas and not go through every single recommendation on the slide. but just highlight some that we think are important to share with you here today. Next slide, please. In operational enhancement and personnel development, our main recommendation is a commitment to annual data collection. Again, that parking occupancy and turnover data that was mentioned earlier, that should be the foundation for any municipal parking program and for your future policy and service delivery decisions. regular data will support a refreshed parking aid coverage routes staffing needs and will be complemented by recommendations from the next focus area technology and equipment because those are really the tools that help you have a efficient well-run and streamlined operation next slide please within technology and equipment We've jumped right in. We are not waiting until the planning process is finished. So we've been actively working with your staff team as they review options for pay station upgrades, making sure you're really getting the most out of the life of that investment of those technologies, looking for ways to both complete mandatory compliance updates and also improve that customer experience. And looking to the future, using data collected by your license plate recognition technology that you already have and through your payment transactions, we can support future investments in other technologies like public-facing parking availability, information tools, and signage, which can in turn improve the experience even further for those looking for a parking space during some of Flagstaff's busier seasons. Next slide, please. Our recommendations around accessibility really focus on ensuring compliance with federal and state regulations. I know that is the goal of your team. That is the goal of every well-run municipal parking program. And just ensuring that you have an ADA plan that understands to the best of its ability where improvements need to be made to make sure that you are creating the most equitable parking and curbside experience for all system users. And if case, of course, you know this should be done within the context of your existing and complimentary staff risk management department. The Commission on inclusion and adaptive living there's a lot of really great local resources with which this particular focus area can be implemented next slide please. And while I can't say this enough, Park Flag really excels at customer care. The customer experience is something that parking programs and curbside management programs should always be continuing to invest their time and talent. And again, leveraging Park Flag's really strong relationships with not only interdepartmental city partners, but also with the Downtown Business Alliance Association, Discover Flagstaff. There's opportunity for active promotion of parking options through joint customer campaigns that have a focus on promoting options, promoting mobile payment convenience, various permit offerings and much more. And additionally, with the launch of the online questionnaire this year, that's a great way, if done in the future on an annual basis, to not only know how you're doing, but to identify challenges your customers might be facing that you may not be aware of. Next slide, please. Recommendations surrounding the signage wayfinding and branding focus area are going to be zeroing in on reducing and clarifying on street signage and pulling park flags, really colorful and well done brand work across all elements of the program from pay station decals to staff apparel. And again, this one is really a tweak, refine and build upon a strong foundation that you have to date. Next slide, please. For policy and program development, throughout our meetings with staff, we've learned that there's active exploration of a number of different potential policies or programs, including notably shared parking agreements with some private or commercial property owners. This is really in line with best practice in terms of both land use and in the customer experience. And looking forward and guided by regular data collection defining a predictable cadence for any sort of parking fee increase, whether it's permits. or the pay to park offerings can really help stakeholders understand what those fees will look like not only today, but in the future and as a quick side note before we go to our last slide. I've told staff this, but I think the 2025 parking rate fee and analysis report was very well done. I thought it was a great resource and outlined the plans for the proposed rate increases in a very easy to understand way, which is not often the case with documents of that type. And I do read a lot of them. Next and final slide, please. And last, but certainly not least, we are recommending a balanced approach to curbside management. with several recommendations supported by stakeholder input, including expansion of the highly popular 15-minute zones paired with increased communication about loading and accessible parking regulations with additional enforcement as needed. And I want to commend the city for including Park Flag as a subject matter expert and resource in many conversations about curbside planning that were even ongoing while we were on site in December. This is such an important role that the organization can play in the support of other curbside activities. And so with that, I will thank you again very much for your time. I know that was a lot of information in a very short amount of time, but I am happy to answer questions and or to support Gail in answering your questions as well. Thanks very much.

Thank you. And Gail, did you have anything to add before I take questions and comments from council?

No, I don't. Vanessa and her team have been amazing to work with, so we're ready for questions.

All right, thank you. Council Member House.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Gail. Thank you, Vanessa. This was great information. I'm wondering, just going back to kind of the beginning of all of this, How do you balance the data on local access and use versus tourism use when it comes to access for parking downtown? Is that a differentiation that's made or is that a consideration that's put into play?

I don't exactly know how to answer that. I know that we see the numbers, and we see that the data is definitely different if you're looking at our busier times of the season when our tourists come. We did most of our data collection after NAU was out on winter break, and you can definitely tell it's a slowdown in downtown Flagstaff. And we are excited to see what our data counts look like Um, when we collect that information, we are in the process. We started a couple of weeks ago, um, through June. I'd love to see, you know, what it looks like in August. Um, and we may have to conduct that on our own. We just won't be able to provide it to our, um, our consultants. Do you have anything to add Vanessa?

Sure. Uh, council member house. That's a terrific question. And I think my answer is twofold. Um, when we look at the existing, uh, park flag service area and your total on and off street supply. We really do look at that as one supply. We don't look at, you know, visitors are gonna use this portion or residents are gonna use this portion. But what we do is we understand the unique needs that potentially a visitor needs, maybe a two or three hour drop-in window where a resident has, they're gonna come downtown, they're gonna have coffee, they've got to visit a business, they're gonna go do a few other things. We understand kind of what that user profile looks like. And then we make sure when we're managing are supplied that there are different options that are tailored to not so much the type of stakeholder, but the type of trip. So short-term trip, a longer-term trip. And then for visitors, especially, they're usually in a hurry. They're usually distracted. They have, as we called in the program that I managed, they have visitor brains sometimes and are not really focused on you know, understanding regulations. They want to know what they need to know very quickly so they can get on and enjoy your beautiful downtown. And so just making sure that the options are very clear where they need to pay, how much it is, how they can pay so they can get on with their day. So more so in the, I would say, programmatic and signage tailoring to that visitor short-term parking. Um, and more when we look at the entire system, tailoring what we're managing to the trip versus the user type. So hopefully that answered your question.

Yes. Thank you both. I would like to add one, one bit of interesting, um, statistic. Uh, we, we do monitor what the average stay is. We put it in our, our annual, our monthly report. I'm sorry. Um, and it is interesting that the average day is between 2.2 hours and 2.4 hours. throughout the entire year. So we don't see a lot as far as the average stay downtown for parkers.

And not to over-answer any question, but if I could just add a little piece as well. One of the things I did want to point out is that we do have employee permits and permits that recently were put into place that allow for contractors and other folks who work downtown a lot, always going to be locals, to access the downtown at a different rate that way. And we try to do a really good job of advertising to... to everyone, but I think locals are more likely to know about the free parking options that are around the outside. Municipal facilities, thank you for allowing us to do that with this parking lot are available on weekends when there's not a farmer's market in them or after business hours. And so I think that is another one of the places where we do see a difference between You know helping to differentiate is where we can find ways to Help locals to access different permits or to help make sure that they're aware of some of the other options for how to get in through bus passes through walking Multimodal transportation, so I just wanted to add that piece as well.

Thank you Thanks very much the only other thing I had then was just more of a comment slash question Just when it comes to the signage wayfinding and branding recommendations that are being made, I'm thinking back to conversations that I've had with folks from the Downtown Business Alliance and members of the Commission on Diversity Awareness who have talked about the potential for wayfinding signs that speak to some of the history of the downtown area, the trade routes, the cultural identifiers and like namings of streets or things like that. And I'm wondering if that's been considered as part of the branding that could happen, um, with some of the signage. So whether it was, uh, if you're already thinking of redoing the wraps on the, um, the parking kiosks and just, adding on part of that, some of that information, I think would be a wonderful way to kind of start the ball rolling on that. But just finding those ways to integrate that information and so that people are doing more than just paying for parking, they're also getting a little lesson about the city and learning some of that history at the same time.

Mayor, Councilmember House, I appreciate that comment very much. And I mentioned that we're working under leadership of Shannon Anderson. We're working with the DBA and a number of other divisions within the city to identify where we can reduce some of the numbers of signs, enhance the way the signage works, make the signage better, and bring some of those pieces in. I don't know if you want to speak to it directly, Shannon, or if that's enough. But we're working on that pretty significantly under Shannon's leadership right now. with the DBA, who is here, by the way, in the back, and I'm sure is gonna happy to share with working with them as well on that very specific topic.

I'd love to hear more, Shannon, if you had anything more to add there, or if not, no pressure, you don't have to.

So we have a downtown beautification infrastructure team that meets on a monthly basis. One of the things that we're looking at doing is having the downtown wayfinding signage also match or coordinate with the street signs that you see in the downtown area. Right now you have the downtown signs and then you also have the required or regulatory signage all in the same space. So it creates kind of a clutter. And so the goal is to try and create one sign that can include both elements of giving that notice of place as well as meeting the regulatory requirements to reduce the amount of signage that you'll see in the downtown area. So the team, Heidi Hansen, has actually agreed to lead the efforts in pulling in Discover Flag staff, Beautification and Arts, some of our specialized staff that know how to bring those things to life and make sure that it's attractive both to our local community as well as our visitors.

And I would like to add one more part to that as far as bringing in artwork in the history. We have been talking about the possibility of wrapping some of our kiosks. We've talked about it in several different conversations. Because when you do add artwork to something like a parking kiosk, it's also less likely to be graffitied or destroyed or marked or painted on. So that is something that we've talked about as well. So that would be a great opportunity for us to include some of Flagstaff's history downtown by putting it on our parking kiosks.

Thank you all, thanks Shannon for that added information and that's it for me.

Council Member Garcia.

Thank you Mayor. Thank you Erin and team for this presentation. My question is pretty specific and maybe a little bit niche. I was curious if you can toggle back to slide number eight. And just help clarify to me, I didn't quite understand this slide that well, and I'm looking at the loading area. Does that mean that's where the future loading area is presumed to be, or that's where the best area for loading is? If I'm not mistaken, it's on the street that's across from the post office.

Gail, did you want me to jump in or would you like to lead off?

So I believe from, I'm looking at it, it's very tiny and I apologize. It's depicting our current loading zones, correct, off of LaRue. So we have several small loading zones downtown and they have limited hours, limited hours of use from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. And they are located on Aspen Avenue between Beaver and LaRue and then again on Aspen Avenue closer to the post office. between San Francisco and WC Riles. We also have a newer zone that we've added in the last several years on the Rue in the morning, which is, it's an interesting zone. That's where we really hope that they use the time that we've allowed for them to use because once that becomes a two-way street, it's hard for larger trucks to go in there and load and unload. But those are the existing zones that we have.

Okay, I don't think we need further explanation on that one. I was just wanting to make sure that we were protecting those either 15-minute zones or the loading zones that you specified, including the one that's on San Francisco between 66 and Aspen where that curb cut is for the alleyway.

Yes, yes. So those are loading zones, like commercial type loading zones. We will continue, alleyways will be continued use for loading and unloading. They're super important. It's very rare that I do believe that you see alleyways used for loading and unloading within downtowns. So it's important that we keep those for that as well. The 15 minute zones, we had those during 2020. Most of you probably remember the, small signs that were placed out on the street. So, yeah.

I was thinking of something different. I'm sorry.

No, we'll bring those back, though. We're definitely considering where's going to be the best placement of those for everybody to be able to use for different purposes.

Thank you for that clarification on the loading zones.

Vice Mayor. Thank you, thank you Vanessa and Gail for your presentation. I have a couple of questions and a couple of comments. Gail, I'm wondering, or Vanessa, were there any particular curbside users that emerged as the biggest source of a conflict, like deliveries, short-term parking, ride share, anything come to top of mind?

I'll let you lead with that one, Vanessa. As far as from just our counts, Vice Mayor Sweet, or from our survey?

I think counts and the survey.

Okay. The survey, I think our survey results showed that there were a lot of issues with loading zones. And I think if anybody's driven downtown, they've played almost like a game of Frogger, where business owners have talked about it, where they go in and out of delivery trucks. I think that was the, the number one issue that we saw through our survey information. And honestly, through our counts and turnover rates, everything, it looked pretty good. Our turnover, we didn't see people staying on the curbside long-term. We did hear from some survey results that they wished that there were more short-term parking, more free parking for coming downtown, just picking something up. And if you can add anything to that, Vanessa, I'd love it.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the question, Vice Mayor. I think from across the in-person conversations and then the online questionnaire that we had, I think the biggest kind of conflict area was the conflicts with loading and loading, which is a very necessary activity that needs to happen to support a vibrant downtown. And so I was really pleased that Gail was able to coordinate a virtual meeting with some of the commercial delivery providers and was able to access contacts for some of just the bigger you know delivery drivers that have you know goods services laundry etc that needs to happen and needs to be in the downtown on a regular basis we had a really productive conversation about you know times of day that are necessary for loading and excuse me hold on just a second Sorry, I'm just getting over a cold. And so the times of day that are best for loading, the best communication methods to not only reach out to the leadership of those companies, but the frontline drivers. And so that was really helpful to establish that communication so that we can support the staff as they navigate that necessary activity. And also we had a stakeholder meeting with some members of the DBA that was raised as a top concern, just kind of the loading and unloading and making sure everyone had a space at the curb. which is a challenge that many communities, in addition to Flagstaff, face on a daily basis, especially communities that are more remote, more rural, and that the deliveries have to happen, you know, kind of in a certain window. So definitely that was the highest kind of trouble spot, but it sounds like staff are really making some good headways to determine how to navigate around that very effectively.

Thank you for that. So for those of you online and in the room, I've been a business owner for 25 years in downtown, so I have seen many years of parking. And just some thoughts, I do agree with the loading is like playing Frogger and I have noticed that you know they are coming kind of earlier in the day and trying to get get what they need done and I appreciate that and I'm glad that it is a conversation in the alleyways when they park if they stay for too long I mean it's blocking some business access so it's helpful if they can be reminded do what you need to do and then and then please move instead of grabbing lunch in between your deliveries. And I think enforcement of the loading zones just in general, I know that they can get clogged up and I have seen people like customers or maybe business owners park there for hours in the alleyway and that really can clog things up so it's something to notice and to talk about and when events are downtown I have seen different companies event companies or people putting the events on park their trucks and vans unloading all the event equipment, but then they don't move their vehicle. And so they're also, because there's no enforcement, kind of clogging up the pedestrian slash alleyways for cars and bicyclists and pedestrians wanting to enjoy the activities. And I'm wondering about the employee permits. So I know for my business, I do not allow my employees to park downtown if they're here for actual working at my shop, if they're there otherwise, whatever. But they get the employee permit, and then I'm wondering, do we track that? So when they don't work for me anymore, how do you know that they shouldn't have that permit?

That is a good question. We have just started. Thank you, Vice Mayor Sweet. I appreciate all the information as well. We have just started with the help of my lead parking aid, James Smith, working on reaching out on an annual basis. It's incredibly difficult to track because if you buy it monthly, if you buy it annually, it's different times throughout the year. And so we reach out asking for proof of employment. If we see a permit has lapsed several months and they want to reapply, we reach out asking for additional. They cannot use the same. Information that was provided but it is it is incredibly difficult to track our system isn't automated as far as asking for proof of Employment information on a regular basis, but it's definitely something that we've talked about And that we can see people taking advantage of you know, especially People that maybe live downtown and work downtown and see that as an opportunity to have a parking space all of the time It's it's it's been difficult, but we're definitely we're working on it Thank you, though.

Thanks for taking that into account. I would just think that, you know, I'm one of several businesses downtown, and if we're all having our employees not, if they're taking advantage of that permit ongoing, even after their employment ends, it seems like it could clog up the employee parking situation. So thank you for looking into that.

Yes, and it is, just to put out there, it is wonderful. There are a lot of managers that manage their own or manage their employees' parking permits, and I'm not saying anybody has to do this, and they don't necessarily pay for them. Maybe they make them pay for it. It comes out of their check, however they want to manage it. But it is really nice when managers and business owners manage that because then they let us know that so-and-so has left, and it helps us track that. So just as an added thought.

I think that's a great reminder. Thank you. And my last question. Thank you, Mayor, for bearing with me. With your staffing, I've noticed that we may be short-staffed quite often. And right now it's summer and there's a lot of events and weekends and nights. It seems like maybe there's not a lot of monitoring going on. How are you managing that and how do we get to a more sustainable program to where we have the right staff on at all times?

That is a great question as well. Thank you. We did just finish a large round of interviews. We are in the process of hiring three, possibly four parking aids for the summer, if not long term. Definitely three long term, that fourth one. Is it up in the air? It's difficult. It's difficult to retain staff. And I know that's citywide. The rate of pay, maybe somebody can make more money down at a fast food restaurant as opposed to being a parking aid and being yelled at on a daily basis because they're making people pay to park. It's not a glorious job. And I love my staff. My staff members are amazing. I am very short staffed right now. but they come in and they do good work. And we are civilian police department employees. And so we do have to have additional background checks and things of that nature. We have a physical that you have to pass. So it seems like it's been even more difficult lately to employ and keep staff. We love to see people go on and do amazing things with the city. You know, we've had two people just leave for the police department recently. And I think that's amazing, because they're going to go out and do good things. But it does make it difficult for us to enforce on a regular basis. We are short on the weekends, but hopefully not for very much longer.

Could I just add there? Gail's amazing at working to keep staff going and getting these processes hired and everything she said totally makes sense. I just wanted to add in that we also do have a license plate reader. It goes on one of the cars. And so we're trying to take advantage of technology to help stretch where manpower, womenpower, peoplepower shifts a little bit. And so that is one of the reasons that we budgeted for and purchased that license plate reader. It allows us to maintain that consistency. The most challenging areas when we're low staff are the two-hour parking areas because it's hard to get people back there ongoing. But with that license plate reader on a car, just for anybody who's listening, we can still get there, and we will. So yeah, I think it's a combination of the continuing process of hiring and working with staff. We did just have... In this most recent budget, we wanted to say thank you for supporting the ability to increase the pay rate for staff that have more experience. That's going to be very helpful with retention and with recruitment. So we're taking a number of steps with support of leadership and counsel and also through technology, we're going to be finding ways to do that. I think it is going to be a challenge to maintain full staffing ongoing just because of the way the position is structured at times. But with technology and with some of the changes that council leadership is supporting, we think we're going to be able to get there, and Gail's doing a great job already. So thank you.

Great, and I just, one final thought, wanted to thank you all. I know you're working with limited staff at points in time, and everyone has been very friendly. My customers come in, and they ask me about the parking, and it just seems like even though you are working with a skeleton crew, you're still doing a great job. I really appreciate it, and I hope we can figure out how to keep everything staffed at a better level. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate it. And we love to hear it when business owners and managers are parking ambassadors for us. We appreciate it.

Oh, Council Member House, just let me know that Vanessa's hand is up.

Oh, yes, thank you. I just wanted to... David actually jumped in and stole what I was going to say, but I wanted to underscore the important use of that license plate recognition technology investment that you've already made, not only to stretch the reach of your field staff when needed. But also going back to the comment related to employee permits, when you have a regular kind of annual data collection cadence, when you're looking at parking occupancy and turnover, how well utilized your facilities are. One of the things that when I was managing a municipal program, that we introduced into kind of a regular annual council update was the utilization of employee permits as well using your existing LPR tech, the license plate recognition technology, just to understand, you know, maybe you have, you know, 500 permits out there, but how frequently are you seeing those permits throughout the day? And that just gives you a sense of not only how well they're being utilized, you know, maybe where those employees are frequenting most often, It also helps you for future decisions about permit pricing. So I think that that tool was an excellent investment. It can be used to help supplement a number of the items that were raised. So thanks very much.

All right. I don't see any additional questions from council. And we do have an online commenter.

DIRECTOR HAMPSON- Thank you Mayor. We have Tyler Denim. Tyler if you'd like to unmute and offer your comments now.

SPEAKER 10- Hi. I'm here as the Executive Director of Flagstaff for Affordable Housing. We want to chime in on this agenda item because proper curbside management is essential to meeting Flagstaff's housing and sustainability goals. Heavy-handed and inflexible parking mandates increase construction costs and cut homes from projects. But in order to get away from parking mandates, we need a functional curbside parking program to manage public parking. So our main message is to endorse the work outlined in the curbside plan. It's really great. and it's not flashy work but it touches on so many aspects of urban life housing affordability sustainability traffic congestion access to downtown economic vitality and so forth that are essential to a functioning city aside from that main myth aside from that main message i have a few comments about content in the presentation on slide nine the parking occupancy map It seems there is wide variation between streets. Some are above 80% occupancy, the standard optimal target, while others are below. That implies to me that the city could explore a basic version of dynamic pricing, perhaps by defining Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 streets with lower pricing for lower tiers. On slide 18, we really support shared parking agreements. Shared public parking by averaging parking demand across many different uses is always more efficient than private parking for every separate use. And I believe it's much more cost effective than building new parking structures. On slide 16, we really support technology improvements that reduce the economic friction of payments. When people complain about paying for parking, I strongly suspect that the economic friction, the process of engaging with the meters or the app, is actually greater than the cost. They're not really complaining about the dollar or the two dollars, they're complaining about that barrier of interacting with the technology. And finally, as Flagstaff carries through with parking reform, we'd like Park Flag to be ready to step up and expand parking benefit districts into residential neighborhoods with high parking demand. Townside, Southside, and maybe even Sunnyside are the immediate ones that come to mind. And that's all my comments, so thank you for your time.

Thank you, Tyler. I do appreciate your comments always. They're always very well thought through.

Mayor, that was the only online commenter we had.

Thank you, Tyler. Council Member Garcia.

Thank you, Mayor. And I wanted to circle back to my point because something else came up. So I was happy that you guys mentioned that the alleyway parking or loading and unloading is fine. But there's two specific places that I don't want folks to lose access to unloading and loading, and that's on San Francisco between 66 and Aspen on the right-hand side right at that curb cut. And then also on Aspen as you turn right from there, where the next curb cut is, right directly across the street from the Monte V. I don't know if that's official place to unload stuff, but... Anything over a pup trailer, those are necessary to be able to park your 40 foot, 48 foot, 53 footer, not block people in because you have that whole curb to do it in and you're on a one lane access to where people can get around you. So are those two places in specific going to remain able for those bigger units to get in there when they need to and unload?

That's a great question. I apologize, I'm struggling with the, I'm a very visual person and without a map it's difficult for me to understand where that's at. We are not planning on making any changes as far as, you know, other than adding the 15 minute zones in different areas. If it's on the street specifically for loading and unloading those, unless Dixon and Vanessa have other recommendations, which we'll bring back later this fall, you know, those loading zones that are currently out that are signed will remain.

All right, that sounds fantastic. I was just looking on this map, it looks like the yellow is only on that street where there's absolutely really no place that you would need to unload. The post office has their own crew, their own place, and then across from there there's really nothing except for a bank teller. I mean, I'm sure somebody would love to unload the money for the... from their truck into that. But there's just no feasible downtown businesses that aren't a pretty steep hike up to San Francisco Street or anywhere in that area. So when they mentioned reaching out to a lot of logistics companies, it made me scratch my head for sure, knowing those facts.

And I do agree with you. When loading zones are on one-way streets, it does make it easier for everybody to get where they need to go. Thank you.

Please, Mayor. Thank you, I just had a couple of thoughts. Back to the loading zones, I just wanna make sure that I'm stating how important it is that we keep working to figure this out because downtown is very highly visited. We have a lot of packages coming in and out, food deliveries and it's important that we're not, that we find a good balance between not hindering what the loaders need to do and the businesses get their products, we get our packages and we're not clogging things up that way. So I know it's a delicate balance and We can keep talking, and I know you'll figure it out. The other thing I forgot to mention, I am really wanting to hear more on the 15-minute zone. People just want to pop in and pop out real quick or get a cup of coffee, and I would like to explore that more, and I can't wait to hear what you come back with.

All right. Any additional questions or comments? Thank you so, so much. Thank you. All right, next up, item number seven, public safety ballot measure.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Shannon Anderson, your Assistant City Manager. I am joined today with a group of individuals. We'll introduce them as each one comes up. But I wanted to let you know today's presentation is going to include some of the background on process that brought us to today. The General Fund is the primary funding source for all of public safety, the Citizen Committee recommendation, and then the impacts to fire, emergency management, aircraft rescue and firefighting, and police. City staff also presented many of these details behind the recommendation council received today from the citizen committee back on March 24th. But we have done our very best to not repeat all the information, but begin with a few background slides to make sure we are covering areas we still hear questions about prior to presenting the citizen committee recommendation. Again, this journey started in January of 2025 when City Council identified core services, public safety, and fire resources as their budget considerations. We came back in April of 2025 at the budget retreat and presented what are those public safety needs that had been identified. Also defined that public safety includes fire, emergency management, aircraft rescue and firefighting, and police. We also heard from council in September of 2025 support to continue exploration of a public safety ballot measure and to engage a citizen committee. That citizen committee began meeting in November of 2025 and actually finished here this month, May 13th of 2026. They met almost weekly for the six month period and heard about the city's financial outlook, Fire, including wildland fire management, emergency management, aircraft rescue and firefighting, police and financial opportunities. All of the presentations as well as recording of the meetings, Q&A documents are all on the Connect Flagstaff site and we've provided a link within the presentation. This financial overview includes a few key points from the March 24th presentation about the general fund, as well as some new information relevant to the recommended budget presented in April and being considered by council later in June. The current general fund budget is $117 million, and 54 of those in the general fund are dedicated to public safety, which accounts for approximately 46%. There is an additional $29 million outside of this 46% also invested in public safety for a total investment of $83 million towards fire, emergency management, aircraft rescue and firefighting, and police. Public safety staffing accounts for 311 of the 981 full-time employees, which is 32% of the staffing in the general fund. In the fiscal year 2026-2027 recommended budget being considered by Council, staff have funded two additional full-time positions in police and fire, reallocated some property tax and new construction revenue towards public safety to create more ongoing capacity for contracts and commodities, and maintained competitive wages and benefits to retain public safety personnel dedicated to delivering public safety services. Many on the committee and in the community have asked with this investment, how did we get here? The Great Recession impacted the city's financial means, but staff did not experience a true decline in the community expectations for service delivered. This means all existing capacity has been spent trying to grow back the losses of personnel and the contractual and commodities to do the work. There was not enough new revenue to address this plus the growth that was happening at the same time. And staff has accomplished as much as they can through efficiency measures. In addition to trying to stabilize available resources to meet growing needs, there have been additional challenges surfacing. such as ongoing costs in personnel, implementation of cost and benefit changes to retain staff, investments in technology to help us monitor and provide reporting, and aging infrastructure, which then costs us more to maintain on an ongoing basis. The operating costs are outpacing the average 5.4% the general fund grows each year. We use an average because sometimes the general fund is up 17% and other years it's down 7%. But regardless of revenues, the cost to employ the staff and the contracts and commodities needed to do the work continue to rise. This is why the city has been using all new revenue plus one time set aside money to fund the public safety needs. You can see by the illustration on this slide, there are still over $18 million in operating requests that go unfunded in the organization, including those needed by public safety. We continue to see capital costs grow following the pandemic that impacts how much it costs to purchase the specialized vehicles, equipment, and technology needed to accomplish the work to maintain the public's safety. Additional changes at the state and federal level also impact the city's capacity in the general fund. A recent example is the 35% reduction of state funding that supports our dispatch center. City staff presented the background that has led to the citizen committee recommendation back on March 24th. Throughout the process, the committee members expressed the need to keep any increases as low as possible given the cost of living in Flagstaff. This is why the committee recommendation includes multiple funding sources. The general obligation bonds reduce the need for a tax increase by providing funding within the current capacity for one-time purchases. Staff also worked through the process to reduce the cost by identifying the most critical needs. The $511 million 10-year total at the beginning of the conversation has now been reduced to $237 million, of which $182 million is ongoing revenue that's needed to support the ongoing needs of public safety, such as personnel. It was clear community members struggled to recommend a sales tax given the community concern about cost of living, but believed the needs should be addressed now to avoid any significant issues in the future. Mike Levin, who's the chair of our citizen committee, is here to tell you a little bit about that committee process before we lead into their recommendation. So I'll invite Mike up to the podium.

Honorable Mayor and Council, privileged to be here this afternoon. So, as Shannon has demonstrated, we spent the past seven months, pretty much every Wednesday, and I want to thank the committee, the citizens that took their time to be a part of that, and particularly to staff, leadership, and the department heads who sliced an infinite amount of data for us at each and every meeting. We tended to ask for more. I believe you received a letter The summation of those efforts are a half a percent sales tax increase, a $40 million bond, and asking the council to visit the RIP funds as possible funding sources. Underlying all of our efforts, it became painfully evident that all of these departments are underfunded, facing greater challenges at a time when the city continues to grow both numerically and geographically. And not necessarily speaking for the committee, as an aside, as an individual, sales tax increase is never very popular, but neither are cities that cannot meet their basic needs for fire and safety. So happy to answer any questions and thank you for your time.

Thank you, Mike. And thank you for... all of your service and helping to keep things moving along on this process. I know that it was probably at times overwhelming and all of you who served on the committee put in so much time and it's so appreciated.

The only thing I'd add is when I said yes, Shannon didn't share it was gonna be seven months.

Nor did she say it was going to be every Wednesday for seven months. That will teach you. We have a question from Council Member House.

Thank you very much for the information that you just provided. Just going back to the comments that you made regarding the difficult decision to kind of break down where this funding is coming from and the way that the committee did, I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit more to how you came to that breakdown and especially with the weighing the often unpopular opinion of a sales tax increase. That's still the ultimate decision that you all came to and I'm wondering if you can give just a little bit more insight into how you reach that as the best option.

Well, a lot of this is the power of committee because There are many differing views and a wide range of suggestions and feelings on the sales tax in particular. But through an iterative process, when the first number was $511 million, that's pretty demonstrative of the needs of these essential departments. So not necessarily to provide the lawyerly answer, but as we progressed over the six months and everyone in the committee voice their concerns, whether it be representatives of downtown business who encounter that sales tax challenge. The question about the amount of the bond, well, the need for physical assets and bricks and mortar is much more than the $40 million that was weighed into the decision. So at the end of the day, through the strength of the committee, I think we arrived at what is the happy balance for the community of Flagstaff, while supporting these very essential services.

Thank you very much for that.

Council Member Garcia.

Thank you Madam Mayor and thank you Mr. Levin for everything that you did for the committee. I was always chomping at the bit to see when they were going to come on YouTube after that Wednesday meeting so that way I could get caught up on things and I had a great time watching them. At a certain point, honestly during that, you know, the time that it takes you guys to go through these meetings, I'd say about halfway through, I was a little bit concerned. So I just wanted to open up the air for you guys, for yourself to kind of explain how you got to that end, if you had left anything out. Only because there was such deep, and diverse conversations during each part of the process. And sometimes it was looking like folks weren't really happy with doing anything. Different parts of the funding mechanism wasn't a good idea. How do you think that we got to such a great consensus of a package that, in my opinion, seems to work really well in the end?

Well, I think the consensus was driven by efforts of staff and the department heads who very articulately laid out their needs and their programs and then our challenge to them as a committee was to go back and Establish by tier levels, you know, what are really, you know fundamental That there's no wants in any of this but there's absolute necessity There's necessity and then long-term needs on that but as I mentioned earlier That's the strength of the committee to come through and at the same time have a sensitivity to the greater community because we represent them as well, not just the community, just not the committee, but what is a palatable amount, what, you know, an acknowledgement of these services. And it's an opportunity for the community council and all of us to at least show support for these important departments. Hopefully things pass in November. But at baseline, it demonstrates that we care about these folks and we support these departments.

And I was really happy that you wanted to paint the picture of staff's inclusion into these really challenging questions and at times places where the committee might have not been sure exactly if they wanted to move forward with things. And the main reason I wanted to depict that for the public that wasn't as invested as some of us up here were in those committee meetings is to say that so many questions were identified and then answered with enough information that it made the entire committee in the end amenable to what you guys are serving to us today. So thank you for your leadership and thank you for all the work that you did with the committee.

Thank you. There was an infinite amount of data that was sorted through because as I said, every week there was a different set of questions and subset of questions and staff in the department has always replied in a very finite and detailed manner.

Thank you, Mike.

Thank you.

Shannon, you may proceed.

Thank you, Mayor. So moving into the Citizen Committee recommendation, after all of their meetings, receiving community survey feedback, and a month of open call to the public comments, the Citizen Committee is recommending a half-cent sales tax a $40 million general obligation bond, and an evaluation of the water resource and infrastructure protection fund fee in 2027. The half-cent sales tax will provide the ongoing resources to hire additional all-risk firefighters that respond to wildland fire calls, residential or commercial fires, and provide emergency medical services. It provides those staff members with the academy and ongoing training resource and the specialized supplies and equipment to do the work. It provides them protection through cancer testing and ensuring they have important safety equipment like turnouts. The ongoing funding will provide training for police personnel, maintain all public safety facilities and response vehicles, and emergency planning. It also provides for additional staffing and emergency management, aircraft rescue and firefighting, and police, along with the equipment and supplies they need, such as public safety radios, computers, and personal protective equipment. The $40 million general obligation bond can be supplemented with development impact fees. and will provide the one-time resources for construction and equipment for new and existing buildings, purchasing vehicles, cardiac monitors, radios, computers, and software. The Water Resource and Infrastructure Protection Fund fee established a sustainable, stable, and long-term initiative to maintain investments in watersheds and city water infrastructure via the Wildland Fire Management Program This fee is dedicated to the wildland fire management program whose prevention efforts protect Flagstaff's water resources and infrastructure from wildfire. The current rate is 53 cents per thousand gallons of water, which equals about $1.27 million per year in revenue. The recommendation to evaluate the fee is to ensure the fund can pay for the increasing costs in personnel and equipment, given the importance of wildland fires prevention efforts. Science demonstrates wildland fire in a treated area is far less severe than those that are not treated. The citizen committee stressed when discussing the recommendation the importance of not losing sight of what the community felt was most important. I've pulled those areas that received a rating of 3.51 or higher. Please keep in mind this is on a scale of one to five. It's come from the city community survey presentation to demonstrate those things the community supports the most. There was also a recent survey completed by FUSD, and those survey results demonstrated 41% of their respondents said they would support a public safety sales tax and bond with the school's overrides at the same time. Next, we wanted to spend some time sharing the impacts these additional funds can have in providing public safety services to the community and those who visit. We will start with Chief Gaylord from the Fire Department, move on to Daniel Kelly for emergency management, Chief Conley to discuss police operations, and then Tim Skinner for aircraft rescue and firefighting. So I'll turn it over to Chief Gaylord now.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. It really is a pleasure to be here today and have the opportunity to talk about properly resourcing your public safety elements here. And it's been a long discussion. It feels like a year to you all, but I will tell you that these conversations for us started two years ago. And there were precursors that were a little bit I guess older than that. So thank you for the opportunity to be here. The critical elements of the measure that the Citizens Committee had put before you, fundamentally, more firefighters on the ground. And if you'll recall, and this is important, the all-risk firefighter component that we have in our community Every fire station has got a structural firefighter. Those fire stations have paramedics responding to emergency calls, and they're also the frontline defense for wildland fires, which is the number one risk here in our community. And so the opportunity to address those ongoing staffing, I've got some data that I'll share with you in an upcoming slide, and it kind of paints a really clear picture as to how we got here, perhaps a little bit more clarity in some of the challenges. But we talk about what needs to happen at the fire department. Risk and demand are the two primary types of factors that we look into. The risk for us is an evolving risk. We're absolutely seeing more wildland fires. We're absolutely exposed. We have a greater wildland urban interface zone within the community. And we're absolutely, from a fire protection standpoint, we've doubled the number of four or more floor buildings in our community. I'll talk a little bit more about that as well. Reducing the severity of wildfire threats in treated areas. We've talked a lot lately, and many of you have been involved in that conversation. That includes coming inside the city limits now. Because we've done a really good job of working on the area of the National Forest in and around the city of Flagstaff, and now we have recognized that the remaining threat is inside the community. And so the ability to begin to program protection in those areas. Insurance is really a very complex and multi-pronged approach. We tried to explain it to the subcommittee. I don't know if we did a good job or not, but it's complicated, and we worked through it. Two major factors, I'll just leave you with this. Protecting our community from wildland fire through the preventative engineering enforcement and education piece is very much a part of what's needed. It takes people and programming to do that. And then the other piece is, and particularly for the business community, The insurance services office is an industry-based rating service. They evaluate our city's building safety department and their fire department. And for years, we've been unable to move the needle on improving the city's insurance services offices rating, and the number one factor has been on-duty staffing. The ability to sustain and improve response times as the community gets more congested, our ability to move through the community, becomes more difficult and we are now experiencing new development in new growth areas of the community where we do not have a city fire station plans to do that. This effort will allow us to address those future concerns as well, not to be confused with catch up concerns which much of this measure will provide for catching up. Yes.

Sorry to interrupt, but just really quickly. We've had this conversation many times, but do we need a fire station right now, a new fire station right now, regardless of additional growth?

Yes. And the way I look at it is if we have already... put land use planning in place that says we're going to develop that area and we're already seeing PLATS improvements occurring in that area, then yes, we're in a point where we need to put those resources in place. The consequence of us not addressing that in a timely manner is as we begin to see more call activity in that portion of the new part of the community, our existing community will feel the impacts of slower response times into the existing portion of Flagstaff. So it's time. I mean, we're in a point now where we're getting ready to go into design phase. We have not secured construction phase funding. This bond that's being proposed would do that. But we've got a lot of work to do to put that in place. Perhaps some of the more difficult part being up staffing, training, and preparing our fire department to take on another station in another growth area.

Can I, sorry. Yes. To belabor, I'd like to belabor this point. When we discussed having a station that was large enough for the apparatus, I think it was the ladder truck, correct? We don't currently have room for a ladder truck that we have coming in, is that correct?

We don't have available bay space. And that's, quite honestly, you know, we have several very nice firehouses, but they are underbuilt. They never anticipated growth, and they will not accommodate the additional fire protection units that we need to have in place. And they didn't anticipate the fact that we have a multifaceted mission. We provide municipal firefighting services, fire-based EMS, Residential structural response and then we have another fleet of equipment that is needed to support the wildland fire response as well and so our stations are somewhat cramped and Yes, we are we're having the deal and our team is working on Dealing with we're gonna have to make some interim measures on apparatus storage. That is definitely a challenge this bond issue anticipates expansion and modernization and modernization just It's not a code word, but that means making those firehouses safer for our firefighters.

And this is all under current conditions regardless of future needs?

That's our condition now.

Thank you.

Thank you for the question. adequate resources to respond to large-scale multiple incidents, you know, the types, and I'll share a little more information as we go into future slides, but the, we need more firefighters at more complex incidents. This morning we had a command and meeting with all of our captains to talk about our newest threat to firefighter safety in the community, It's batteries and e-vehicles and what that means to us and how we're going to address that risk. We're watching in the larger municipal fire departments in larger communities and we're watching the prevalence of serious fire loss and loss of life because of the introduction of e-bikes, e-vehicles into our communities and we need to be able to address that. Facilities for personnel and apparatus I've just mentioned, we have several facilities that are undersized. So even if we had the ability and resources to hire adequate staffing, we really are challenged to put them into the station where they are needed. And then just support for station operations. We are running a banjo string budget with respect to what it takes to make sure we have enough band-aids, defibrillator pads, the ability to make repairs that you should anticipate in a building that gets worked on and worked in 24-7, 365. And so we're really, really struggling in those areas. And those areas often compete with things like professional development. Professional development, fix the oven at station two. So these are really challenging conflicts that we have in a very operational sense. I want to just kind of remind you it's really important, and sometimes we can be confusing, and so I'm trying to be less confusing, but every firehouse has got firefighters in it, and every firefighter at the Flagstaff Fire Department is a wildland firefighter, and wildland firefighting is our most significant risk. And so the ability to put more firefighters on the ground, and particularly for the initial attack, to try to stop that fire that vegetation to building progression and then following that the building to building progression that we're seeing so much of in the Southwest. And so the ability to put more firefighters on the ground is super important to protecting this community along with prevention, along with the education, and along with the engineering. And as you If you've been in this community, and I've been here since 2013, the first fire impact I saw was the Slide Fire. We've been impacted by the museum. Our community lost 30 structures in the tunnel fire just outside the city limits. And if you think about if that could happen in the city of Flagstaff, what keeps me up at night, is that what if that had happened south and west of town? So our ability to respond to that in an emergency response standpoint is very critical and strategic for us now. And we're all witness to the increasing frequency and intensity of those fires in and around communities in the southwest. additional equipment for wildland firefighting. We have, thanks to the efforts of our elected team and our, our community affairs team, Governor wrote a nice, I don't know if we got the check, but they have committed to giving us four million dollars towards a building that's really going to take about six million to um to actually complete um and that and that's the low number. So this provides for our ability to complete that and put a building that supports wildland fire operations and training um in place for our firefighters who are currently working out of a 70-year-old rock building that was never designed for what it's being used for. And then fire prevention work. And you all have been so supportive and so important to the ongoing discussion. We've got to find ways to improve the new environment that we're building and then the built environment as well. And so additional funding to provide for that is anticipated in this effort. You know, here's the piece that I think it's really an important part of what's happened. The risk has changed in the community. It's not a bedroom, single family dwelling community anymore. And the big buildings aren't simply on campus anymore. And so for us, the ability to provide fire, rescue, emergency medical services will tell you that a chest pain call on the fifth floor of that building is a little different than a chest pain call on Aspen to a single family dwelling. and the people impact of getting enough resources in there so we can take care of Mrs. Smith, who we call our every customer, and take care of our customer, it's decidedly changed when we change the risk in the community in this way. And then just really wanna emphasize that The addition of firefighting personnel to respond to calls like this isn't always about, do we have a ladder tall enough? In fact, it usually is, do we have enough people on scene? And that's what a staff ladder, staff quint company provides for us. We start to be, we begin to provide adequate levels of staffing to these types of calls. And they can be simple calls. Food on the stove. But because of this type of risk configuration, it takes more firefighters if we're going to do it safely. And then, obviously, the training component. Now, this is kind of the, there's a lot going on in this slide. And I just want to kind of guide you through it. I think there's some of these up here as a resource later. Let's look at the increased number of calls. 2008 were about 9,894 calls. And then along that continuing 2024, 18,000 calls. I'll be honest, I came here in 2013. I thought I knew what busy was. I didn't know what busy was. Your fire department is extremely busy. And so I really want to kind of emphasize that because look at the slide below that, then and now. And if you take a look at that slide, slide there it tells a lot it kind of tells the tale of our challenges today which is to say in 20 in 2008 with 9,800 calls uh seven frontline units and 28 firefighters a day now here we are in 2024 and that was actually these numbers have got a little bit more pronounced We've got two more firefighters to shift, which I can't staff a firefighting apparatus with. So we have a net zero with increased firefighting capability in our community over that period of time. So it really is telling the story. And then obviously the heat map tells where our hot spots are in the community. It's giving you a clue as to where a lot of the high intensity activity, that would be your frequency. So those are your areas of high-frequency calls. So I think from an increased number of calls and the staffing piece, those pictures say quite a bit. As we show these to the Citizens Committee and to other groups in the community, this is really the telling piece, the tale of the tape, as they say. So the additional supplies are needed. We're seeing twice the number of patients. Just think about that in the context of how many rubber gloves is that? How many rubber gloves? How many Band-Aids? How many dressings? And so our ability to grow our operation and maintenance supplies with that type of call volume is extremely challenging. replacement of equipment. We use very expensive medical diagnostic equipment and that, that equipment has a shelf life and we, we have to have replacements scheduled and programmed. Fire Academy is in staffing and training. We're talent, we're challenged with Recruitment and training right now streamlining the process and continuing to recruit Firefighters and train them not only to be firefighters in the traditional sense But also what are we teaching them about these new hazards in our community? and so it's really important piece of Protecting our firefighters the same number of firefighters as In 2008, roughly, are going to twice the number of calls now. If you take a look at past citizen, excuse me, past employee surveys here at the city consistently, there's been a discussion of workload. Well, your firefighters are taking that workload up. And I just want to share this. We're experiencing people who are 20-year paramedics that are at the end of their career, and they're dropping their paramedic patch. It's unheard of where I came from. And that has to do everything with the lack of number of paramedics that we have. Because we ask them to practice medicine alone, and the standard of care in systems our size is they are at least working with another paramedic. Again, a really, um, another part of the, the tail and then the new fire station without some type of additional revenue and you seen in, in Rick and the team did a really good job of talking about that with the, the citizens committee is just, and you and your experience on the city council, when have you seen a year where there might be enough discretionary ongoing funding to even think about staffing a new firehouse in your community? Um, so really important for us, the impact of that is longer response times, uh, either to the new growth area, if we don't properly staff, uh, fire emergency and rescue services there. Um, and, or it's, it's going to be long response times because we're going to be in another area of town and we're leaving the first due area, um, because we're missing a firehouse. So, um, that's, uh, That is all my comments. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to have this conversation with City Council. Grateful for the Citizens Committee. My boss is amazing. She's shepherded this. Can't say enough about Shannon Anderson and really doing a good job on the public process to come here. And we certainly understand some of these solutions are not popular. But we struggle to find a different way to really address these needs. So I'm grateful to all of you and to the committee in the process.

Stay there. Please. Council Member Matthews.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Chief, for your presentation. It's very informative to revisit some of the things that we've talked about over these months. And I just want to emphasize before my question that we don't have a town or a city without our fire and our police. department, so I appreciate everything that you all do and your team does and our police department. I had a list of questions and since you're on this topic instead of waiting until the very end, there's a couple of things I wanted to ask you and a few new ones that came up during your presentation. Question on the, for the all-risk firefighters, when you were talking about it, it came to mind, is that different training than maybe down in Phoenix where they have firefighters that only have to be proficient in building fires or how does that work?

I would say that Phoenix would consider themselves an all-risk fire department. There might be some debate as to whether they have a wildland fire problem. No debate in my mind. I've seen Camelback Mountain just burn right off. However, that's the historical deal, and I say that tongue in cheek because I've had this conversation with Chief Duran in the city of Phoenix. You know, really, all risk is a term that comes out of the historical fire service. There was a time, and in some communities even today, there are separate services. And so you have firefighters that don't do anything except go on fire calls. And then you have a separate workforce distributed throughout the community that only does EMS. And then nobody's doing wildland. And so all risk for us is really important because it creates, in my view, the most efficient way to staff all those very important protection features of a community by being all risk and cross-staffing, cross-training. Lots of places don't have it. we rarely do local governments have a wild lion fire division. It is not typical. Um, and as you know, we are not typical and we do have one. Um, and you know, that's the nuance, but for everything else, all risk is probably the same definition.

Thank you. Um, and then you brought up, uh, batteries. I'm on the board with mountain lion and, and we've talked about this with, uh, increase in, in, building insurance because of our EV buses. But you made me think about the training, because I've read if a bus, if a commuter bus was to catch on fire, electric bus, the doors don't open. Or maybe they do have an emergency open. But is there special training that goes on to address our public bus service now that we're converting to electric buses?

I'm not aware of any training in that industry and I probably wouldn't know if they did have it. I will tell you what we know about runaway reactions of batteries. If you're working in around them, you should have some training.

And then my other question, my last question is about the new fire station. And I ask this just so it's on public record because there's been some questions about, well, when do we need that? And we should let impact fees cover it. The development should pay for itself. But my understanding, and please correct me if I'm wrong and Rick can stand up here, is we do have impact fees that go towards that. It doesn't cover a new fire station 100%, nor is all the build-out. and the fees collected for a whole community collected up front before we need the fire station. Is that correct?

That is correct. Development impact fees are typically paid at the time of pulling the building permit. And so it comes in very incrementally and it also, that incrementalism is also challenged by new state statute requirements that says we have to expense the money over a certain amount of time. Uh, so there's a lot of challenges. Great program. We should maximize that. Rick, I'm sitting over here tap dancing. You still haven't got up. Um, I was hoping you'd, uh, head this way as he's coming up.

My unders, my research was telling me that impact fees typically cover 20 to 30% of a new fire station in the, the size that we need for that area. And for our new ladder truck, is that, is that a good assessment?

Mayor, Vice Mayor, City Council Members, Rick Tatter, Management Service Director. Our analysis of what we're going to need for bonding versus development fees, I'm estimating the 30% to 40% would be with development fees for a lot of the projects that we need for public safety. So that's kind of the range where I'm currently projecting. We do have a development fee study going on right now, and that will kind of drive how much will be covered by development fees in the future. And one tool that we'll have is also, because it takes so long to get the fees paid for a project, structure is we probably have to debt finance the development fee portion and then pay it back with future development fees. So there's a couple of ways we're going to work through that to get the full fire station funded. But development alone will not fund those.

And it hasn't funded other development.

No.

And the incremental funds that come in and using a percentage over time, if we had to wait for all those fees to be collected, we'd be in a bad position because we would have a firehouse for decades past when we really needed it.

Plus, as Chief said, we've got to spend them within 10 years. So it's not like we can build up over a longer period anyways with that. We've been very successful with the smaller items, the equipment, the communication equipment side of our development fees and getting those funded 100% with development fees. So there's success on the smaller items. The larger items take a lot more.

Thank you. I appreciate it. That's all I have for right now.

Council Member Garcia.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Chief, for the presentation up until now. My question is, and I don't mean to put you on the spot, so if you don't have exact numbers for these things, then I understand. But you wanted to mention the numbers that are in front of us now on this slide, how many firefighters we have per shift right now. What should that look like? And the reason I'm asking this question while you're thinking of your answer is because I think there's a huge focus on we should be able to pay for this out of some other developmental fees or things like that as we go along, which could cover some of the things that are current. but I think that this tax and what the commission has brought towards us for us to look at is for the future. So I want you to, to, I mean, it would be nice to have a number of what would be right for us now. And also what would be right for us in 2040, because I'm pretty sure that what we're discussing is for the development of our future as well as current.

I really appreciate the question. And I, I would not say that is accurate. Um, We haven't made investments in the city's fire protection capability for decades. And so much of what you see here are things to catch up. Everything associated with JW Powell, the fire station, and the staffing on the sales tax side, those clearly are, we're addressing growth that's occurring, it's occurring now, and we need to address those issues. But a great deal of that is putting into place fire apparatus and fire companies that should be on duty today. So it's really a great question because that's important to kind of see that. And then just following up, development impact fees, development fees, all those elements, and that's a challenge. Um, they will not hire firefighters. We cannot hire firefighters with those development impact fees. And so it's really, uh, you know, it, it, in addition to not being able to 100% address the impacts of growth, um, it doesn't assist us on the O and M side and the personnel related expenses side at all. Thank you, chief. Yeah, absolutely.

Council member house.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Chief, for all this information. Councilmember Garcia kind of stole my thunder with my question a little bit. I think I did this to you last week, so now we're even. I just wanted to circle back, though, and reiterate, looking at this slide in particular, as we were heading into this part of the presentation, I had a news alert come up on my phone saying that Southern California's currently being circled in wildfires, and it's only May. And so keeping that sort of potential wildfire impact in mind, thinking about the growth that we've seen in calls versus the lack of growth that we've seen in our number of team members, and also considering the potential impact the variety of roles that our fire crews are playing in our community, not only meeting, you know, the typical needs of structural fires or residential fires, but also wildfire, as you noted, the EMT paramedic needs that they are, and roles that they're serving in our community. I think part of my question is what you, just said about we're not looking just at future needs, but also working to catch up to where we are now. And I wanted to just give a little bit more space to that thought and for you to speak a little bit more on that in terms of what our teams are navigating right now in the midst of trying to fill all of those roles. and seeing the growth in the number of calls and seeing the escalated wildfire risks, what is the situation looking like for the department with that kind of bigger picture lens?

That's quite a question, Council Member House.

I never ask small questions, sorry.

You know, what we're seeing is they're going on calls, a lot of calls. They're seeing a lot of patients. They're working alone without assistance. They're responding as an engine company to a multi-floored building, and there's not a staff ladder backing them up. There is one company in our city on the west side, but to staff that, we had to take down an engine company. We didn't staff a quint. We took an engine out of service to put the quint in service. And so to get those numbers of firefighters in place that I had mentioned earlier, we need them all. We need that modern fire department, quints and engines, and battalion chiefs, and that's one of the measures that will be advanced is our we're asking our battalion chiefs to manage a whole bunch of firefighters and we their span of control is has been exceeded beyond what's reasonable so additional overhead to manage that as well um but that's kind of what's going on with respect to what they're exposed to our our team our firefighters go out and they do great great work they take care of the community But they're working hard, and in some cases, we're not supporting them enough by getting enough firefighters on the scene, by making sure there's enough paramedics so that they're not dealing with the mental health aspects of providing that much patient care over the long haul all at home. So it'll be a continuation. Our team's gonna do good work. They do great work every day. What I know about what it takes to provide modern fire protection and EMS services, they're woefully understaffed.

Thank you very much.

Vice Mayor. Thank you and thank you for being up here tonight. I know that there's been talk about retirements and there's a clump happening soon. Can you expand on what this will do to help us not only keep up with development and what's coming and what we know is going to be happening, but with retirements, that's a whole other layer.

We are attempting to get out front of a term that was coined several years ago, the retirement tsunami. And that term talks about, in a couple of ways, just the onboarding recruitment, selection and training of personnel, and then how to deal with the loss of all that experience walking out the door, like a 20-year medic. uh, like a, like a 30 year firefighting captain. And so, yes, that's weighing heavily on our mind and that is represented here. And this proposal is to provide, um, the staffing to really address what professional development needs to look like in a, in a modern fire department. And then the facilities as well on the bond side.

Thank you for clarifying.

I have a point of clarification as well. Do I understand correctly that the aircraft response unit that's located at the airport will also respond to calls throughout the community if they're needed?

I will let the ARF chief speak to that.

Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Member Tim Skinner, I'm the ARF Battalion Chief, or Aircraft Rescue Firefighting Battalion Chief. I'm also the Operations Manager. Great question. Right now, we are working as best we can. You'll hear me speak a little bit later. One of our biggest challenges is our staffing, like everyone else's. And so the easy way to answer that question is if we have the available staff to cover what our mandates are at the airport, then yes, we can, in situations, send our folks out who are also trained to the same aspect with the same academy to support any township call. My position is a little bit different from the folks on the line. I'm a little bit more mobile. And so in recent months and the past probably 10 months or so, I've had the opportunity to go out and help and support on larger incidents. And so we try and do the same thing with some of our firefighters as well. I don't know if that answers your question.

It does. Thank you.

If I can, Mayor, Chief Skinner and his team, we have over the years done everything we can to bring alignment. So they're on the same shift. They participate in training and they run training for us because that's still one of our target hazards in our community is the airport. And so to the greatest extent possible, we are integrated. But there are some responsibilities that the ARF airfield force has that makes complete integration difficult.

Thank you. I think that that's all that we have for you right now.

Thanks for your time.

Mayor, vice mayor, council members, Daniel Kelly, flag, Sasson, mercy manager. Um, thank you. It's an honor to be here tonight. Um, so just following up on chief Gaylord on his, um, I want to highlight how emergency management strengthens the public safety aspect. As you guys know, emergency management was only created about four years ago. But during that time, the city has really leaned into the program, which is great. But it's very bad for my calendar. So emergency management is being asked to do more every single year than it was before. And with that, with this potential investment, we're looking to add emergency management personnel to help close that gap. Flagstaff, I don't have to tell you guys, faces very unique risk and hazards, some that most of the communities in the state don't have to face. We have a large train system that runs through the city hundreds of times a day. We have a wildfire threat. We have hazmat issues. We have flooding issues. We have all the above. So we need to make sure that we are spending our time and our resources appropriately to address those impacts. And with this additional investment, we can help coordinate a more cohesive response. Public information needs to be timely, clear, and accurate. It takes resources. The long-term recovery cost is where emergency management really comes in and makes its bread and butter. That is very time-conducive. Right now, I'm still trying to close out disasters from 2019. Now, at the federal level, that will change, hopefully, with the stuff that's going on up there. But that will also mean more... burden is put on the local and state level. More timetables that, yes, the federal level will be also held to, but that means if the feds are held to 180 days to close out an incident, that means the local level would have to do that in a third of the time. So what we're seeing at the state level is we'll trickle down. Emergency preparedness, the planning, this is where we make the resilience and the preparedness is absolutely crucial. If we do not have a good preparedness phase across all aspects of public safety, you will see in the response, and therefore it will also be seen in the recovery phase. We face a large, wide range of threats, active shooter aircraft emergencies, public safety power shutoffs now, It's not just a simple thing as public safety power shutoffs. It's the water critical infrastructure that's impacted and then the trickle down effect that it has over this period of time. Pros, they're very good at hosting these large events, but with these large events becomes more hazards, more threats. Right now, currently, we are already planning for the July 4th events, not just for the parade, but for the drone show as well, which will bring 20, 30,000 people. This requires resources, it requires planning, it requires ensuring that we not only have a plan in place, but our personnel are trained and adequate to carry out the plan. At the emergency declarations, if I'm before the executive and elected community talking about disaster declarations, things are going really bad. But this now puts on a new hat that I have to wear. Not only am I wearing the hat for response, but now I'm wearing it for disaster declarations. and going forward with recovery. This means that I'm gonna have to become the coordination hub for the county, state, and federal level. The more resources of personnel we have in the emergency management to support emergency management, the smoother that process is gonna go. We need to unlock, when we declare emergency declarations, we're unlocking resources, not only at the local level, But at the regional and the state level, we need to be able to coordinate those so it's seamless and timely. Emergency notifications, again, coming back to that, we need to make sure that it is timely, clear, and accurate and relaying to the residents and the businesses what they can expect and what actions they need to take. The disaster recovery, like I said, it takes an extremely long, lengthy amount of time. During this process, we have to make sure we are capturing pictures, we are capturing who was on what site for how long, what equipment did they run, how long did they run that equipment, and what other documentation on their time card shows the work that they did. There is a large amount of documentation that we have to collect in real time. We have found out the hard way through hard lessons. Going off of memory doesn't work out that well in the end. But times are chaotic during disasters. So we need to make sure that we have these plans and processes in place, personnel and systems, including software, to help delegates on this work to make it more efficient and streamline. We also need to look to engage the community non-profits or United Way or Red Cross or NACA. Bring them into the fold. This all takes resources. It takes staffing. So that's what we are looking and we Very thankful that emergency management is included in this public safety ballot. We know we could have easily been skipped over because it is a newer program, but thankfully the city manager's office, police, fire, and the airport all understand the value that emergency brings to the table. With that, if there's no questions, I'll hand it off to Chief Connolly.

Mayor, vice mayor, members of council, city managers, and Mr. Lovin, I guess he left. I wanna express incredible gratitude to him and his pragmatic leadership in this whole endeavor, so thank you. Before I get in to where it all begins in dispatch, I'm gonna walk you through the department and our core missions related to what we do on a daily basis, minute by minute. But this conversation's rooted in our core obligations for all of us in this chamber, for the community we serve. It's public safety. It's the undergird that allows us to do everything else we want to accomplish as an amazing city. It's about what we stand for. It's about what we stand for in this community. And it's based on reality, the reality we're all standing in right now. It's based on our collective responsibility. This is a team. This is Team Flagstaff. And you're seeing it on display. And it's about modern readiness as we move forward. You're going to hear a lot and you've heard a lot about collateral duties. Our backpacks of our staff are full. And my bomb squad guy is also my IA guy. And he's my detective. And he's also a drone pilot. And so bless them for that work. But this is what this is about today. And it's a tipping point. And I think it's an inflection for all of us that now requires some wisdom and some deliberate intent on how we move forward with some courage. I know we're all forward thinking in this community on so many things in so many lanes, and it's beautiful and wonderful to watch how forward thinking and progressive we are. And I believe we understand that to not make a decision is making a decision. And in doing nothing at this moment in time can be the most expensive decision down the road. So let's begin where it all starts in our dispatch room. We love our dispatchers. And when we look at the dispatch room, on how important it is. The modern best practice in the dispatch room is not just having dispatchers handle everything. I just want to paint a picture. A 911 call comes into a dispatch room and you're talking to a community member on their worst day, having that conversation. That should be a call taker. That's a separate mission. That is a totally separate mission where you're triaging, getting information, collecting it, preparing it, and providing communication and comfort. Then you go to a dispatcher. In Flag PD, we don't have call takers. Our dispatchers are our call takers. And not only are they our call takers, but they're managing the second largest county in America, in Coconino County, and tracking all the safety. So imagine talking to a citizen in a crisis, managing sheriffs all over the county, Flag PD officers all over the city, and then other fire districts and the fire department all at the same time. And so when we have this discussion in this measure, this gets us to a place of call taking as we move forward. They have one console for all of that. And so we need to get to a place where we have additional people on those councils and additional supervision. The other part is evidence and records to maintain integrity and further legitimacy. I think you're seeing in this state currently, if you're following the news, some police departments in the valley are losing homicide cases by crafty defense attorneys attacking their evidence management. And police chiefs and city managers and councils are on the hot seat on how we manage evidence. It is a really important behind-the-scene practice. And I remember when I first got here, I walked into our main station, and the cup was overfloweth. The cup was overfloweth. There's 100,000 pieces of evidence, many that are statutorily required for us to keep, and there's thousands coming in yearly. And there's two wonderful texts, two. And that's been that number for many, many years that are managing all of that. And then we'll talk about some more of the demands on evidence as we move forward. And the warehouse, I took a tour of the warehouse. I'd love to take you all over there. It is not a modern police warehouse and how the evidence is stored and stacked and managed and barcoded as we move forward. And those two evidence texts do not have an evidence supervisor. It's another collateral duty in the police department. There's a manager that is responsible for records and a whole bunch of other things that's providing them that leadership. So that's really important. You'll hear us talk about capital improvements, north expansion in this evidence warehouse. There's symmetry to all of this. The north expansion gives us more room in our current building to take what we currently have that is cup overfloweth and help manage the evidence warehouse that needs to be monitored. This is a thoughtful process of integrating growth as we move forward. We talk about identifying trends and create responses to mitigate crime. We are a data-driven, intelligence-led police department. And what that requires is sometimes when a police officer's on a 911 call in the middle of the night, they don't have time to be data rich and intelligence driven, but you have to support and wrap them around that. That is done with civilian analysts. And we'll talk about the PFM study, which is a really rich process that we went through. We would not come before you with these conversations or with the committee. And I'm sure my boss would not let us have it without having a PFM study that is really rich in all of that. But when you look at that, we have one analyst for the whole department. One analyst. And I put a lot of pressure on her for things that come through all of our worlds for information. And so that number has been identified as needing significant improvement as we move forward. The conversation about police aides. There's been a lot of conversation about police aides. We love Greg and everybody here. But that's a misaligned mission currently with half of the staff that we currently have. And we do not hire police aides. And police aides in a modern police department are not used typically for stagnant building security. But we've accommodated that because we're Team Flagstaff and we have to get the things done as we move forward. That's typically done with city security guards in a different mission, whether it's the libraries or buildings. The goal would be to have a police aide in every squad. I recently was sent a picture of my first year as a sergeant in 2000 in Maryvale Precinct in West Phoenix. And standing with my nine officers that worked their tails off was a blue shirt police aide. And there was a police aide in 2000 on every patrol squad in another police department. And so that's the goal. So we want to improve our police aides. This would do that for us. When we talk about increased space and people for proficiency and scenario-based training, you've heard me talk about one of the most important pillars in policing is the pillar of training wrapped around policy systems of accountability and wellness. And with proficiency comes professionalism. With professionalism comes productivity. It's all connected. We're grateful. for some additional space that we've recently come into. We now don't shoot out in the woods at a dirt berm in a shooting range. We have a shooting range. We're grateful for our relationship with the college, for our academy. That's two classrooms. It's basically two small classrooms that a police academy that's regionally running. We're grateful for the community college bond that's gonna get us a new 10,000 square foot, but it's gonna require staff and it's gonna require resources as we move forward. That's super important. Let me get this right. So the PFM study, and you heard me talk about this and I think it's really, really important as we talk about how we go about this process. One of the first things when I arrived here was I had a conversation with my boss about a staffing study because I had heard these numbers that, hey, in 2013 we had 112 police officers and today Now in 2026, we have 119, but the community's grown, the demand of service and expectations grown. Having had some experience with PFM, they are a group of world-class mathematician and academics out of Philadelphia partnered with retired big city police chiefs. And it's not so much a staffing study as that it's a workload analysis. It is a very analytical process in which every mission in the Flagstaff Police Department has been analyzed through this modern lens. The old days of taking how many people you have, how many calls for service you had, and your crime rate and saying, okay, this is how many officers without taking all the other complexities of the mission, all the other collateral duties, the community demands that we get on a daily basis to staff wasn't included in prior staffing. This one does. The scope of this is to ensure and determine optimal resource allocation and sustained operations while reducing crime and making sure that we're meeting community expectation. It's a data-driven approach, focusing on the analysis of a work-based methodology that is rigor and can stand up to criticism. It's forward-looking, however, I wanna preface, in this 216-page report on this police department, it's a baseline for today. It's a baseline for today on a lot of the things. So I think that's just really important, and I'm happy to have more conversations about it. I wanted to use this one story about transports from the jail to the court. We have created internally some solutions on one portion of multiple different types of transports. But here's an example of why this is important. Every week, historically, in this police department, officers, detectives sometimes, CSU detectives, whoever we could get scheduled has to transport 20 prisoners from the jail over to the city court. And that was typically done on a scheduled day and we would do our best to get it done. But a couple weeks ago we had an individual on a domestic violence call who a police aide responded to initially. She did everything which she trained, backed out, pulled a knife on one of our officers in an alley. And they were involved in a pretty intense conversation. And the individual advanced on the officer was well within 21 feet, which is a standard for us in our training. And a detective peeled off what he'd done. Everybody in the building peeled off what they were doing and responded. And we were able to use a taser and a stun bag to safely resolve this without having to use lethal force. But that was an all call. And we missed our transports. Those people didn't get transported. So when we talk about how this is important in building the right capacity, that is a story. We talk about maintaining safety for large events as we move forward. And protests, I don't like calling them protests as much as First Amendment assemblies until they're not. And so we continue to see tremendous activity in our community. We want to support drone shows, Pride events, 4th of July parades, cone drops, and all of those planned events, and then all the other unplanned First Amendment assemblies, those are department all-calls. I just want to be frank with you. To staff those types of events, they're department all-calls. So what does that mean? All the detective bureaus are turned on, our SWAT teams who are collateral are turned on, and everybody's down at the 4th of July parade. There's a skeleton crew of patrol officers patrolling this city at that time. If there was a fatality accident on the east side and a domestic violence that required investigators and an arrest on the west side, we would have to pull off members from those events. So what I say in that is that we are a one or two incident police department. Literally, a one or two incident police department. These incidents, whether it's a murder of a baby, whether it's a helicopter crash in a two hour gun battle, whether it's the death of a fraternity member in a frat house, whether it's one of our most vulnerable being struck by a car in a roadway or by a train, these are our wildfires. These are our wildfires and they are occurring. And I also wanna say related to wildfires, when these wildfires occur or when they may occur in the future, these are our brothers and sisters. in red and green, some maybe yellow. And so we're responding to that. And our job in that is evacuations. The firefighters need to keep their heads up and fight fire and do the things. They don't need to be evacuating buildings. And so that's an all call for us. And so if I've got a wildfire that I'm having to work, Colin is struggling to staff basic patrol service. Imagine if you load that on top of just a community event or some other event or a First Amendment assembly. We're tapped. And so I'm just really trying to paint this picture for you. The other thing I think is important is community engagement in this conversation about keeping our streets safe, about being more than a one or two incident police department and responding to community members. I told you earlier, it's almost daily that my PIO sergeant gets a call for us to be at something in a good way. Bring bear. Be involved in something. And we want to be able to do that. We want to be able to do that. All that is collateral duty and based on what is going on operationally for us to plug and play on those things. And so I think that's really important. We're not here to build Lamborghinis. And luxury buildings. I and the fire chief and everybody here just want a nice modern pickup truck. And so I just want to be clear on that because I've heard that conversation. There's also a conversation about, hey, you reduced crime last year by 10%. And I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud of that. So why do you need anything? Why do you need more? Well, I will tell you, and this is in the PFM study, from 21 to 24, there was a 14.7% increase in violent crime in this community. We changed it last year, well, in 2024. We've lost some recent technology that serviced 318 victims in that year. We drove that down. It'll be interesting to see what happens this year. But I promised you is we're gonna give all. And I think what you're seeing is the grind. that police department, these members working their tails off to be able to get that where it was. So that's really important and I just wanted to share that. We also talk about advanced software and specialized training. We talk about the expansion of evidence and increased technology. We talk about aging systems and integration and challenges. Imagine trying to plug your modern iPhone into with a cable from just three or four years ago to get it to work, and it doesn't match, or use a different iOS. This is all evolving, and it's evolving so rapidly. And it's rooted in this word. It's rooted in the word of expectations. There is an expectation on behalf of victims in this community that we service them in a modern way. We have to be able to extract phone cell data. We have to be able to gather more forensic, scientific, biological evidence than ever before and then manage it. We have to be able to meet the standards of our city prosecutor and our county prosecutor and the obligations to honor those that are being accused and incarcerated. And there's a huge commitment for us on all of that. All of this is rooted in this expectation. And most of all, and currently, I just want to say a lot of these things that we put before Rick and that we're asking for are currently funded one time. But I will tell you, as I look at some of this just basic stuff a detective needs from a software capacity, it is not a one time, it is an ongoing electric or water bill like for us on a lot of levels. And so that is where we're trying to build more legitimacy in that as we move forward. We'll continue to do our best to access grants, to work with the state to offset costs. But some of these are becoming the basics that are one time, and that's really important to understand. There's a social mandate. There is a social mandate right now for us to aggregate data, modern and efficiently. And that's through our systems. So when we take all the data that we have and aggregate it to get us on point and be efficient, it is just a mandate. And some of these systems cost money. And that's what you see in this conversation. I already talked a little bit about the evidence there on that bottom bullet point, but I want to go back up to criminal investigations. And this is a really important conversation because I think I have maybe I don't know, failed in my policing career, but I've lost what I didn't have focus where I should have for all those years. And we talk about patrol and going out and making the arrest. But could we have a conversation that once you've been a victim of a crime and now you've been assigned a detective, that is probably one of the most important relationships a city and a police department can have with somebody and how you manage that, how you stay in touch, how you keep them informed about the case and the evidence and talking to witnesses and providing victim support. And so currently, our staff investigated approximately 174 people crimes and 271 property crimes. What I want to paint a picture for you is that is being done currently with approximately 14 detectives. Just under anywhere from, depending on the detective, 170 to 200 cases per year. That national standard best practice for caseloads in detectives is 80 to 120. So see how we've exceeded that in that number of managed cases per detective. And here's a little picture too I think that's important for what a detective life looks like. So when you have a crime against a person, an assault, a robbery, a sexual assault, an ag assault, it takes an average of 27.4 hours for that one detective to complete one case. And remember those numbers I gave you before and how many they're managing in a year. Property crimes take about 10 and a half hours. So a simple burglary for one detective to manage a burglary. And a domestic violence case can take up to 23.4 hours. So what we're accomplishing with this endeavor here is getting our caseloads down for each detective, because they're too high currently. The north expansion gives them more room. They're crammed in there. Incident command vehicle, evidence warehouse, PFM recommends more detectives for us moving forward. The other thing, and I just want to make sure, I want to go back a little bit. When we talk about patrol, I think the other thing that's really important to understand, you heard the fire chief talk about 2008 compared to 2006. I'll compare 2013 to 2026. So in 2013, we had 112 police officers. Today, we have 119. sworn. I think there's been a lot of change in this community related to what we need to be involved in on behalf of victims in that time. We took 72,000 calls and wrote almost 17,000 police reports within that small patrol division and that investigative division. The other thing that PFM did for us, and it's really insightful, is when we look at available time in a 10-hour shift. So we're a squad and we go out Each one of you in the Flag PD currently is going to have somewhere around one hour in your 10-hour day of available time. Well, maybe that's to use the restroom. Maybe that's to have some lunch if you can get it. Otherwise, you're going call to call, report, report, report. A good standard in a modern police department that's allowing our officers to problem solve with community, connect with community, do some proactive traffic stops for all the traffic complaints that can come in is around 40%. So we're at 10%. And so this PFM study gave us some numbers for a more modern standard. The other thing that I think really needs to be taken into consideration too in these numbers is how much time does an officer have to be with his family? and take off. I mean, we have vacation, it's a benefit. We have sick leave, it's a benefit. And we have some of these things. But I'll tell you, based on my experience, those officers are maximizing every hour they have here. And I think from a wellness perspective, I would be a hypocrite a little bit as a chief if I'm sitting here talking about wellness and I don't have a staffing model that lets them honor their vacations when they want to take a family vacation, go to a graduation. On this most recent homicide, loving the baby, I had a detective come off his wedding anniversary. And so building a staffing model that meets those standards, I think, is really important. So in a nutshell, I think I've tried to paint a little bit of a picture. There's a tremendous amount of data and understanding that goes on behind all of these things that I've talked about, but we've identified through our PFM study. This isn't a group of police leaders sitting around saying, hey, I think we need more based on one or two Metrics or analytics. This is an incredibly detailed Modern approach to to building out a model for the future for this police department.

I'll take any questions with that Thank You chief councilmember Garcia

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Chief. I had a question earlier while we were watching Shannon go through one of her slides. It mentioned a community survey, and of that community survey, there wasn't as many bullet points on that slide for police. And I want you to be able to speak to that from your belief system, but pause for a moment while you think about that while I get out my... my comment, and that is, if you look at the Sunnyside neighborhood, for instance, the neighborhood I live in now, in the past, we've had times when it consumed a lot of the criminality in this town. But over time, with limited staffing on the Flagstaff Police Department's shoulders, with Flagstaff police officers playing many roles within that capacity in order just to get the job done, missing vacations and everything that you just mentioned, You guys have worked really hard and done a really good job to get criminality in that specific neighborhood and we can go around the city and probably you'd see the same thing come down significantly and substantially. So I could imagine why if you were given a poll on are you worried if your house is going to burn down or if there's criminality in your streets while the PD has successfully over time incrementally done better and more work. to make those streets so safe that when you get posed with that question, automatically you might not think about criminality or safety because you guys are doing the best you possibly can with limited resources, but you really are going to that level. I believe that we're at a critical mass when it comes to that level. We've reached that tipping point to where how much longer can we expect officers that are overburdened to keep this expectation up that makes people feel very safe at this point in time. I like to look at the future. I know you do. I know staff does as well. A future of where that tipping point goes over the edge or that critical mass is actually reached. 10 years from now, criminality in the town could look very different without some Some changes. So that's the reason I wanted to reference that study because it kind of seems like people are pretty complacent Well, no, I've actually had people say there's no crime in my neighborhood. Why do we need more police? Well, I wanted to give you enough time to kind of concentrate on that and formulate an answer for me mayor vice mayor councilmember Garcia, I Appreciate your insightfulness

There is a lot of complexity. I've been around a lot of community surveys of police performance and public safety performance, and it's super hard competing with our brothers and sisters in the fire department. Just based on the inherent nature sometimes of our missions and who we have to be at times in our community on behalf of public safety, that can be a conversation. As it relates to the conversation about working yourself out of a job, in some things. You know, I think that might be part of it. But I will say there's fragility in what we accomplished last year in that reduction. And I talked about one of the things, and there's some other things. And at the end of the day, I think one of the important conversations that I like to have with community, it's a tough one. And I realize that when I get up and talk to you, sometimes I'm not, I'm talking about tough things, right? We're talking about homicides and and fatalities and helicopter crashes, but that's who we are in this police department, and that's why we're here. And so, but the one thing is, I have conversations with community about is, okay, great, so do we need more victimization to have this conversation? And I would hope we all agree. The conversation isn't, well, it's safe, I'm feeling good about things. I think being in a mental state, you heard me talk about preparedness and readiness for the ebbs and flows of criminality and the crime rates. I would hope that it's not based on victimization's good right now. I don't see a need. That's not a healthy way. As it relates to our number, thank you, Shannon, for bringing this up. We were in the threes too. And so we were at 3.28 is what I recall, if that's accurate. And when it was articulated to us, I think the cutoff for the slide was 341. We were 328. And Shannon, if I'm wrong, please let me know, but I think Even being in the threes, it's still rated as good. There was certain verbiage that the surveyor, he was impressed that he saw the police department even in the threes. So I'm comforted by that. And so I appreciate that.

Thank you for telling that story, Chief.

Yeah.

Okay. Council Member House.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Chief, for all of this information tonight. I wanted to ask you a similar question to what I asked Chief Gaylord about just the bigger picture of the need for the police department. I think it was mentioned earlier in comments, us hearing that the department is doing so well. Why do we need more if we're meeting needs where we're at? And I wanted to give just a little bit more space to speak to that, especially in consideration of what you were just starting to mention in terms of um, officer wellness, um, the ability to meet those needs and, and, um, meet the growing needs of the community without essentially burning themselves out, um, as they're trying to do that. So, um, if you can speak a little bit to why the things that the police department is asking for, under this measure are critical needs or just absolutely needed in this moment?

Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Member, House, thank you. And I think you've heard me talk about the bicycle wheel. And it's not just about one spoke and how all those spokes need to be true for that wheel to not wobble. And I think this is the same conversation. if we're gonna take one metric crime rate and go, okay, you're doing a great job. I think I've painted a little picture with you here. I know we painted two days of picture for the committee and I've had a crime report provided to you, a crime plan and an annual report. And you all I know with your knowledge know how much more there is to a police department than that one monolithic metric to say we're doing great. And I think as it relates to the police department, at what cost? Yeah, we were successful last year in our crime reduction, but at what cost to the wellness of our officers, to the grind on professional staff, to the missed opportunities? And we've had this conversation about where broken, traumatized police officers meet traumatized community. George Floyd happens. And so I'm hypersensitive. That's what I lose sleep about at night. So what does that look like? Building a staffing model that has more overlap. Right now there's not enough overlap between shifts. One shift's getting off, they're trading off cars, fleet. That's their office. Imagine you having to share an office every day. That is the modern office. Everything is done in that car with technology now. Imagine having to transition your office desk and space every day to somebody else. It's a vehicle. It needs to be gassed up. That fleet is constantly grinding. The building, if I were to take you into the locker room, doesn't fit. It's a 20 plus year building and that locker room is not modern. The space is congested and tight and the facility is old. I've talked about the evidence warehouse. Now let's just talk a little bit about people. When we look at that, if I'm going call to call to call and I raise my hand to be a police officer and all I do is report right and call take and I don't get to engage with community and and be proactive in some of the things I want to aspire to do as a police officer. That impacts it, that's what this staffing model does. It builds us capacity to have more resources in our downtown. We've built a skeleton crew. It gives us more capacity to be out at our shelter helping Ross with really highly trained officers. It gives us more attention to focus on the 700 calls we'll take in transportation this year. It gives us more officers to community engage to work on initiatives related to victimization and suspect support. And you and I are involved in some conversations with the CJCC, having more staff to do all that while being safer, while not being a one or two incident town where I have to pull. The other part of it too, just from the business perspective, I would anticipate us having a significant reduction in overtime. And I will say that. I think that this cuts two ways. We can have this model and have a lot of overtime, or we can really work intelligently to be upstream and modern on that. So I think those are the ones that come out to me most. It provides more opportunity for our members to be led and be followers at a high level.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Mayor.

Councilmember Matthews.

Thank you, Mayor. Chief, I just wanted to hit a little bit more on the mental health aspect of this. Many moons ago, my husband was a volunteer firefighter and he would go out on some horrific accidents where there was a lot of fatalities, a lot of young people and stuff. And so I had the Unfortunate experience of seeing how that impacts someone just that doesn't go away that haunting sight And our police department faces at any given day the worst of the worst a baby being murdered and sex crimes and and just other things and I've talked to a lot of law enforcement and fire department personnel to find out that many of them because of our cost of living here are live far enough away, maybe Camp Verde, maybe not parks they can travel to, but where they have to couch surf, come in and stay with friends. I can't imagine just in my job not being able to go home to my home to decompress and just get my wits back to me. I can't imagine having to work long days, sometimes overtime, and then not being in your own home And so I just wanted to say that out loud because I think we in our community forget that our law enforcement have a little bit of a unique job that we don't, thank goodness, have to face like you all do, and that needs to not be forgotten. So I just wanted to say that. I wanted to give you, and I asked you this the last time you were up here, But there still people are hanging on to a comment you made a couple weeks ago about being almost fully staffed, which was, you know, you were talking about what was approved, not what was needed. And then also there has been some questions about the needs assessment, and I wanted you to just restate about the PFM study was not internal. It wasn't what you came up with on it. on your Santa Claus list to say, if everything was great, this is what we need. This was professionals who are from the law enforcement industry that came up and said, this is what is needed in this community for this size community and for what goes on here. Is that correct?

Yeah, I'll take that one first. Vice Mayor, Mayor, Council Member Matthews. To that point, this group, PFM, has been recognized in such a modern way. They'll be presenting at the International Association of Chiefs of Police as a best practice for how you do a workload assessment on a police department with modern analytics. This is absolutely an independent group. They came in and lived with us for a period, for many months, but physically they came in for multiple weeks and interviewed our members, gathered all our data, processed it all. So absolutely, that is an independent process. And I think the other one was tied to wellness, or was there another one?

The other one was about staffing.

Yeah, so I'm looking right here at our most recent staffing report. In the sworn side of the house, we're 93.4% staffed. and in the professional services 88.7. But there's two points that are important on that. This is based on our current FTEs and what we're allocated. And what we're sitting here having a conversation about is that's great. It's tough having a conversation like this and having big vacancy numbers, right? Because then the question is, well, you can't even get to where you need to be with what you currently have. How do you plan on getting to where So I take that very, that's a really important metric for us. But at the end of the day too, these are these old numbers, to be completely honest, that I don't think are based on this modern PFM study of what this city needs moving forward. So that's where we're at with that. The other thing within this, when you look at that 93% number, three of those are on field training, four are on light duty. Sometimes we're involved in physicality and We get sprained ankles and get busted up a little bit. We have some on administrative leave. We have people on parental leave and other approved protected leave. So you see how that number starts to come down, where then Colin's having to wrangle. We have people on military leave. So building some capacity in that is super important.

And then lastly, Chief, for now, can you just go back and visit the crime um rates we you guys did a great job of reducing crime but if we looked over maybe a five-year period that may be a reduction but i'm assuming it's still higher than it was five years ago yeah and i don't know if i would say that council member matthews but what i would say and this is in the study and this can be you you can see these numbers historically from 2021 to 2024 there was a 14.7

percent increase in violent crime against persons. We changed that narrative in 25, and I hope we continue down that path. But there was this trend, and I also wanna say, I think it's important when we look at crimes per 1,000, we're still a safe community, and it's okay to say that. But are we in a state of preparedness for multiple incidents in a city of our size? Are we in a state of preparedness to manage expectations of a DBA and large events Planned or unplanned? Are we prepared to help support our brothers and sisters in the fire service with a wildfire? And I think what we've done and the work we've done, we've identified through an outside entity and a lot of work internally where we think we need to be moving forward and what our capacity is currently. Thank you very much.

Vice Mayor. Thank you and thank you Chief for being here tonight. I wanted to comment and get your sense a little bit more on the community aspect So I have worked with yourself and your department in a couple of different communities, one being the downtown community and one being another one that I've helped through some issues they were experiencing. And what I really appreciate and have realized is how important the relationships are. And your team has really been able to move the needle on some issues that have been happening because of your relationships that you are able to build. I can also see that you're stretched thin at certain times and I don't want to see that community aspect go away and I'm hoping that this will help. I wanted you to touch a little bit on how that relationship can help with just policing in general because I feel like when you have that one-on-one interaction day after day, it does help just in general. And if we don't have the time to invest in that, I'm not sure what would happen. So first I wanted to say I appreciate your time and commitment into the Flagstaff community and what you all have done. It has been amazing to see you out and building those relations. and how will this help further that?

Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of council, thank you for the question. Life is about both personally and professionally relationships. And it's no more true in modern policing that if you do not have that community engagement footprint and connectivity, you will cease to be successful as a police department. It will not work. I think there's some examples of that currently in some other law enforcement agencies around the country. And so with that being said, it's vital. And it is just as important as the patrol division, the criminal investigations division, and all of our support staff. So I want to say that. As it relates to how we're currently doing it, I do appreciate the kind words, but I have concerns moving forward. It just takes a couple things where you have to then ramp that up and be even more engaged on some levels. And currently, my community engagement function, as we do our best with our patrol officers to unplug them, because that's where the best community engagement can come from, but there's no time. I told you what my available time is to let them go to some community meeting. Imagine a patrol officer getting to break off and spend more time there. Currently, that's done by my public information officer. Currently, that's done by a group of background investigators and recruiters. Roger, and I think we saw him all out with Bear. He's my background. I need him doing hiring. And so it's collateral duty. So what this staffing model starts the process of is getting to a modern police department without a dedicated community engagement team of community action officers, who their sole mission is to go out and problem solve, engage, is a necessity moving forward. This helps us get there.

Thank you for clarifying. All right. Thank you, Chief.

Thank you.

I'd like to go first next time. It's a tough crowd to follow. Madam Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Members, again, Tim Skinner, the aircraft rescue firefighting battalion chief. I'm also the airport operations manager, which we'll talk about as well. I have two slides, hopefully I don't mess it up. Madam Mayor, I want to address and kind of start off and clarify, based off the question you asked before, and kind of explain a little bit what aircraft rescue firefighting is, exactly what it sounds like. So aircraft rescue firefighting is a specialized branch of the fire service. Focus is primarily around the response to aircraft emergencies. But in addition to that, we also, like Chief Gaylor, and you'll hear this a couple times, I apologize throughout my presentation, similar to Chief Gaylor's team, all of our folks are on all-hazard, all-risk firefighters as well. We talked about a lot of the hard work we've developed over the last couple of years to try and integrate more, and one of those things has been the base level of training. And so we do the exact same academy with these folks, and so after they get trained up to that base level of all-risk firefighter on the fire department side, they come out to the airport and we do additional training with them and get off to that band-aided training. services and so just a little bit of background on that too and we'll talk about some of the other impacts and additional stuff that makes some of this challenging but one of the impacts that this ballot measure would have and again I probably should have led and dittoed what everyone else set up the appreciative the time we get to talk with you city leadership and the citizens committee again being able to have this conversation and so What that impact would look like for us with the ARV is currently the Flagstaff Airport, there was a study done in 2021, I believe, from ADOT, looking at the economic impact that the city of Flagstaff Airport brings into the community. My boss's boss might correct me on this, or Shannon. Roughly, we're looking at about $128 million a year. That's about 68 direct and about 59 million indirect funds that comes into the community. And so what this support would allow us to continue to support that economic impact I bear service by facilitating business and visitor travel. The thing with ARF, especially from the federal side, is it's mandated. And so the FAA mandates a certain level or coverage of ARF. And so it's important to realize that the federal side of the house on the ARF and the FAA side is the very baseline. If you look at anything in the standards, they refer to it as the minimum standards. And so this obviously would allow us to not only maintain that level of mandated ARF coverage, but also allow us to hopefully bring that ARF level of service to local, regional, and industry best practices and standards. I'll talk a little bit about the staffing later and kind of compare again, going back to what Chief was talking about. And then also outside of the, we'll break this up into a little bit of between commercial and non-commercial, but what this would allow us to do is maintain that capability to support not only multiple airline operations, but multiple aircraft operations. And just a little bit of background, an aircraft operation is a takeoff or a landing at an airport. And for those who don't know, we average about 120 of those a day. So 120 times a day, an aircraft either lands or takes off at the airport. And this ranges from anywhere from smaller general aviation traffic, cargo traffic, obviously our commercial airline partners, military, but like we've heard a lot about this evening, even like the wildland support aircraft. And so again, kind of a plethora that allows to do that. And so this, as we'll talk about as well and get to the next slide, this support would also allow this team, which is a very small team right now. We have nine line staff. And as Chief Gaylor mentioned, we are on the exact same schedule and exact same rotation as the fire department does. And so what that means is if we're at fully staffed, we have three people not per truck, but for fire station. And so the FAA mandates that we have to have two trucks in service at all times. And so our minimum staffing, and I know this is a lot of numbers, I apologize, our minimum staffing is two, which actually equals one per truck. And so with that, this support would allow us hopefully to add a little bit more emphasis on that public safety side, which can then, through a little bit of process of attrition, focus a little bit more on some of the other duties that they have. which is what we refer to as airport operations. So now we're only talking about public safety up here, but it is worth mentioning this is really kind of coincided with the team out there right now. So like I mentioned, and this is kind of what Chief Geller was talking about, the additional duties, the airport operations side of the house really quick is anything from the FAA compliance, to wildlife, to security, to snow removal, to kind of all these other duties as assigned. So this small team out there has to try and balance and juggle both of those at any given time. We provide the service, the RF service, as well as that other service, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And so what this would do, it would allow us to obviously address that a little bit easier, but also kind of like what Chief Gaylord's team is talking about too, how they were talking about seeing an increase in growth, an increase in say high rises or structures, We see that on the airport side, too, but obviously with aircraft. And so, for example, when I first started there, our commercial aircraft were a twin propeller. I don't know if you guys remember or not. Smaller. They were about a 37-seat aircraft. And that transitioned to about a 55-seat to a 75-seat. And thanks to the help of city leadership and the airport administrative team, we put a lot of hard work into it. Last week, we just saw our first 128-seater with the Airbus 319. And so the point is, again, the same thing, if there's a common theme here, our resources aren't keeping up with the growth and the demand. And so looking at this, and again, we talked about this actually says, you know, we're not asking for a lot more people. So the three aircraft rescue firefighters, again, will allow us to be able to handle issues that come with those larger aircraft. And we also talk about an increase in type of aircraft. And what I mean by that is we see an industry growth of, The reduction in a little bit of the smaller general aviation, kind of the Cessnas, the propeller kind of engines, as far as frequency, and we're seeing a lot more jet style or larger jet style. And so with that comes an increased risk associated with that as well. And so kind of a picture's worth a thousand words here, and I apologize if I'm talking too fast. This was taken from the Toronto plane crash back in early 2025 up in Canada. And we use this to kind of highlight some interesting facts to the Citizens Committee. One, that aircraft, that crash, is actually very similar to the current commercial CRJ jets that we have now. And actually, we've seen some of these jets kind of fly into our airport. Clearly, it's obviously a snowy airport as well, right? So we kind of looked at that comparison. What we can't guarantee right now, and I can't stand before you can guarantee that, if you look at the, I wish I had a pointer. Clearly, you can see the fire truck, the ARF truck that's spraying water as they roll up onto that scene. the individual that's kind of closest to us, obviously the fire turnout, that's a firefighter getting out to assist with evacuations, start beginning doing aircraft shutdown procedures, and doing something we call a primary all-clear. Right now, because of our staffing levels, we can't guarantee that that firefighter can get out of the truck. And so that goes back to what we were talking about before. At a minimum staffing, which is the majority of our time with either attrition or vacation or sick time, we only have one person per truck. And so we can't really guarantee that right now. So this discussion we're having right now would really change our ability to impact that, to change that. And so we would really definitely work towards that. And so, again, kind of going back to what Chief Gillard said, integrating, focusing more on the public safety side and allowing these folks to obviously prepare and to train and to get ready, obviously, to mitigate not only just that risk with the aircraft, but any sort of risk that comes up within our little airport perimeter fence. It also supports the plan that we talked about that we were working with city leadership and the two departments over the last quite a while, I think so, to engage, merge the R functions to the fire department, which is typically where they belong anyways. The biggest challenge we've seen with that is kind of some of the staffing that's associated with that. I wasn't trying to beat Daniel's record, but I think I might have. They only gave me two slides, which is a good thing.

I have a quick question. Am I understanding correctly when you say one person per truck, does that mean that somebody has to hang back in case there's a second emergency or that they can respond with the truck to the emergency but aren't allowed to leave the vehicle?

Great question, Madam Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Members. So right now, depending on the situation, which is going to be situationally dependent, no. If we look at something, say, of this magnitude, no, we send both of our trucks. We really don't have that bench step to hang back and reserve for that other emergency. which puts a lot more burden on some of our mutual and automatic partners as well with their call volume going up is not necessarily the most conducive to success. But it depends. If we have a smaller incident, we will still send both trucks regardless of what the call is. We're not that big. We probably have to. If it is a smaller aircraft and it depends if there's what we call like nothing showing, if they're just trying to investigate or maybe there's a medical or something on that call, we've left it up to the discretion of our ARF leads to make that call of whether they will pull that other firefighter off that truck to go investigate. But if we have a situation like this where we think of the typical large plane crash, no, they're not. Both trucks will be responding, and if it's going to be that much of a dangerous situation, there's only so much they can do. They won't be getting out of the truck, if that answers your question.

Thank you. All right. I don't see any additional questions. Thank you.

Thank you.

So I'd like to say thanks to our public safety staff for walking us through the impact the sales tax and the bond can have on the services delivered. These next few slides will speak to why the recommendation is including both the sales tax and a bond. How does having both funding sources balance the need and keep the costs low? A sales tax is the most flexible funding source with the ability to fund both ongoing and one-time expenses. But by limiting the sales tax to only ongoing needs, it keeps the increase as low as possible. The sales tax will fund ongoing needs like personnel, operating costs, contracts, and commodities. Using the bond for one times expenses like construction and additional equipment or vehicles allows a lower sales tax. The bond recommendation is also within the current rate, so it does not create an additional expense. The half cent sales tax creates $18.2 million in revenue each year and would provide the revenue needed for over the next 15 years. It would increase the city's base tax rate, but the benefit of a sales tax instead of a property tax is 37% of the sales taxes paid by visitors who also use these public safety services. And a smaller increase produces a larger amount of ongoing revenue. For example, a 14% property tax generates just over $1 million. compared to the half cent sales tax producing the $18.2 million. Half of Arizona cities have a rate of 3% or higher as you can see how Flagstaff compares where the red in the chart that's up above. There have been four cities that have already used sales tax to fund public safety needs and additional communities are considering the opportunity address unmet public safety needs as well. For the City of Flagstaff, it is a funding source for ongoing staffing, contractual and commodity expenses. There's been some confusion about what sales tax applies to within the City of Flagstaff and it's important to understand tax does not apply to food at the grocery store or residential rent. but it would apply to a dining bill if you went out to eat or if you purchased a refrigerator. The half cent would equate to 50 cents for every $100 spent. The city currently has $98 million in general obligation bond capacity with an existing rate of 0.800. If the assessed value increased by 4%, then residential and commercial owners would see an increase. You see on the slide, residential customers would pay $12.63 more per year, and for commercial property, it would be $51.20 more per year. If the assessed value increased less, then these increases would also be lower. Please keep in mind the city has proposed to reallocate the secondary property tax, a portion of it, to a primary property tax to increase ongoing revenue for public safety. This change if adopted as part of the budget could reduce these amounts even further. There are development impact fees that will augment the bond dollars to the extent allowed. We are currently estimating about $15 million towards construction and equipment. The benefit of the bond is it can reduce the sales tax need by covering for these types of one-time expenses. After council hears any public comment and has your discussion tonight about what you've heard today, the next steps could include another agenda item next week on June 2nd, for any further discussion, then we have a placeholder on June 16th council meeting for a resolution to call the election if council supports a public safety ballot measure. And finally, two other items to be completed if council calls an election would be education and outreach from June to November and a check-in with council before the break on those efforts on June 23rd. That's the end of our presentation and we're happy to answer any other questions that you might have.

Thank you. Council Member Matthews, some time ago you said you had a question at the very end.

So, Shannon, thank you for putting this presentation together and everybody that showed up to give us just a high-level overview of the need, reminding everybody. In theory, I want to say whatever it takes to get what we need because the need is so great and so obvious. The bond, I really appreciate what Rick came up with moving some of the secondary property tax over to the primary to help with the general fund. Where I struggle was with the 50 cent tax increase, but I understand that if we looked at 25 cent or 25%, however you want to say it, would barely get us to what we need today and not moving forward. So where I'm still struggling at is... You know, I've asked a few kind of uncomfortable questions over the last month or so from different departments and just continuing to look at our budget and how we've operated. Again, when we get things that come to council to ask us if we want to approve something, we make an assumption that we can afford it. And then it's just a matter of do we want these funds allocated to this capital improvement or this increase or that increase. But, you know, I started looking at like the BBB tax. No, it's not for housing. But one thing that came to mind when I was just trying to look around to see have we really looked at our budget because in the past we've had the luxury of approving things because They're on our list of things we really like to see done and not what's necessary. And I'm sure there's a really great explanation, but in the last four years, our BBB tax has increased the revenue by $4 million, and yet we still, the different departments, still get the same percentage allocation, which is a pretty nice financial pop. to those departments' budget, I'm not sure that it's necessary year over year to have that kind of increase. And then I look at the, looking at the financial statements and seeing our revenue from investment earnings, which means there's a lot of money in the bank to be making, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars every year because they're collecting so much money. I say this because I know it's a deeper conversation, not one that we can address today. And I want to move forward with what's presented today. But at the same time, I think we owe it to our citizens to show some fiscal responsibility and looking to see, have we turned over every stone? Have we looked at things that have been great to fund and have allocated money to. But this is a big deal. The sales tax increases a lot. And we are already pushed to the limits. And your chart that you showed on our sales tax was just for the city. But we have a city and a county and a BBB tax all combined gives it a different picture. We're not at the bottom. If you put all those that I don't get to choose, Well, I don't want to pay the county tax. I just want to pay the city tax. I don't have that privilege. So if we look at the combined, we're up there kind of at the top of the scale there on overall taxes that are paid. So as much as I know we need the increase, and I will support it 100%, I have to in good conscience. There you go. also know in my heart of hearts that we've had hard conversations in areas that we've had the luxury of affording for a while to make sure that we're just not hitting the easy button again and just saying, let's see if the ratepayers will pay it so we don't have to. So that's what I would like to do, maybe have a special meeting where we really dive down into the BBB and other other funds that we've had the luxury of accumulating. Again, with the BBB, and I don't mean to attack it, Heidi, but it's gone up so much in just from 2022 to 2025, $4 million more than what it started with. I'd like to be on the receiving end of that. right, without having to worry about fighting for other monies. That's a pretty good pop. So I would like to have a more in-depth conversation about that. And then the last thing I'll say is, where was it? Oh, I wanted to ask if a bond measure and a sales tax measure was passed, does this mean, and I'll look at Rick, does this mean that we won't need to take from the general fund or is this an addition, like the general fund will continue to pay what it's paying now and this will cover the additional needs?

So general fund will continue with what they're paying now and the increased cost of what they're paying now, right, because no cost stays stagnant over time. So what we've committed to is to cover what we're doing now, and these would be new dollars for new things. So even the one-time dollar amounts that we're investing, unless it was a deficit that we couldn't overcome with that one time, we're paying for the one times in general fund, and these are the new things.

And then on the bond list of needs that we would try to cover, with a $40 million bond asked. The list totaled 64 million. So can you expand on that a little bit? What's the method behind that?

So there's a $40 million in the general obligation bond. There's 15 million in the development impact fees. So that gives us the, what, 55. And then we also have some one-time capacity in the early years of the sales tax. Because again, we had to account for increases in costs. And so what you need in the beginning isn't necessarily what you need in the end. And so it's through those three mechanisms that we would be able to afford the items that you see on that list.

Thank you, that's very helpful. And then lastly, on the sales tax increase, would we see on the breakdown an allocated line item for the public safety, so it's always dedicated just for public safety out of that sales tax increase that we're imposing?

I believe so. Rick's going to come up just to clarify. Because I'm thinking of the tax that we have related to transportation and others, but he can help us with that.

So am I, but I wanted to confirm.

So as far as the reporting we get from ADOR, Arizona Department of Revenue, they give us the full amount for each tax category. But when we take that and post it and calculate it, we do post each tax type into a separate bucket for use. So we will restrict this 0.5 into a restricted bucket for use for public safety going forward.

Thank you.

It's just different how we get the data versus how we'll post it. We will show that 50 cents.

Thank you. That's all I have.

Can you go back to the slide showing the bond and what our capacity is? Great, thank you very much. And everyone's eyes go to the increase, but what you're saying here is that this increase is based solely, and of course, correct me if I'm stating this incorrectly, it's based solely on home prices and commercial real estate prices or values being increased by the county assessor's office.

Correct. So these prices actually assume that that assessed value goes up by 4%.

And the capacity that we have, this is As we pay debt off, we have this capacity and that's how we're able to pay for something out of our bond capacity without increasing the amount of money that people pay. Exactly. Okay. Other than the increase in assessed value.

Correct.

Thank you. All right, I am gonna take public comment and then we have several council member questions after that. So I'm gonna take in person first and then we'll go to online. Michael Oliver.

Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Flagstaff City Council, members of the community. My name is Michael Oliver, President of Flagstaff Law Enforcement Association, your local police union. I stand before you tonight not only as a police officer, but for someone who has dedicated their life to protecting the people of Flagstaff and serving alongside the men and women who answer the call every single day. I'm here in support of the public safety ballot measure because it's not about politics. It's about people. It's about safety. It's about whether our community is prepared to meet the growing demands placed on police officers, firefighters, dispatchers, emergency personnel. The fact is, Flagstaff is changing. Our city continues to grow, tourism continues to increase, and calls for service continue to rise. Yet the expectations placed upon public safety professionals has never been higher. Every day, officers are responding to not only crime, mental health crises, overdoses, traffic fatalities, domestic violence, homelessness, and emergencies that require patience, compassion, and professionalism. The reality is simple. Public safety cannot continue to do more with less, as we've done for many, many years. We almost won't do it because we're exhausted and we're tired. We're burnt out. And that's facts. This ballot measure is an investment in staffing, response times, equipment, training, and long-term safety of this community. It helps ensure that when someone calls 911 in the middle of the night, there's an actual officer who can respond. It helps to ensure firefighters arrive quickly when minutes matter most. And it helps retain experienced public safety professionals who might otherwise leave for agencies and communities that provide better support and resources. As a union member, I can tell you this measure is also about taking care of the people who take care of this city. Behind every badge and uniform is a human being who misses birthdays, holidays, and family dinners to keep others safe. Public safety professionals willingly carry the weight of trauma and responsibility because they believe in service. But belief alone cannot sustain an understaffed department forever. Strong public safety systems do not happen by accident. They happen because communities choose to invest in them before a crisis forces them to do so. I know that asking taxpayers for support is never something taken lightly. The members of our police and fire unions understand that every dollar matters to working families because we are working families. We live here. Our children go here. Go to school here. We shop in the same stores. We drive the same roads. And we care deeply about the future of Flagstaff.

Thank you. Council Member House has a question for you.

Thank you very much, Michael, for your comments so far. I know that in part of them you said, towards the end, you were saying that this is not something that is done, taken lightly or easy to do. And I wanted to give you space to, if you wanted to finish that thought, on why this was still worthwhile.

This measure is about preserving the quality of life that makes Flagstaff special. Safe neighborhoods, rapid emergency response, professional accountable public safety services, those things matter to families, they matter to businesses, they matter to students, they matter to visitors. So I'm asking the community, I'm asking the council, I'm asking the community to stand with the people who stand for them every day, okay? support the public safety ballot measures, support the future of Flagstaff, and support the men and women who proudly serve the city with honor and professionalism and commitment. We are completely understaffed. And I'll tell you a story. And I went to get gas today before I came here today, and I ran into an officer. And it's his day off. I know it's his day off because I know this officer. I said, why are you here? Well, they talked me into coming in the cover shift. I get it, overtime, fine. He said, well, the rest of the week, I gotta go to this training. I'm mandated to go to this training on Friday. I said, okay, I know about the training. I'm going to the same training. He said, but yeah, I gotta work until 3 a.m. I said, you can't flex out? He said, no, we don't have the staffing to take the day off. So this officer has already worked on one day off, will come in on his first day back and work an 18-hour shift because we don't have the staffing to let him be off on a training day, that's unacceptable. It's unhealthy, it's not safe, and it's unacceptable. Thank you.

Thank you. Michael, don't go away.

Council Member Matthews.

You hit on something that I wanted to ask the Chief earlier, and you may have, well, I know the same insight, if not more, because of your position, but Um, the fire chief alluded to it as well. I've heard people say, I'm just waiting for my 20 years or whatever that golden date is where you get full retirement. Um, you know, that's a concern for me that, you know, working this type of, uh, job and these kinds of demands, do you see are a lot of people looking at that soon as I'm eligible for full retirement? I'm leaving as opposed to I would stay on if it was a little easier on my life and my mental health.

For sure. And that's a common problem amongst the profession itself. Police officers, we're exhausted. So it's not even worth, you know, there's a lot of benefits to staying five more years, ten more years. It's not worth it to them anymore. And that's going across the profession. I've seen it here in Flagstaff where sergeants, lieutenants are like, I can't do it. I just can't do it anymore. And so now to think about our new officers who have a completely different retirement system, having to do 25, 30 years, and they're already at year four or five burnt out, they're not going to make it. And it's one thing for an officer to say, hey, I'm going to go to another agency in the valley because my wife got a job or whatever. And now we have officers that are leaving the profession completely. And so that is even more sad than anything I've ever heard, is that they don't even want to do the job anymore because they're so burnt out. They're so exhausted from having to work this. Spouses have had enough. You've missed this birthday, you missed that birthday, this family dinner, this holiday. It gets exhausting. And there's a reason why divorce rates are high in law enforcement. Because we put the job first.

I appreciate your honesty and just really bringing it to the reality because that's the decision we have to make and we have to show we stand behind our law enforcement and our fire department and I appreciate you being candid with us. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. All right, let's take our online commenter.

All right, Mayor, we have Casey Gonzalez. Casey, if you'd like to unmute and give your comments now.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

I don't think my camera is going to turn on. I apologize. So I'm going to go to settings. So you just get the voice. Coming to you from the beautiful Love's Truck Stop in Arizona City. I apologize I'm not there. Actually headed down to Tucson for our annual state convention for the union, which we're going to be talking about a lot of these same issues on the state level across the state and the Southwest and what's going on. within public safety and how can we address them on a state level? It's, yeah, and sorry, starting off, Mayor, Council, thank you, Vice Mayor. I wanna say I appreciate what the Citizens Committee has sat through over months to pull back the curtains and see what's going on and for them to support a half cent sales tax and a $40 million bond, which I know is painful for a lot of them to say, because it does affect their businesses in the day to day. But what Mike Oliver talked about, is the true reality for us, the ones working the job. I appreciate that there's a safe community and things are being met. It's being met at the expense of a lot of personal lives with that. And to run through a few more numbers as we kind of close this out, when you're looking at dispatch, my day-to-day up there now, and we took approximately 188,000 calls, that's emergent, non-emergent, in 2025. that equates to about 500 calls a day and at times I've got four four dispatchers and like Chief Conley talked about that's call takers and dispatcher the same person taking 500 calls a day with four people up there and then also with four in the morning four in the afternoon so eight total but running that through And, you know, to give you an example of one of the dispatchers who two months ago took a newborn baby that survived not breathing, was able to coordinate a call, get units there, and that kid survived. It's the same dispatcher that a month ago or three weeks ago took the call for the homicide, and I don't know how she recovers from that. But that's what we're putting people through. When you look at it, on average, what we've had for dispatchers, it's about 8,000 calls a year per dispatcher. When you look on the fire side, we had, over the Memorial weekend, we had 53 calls out of one station for a 48-hour shift. a call an hour over a call an hour and we know they don't all come hour by hour but even if they did that's lack of sleep lack of home life over time it's been hit repeatedly we're short staffed on both sides we're short staffed in dispatch we're short staffed on fire uh everything we are doing right now is coming at a high cost to the personnel and i can't stress that enough that that's where we are gonna break. And that's where I'm glad to hear like council member Garcia talking about we're at that critical mass and we truly are. And I appreciate that this conversation has happened and the blinds are starting to be opened up about where we're at. And I'll field any questions you got.

Thank you, Casey. Are there any questions for Casey? Oh, council member Matthews.

Casey, did you wanna finish your, I'd like you to finish your thought and share it with us.

Yeah, I hadn't, you know, three minutes isn't, I think they speed it up on this thing, honestly, it goes so fast. But just the amount that is being done and I'm glad that Chief Connolly hit on it. It's the multiplicity of things that we're having to do day to day. As I sat in a part of the other duty that I have is sitting as a SWAT medic, medic supporting our SWAT team, the regional SWAT team. And on that Ranger 56 crash being in the bear as one of the support medics for the SWAT members and PD and DPS and county and everybody that was out with the firearms sitting there with the shooting going on. Wow. the supervisors had to come in and man the dispatch center to help out in there which it's an awesome bunch of supervisors that come in and do that and the people that have continued to struggle through this that have worked at one point one of them working 11 out of 12 days in a row to keep the dispatch center running so that nobody missed that that that continuity continued in those calls going out and so the citizen didn't have their call go unanswered or the unit not respond to that call Where should I have been that day? I don't know. I was out in the bear with the SWAT team on that call to support them. I had supervisors supporting the dispatch center back there as the manager. Where should I have been? It's just one of those that we just had the conversation this morning in the captain's meeting about that Chief Gaylord mentioned that we are trying to figure out how to do the same with less as everything goes vertical as tourism increases as the population increases as the complexity increases as we discuss lithium battery fires and which which will come around and start happening as the prevalence of lithium batteries increases and the toxicity and danger of those where a simple cell phone or a small scooter battery can burn a house down creating a huge complex issue. EV that catches fire now becomes a, which before was a 15, 20 minute response from an engine get on scene, put out, be done is going to be multiple hours and multiple engines as we try to mitigate that EV, that electric vehicle fire, as well as not create a toxic environment with all of that stuff coming on. So the job complexities continue to increase, the call requests continue to increase, the complexity of those calls increase. As we build denser housing, that comes with other complications. As we continue to move into the forest, I didn't even get to that part of it yet, which has been mentioned over and over, is our biggest threat to Flagstaff and our longevity as a city. You burn down half of the city with a conflagration or a massive wildfire, We're not talking about this anymore. We're talking about how to survive at that point, just as a city, as we continue to move out into the woods and not have the response. And with all of that coming back to the core of the person, when that call comes in, that that dispatcher is able to take the call, function in the call, or the call taker, as it should be, to a dispatcher, to the units. We currently cover 10 different units We currently have eight different agencies that we service with additional requests coming in from other fire agencies where we would have a single dispatcher managing 10 separate fire agencies that want to be dispatched out of our dispatch center because we are a regional dispatch center for all of Coconino County. Thank you. Thank you, Casey.

I'm sorry. No, you're good.

You're good.

I appreciate all of your knowledge that you've shared with us. Thank you. Our next caller?

Mayor, that was our only online commenter.

Okay, so. All right, let's see. Which of these cues, public comment, public participation? So I guess Council Member Garcia.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. And I'm trying to figure out how to formulate this question and make this point without hurting anybody's feelings. Because I certainly don't want to minimize the point that Councilmember Matthews was making. Because I tracked with where she was going with it, with the tax. And so it will have nothing to do with her comment whatsoever besides simply mentioning the BBB. And I have to bring this up because it was a stumbling point, in my opinion, from where I was watching for the committee in the beginning until it was understood what that tax can and can't do, especially for what we're talking about here today. And I don't want it to convolute the committee. THE COMMUNITY ANYMORE JUST BY MERELY MENTIONING THAT TAX, EVEN THOUGH COUNCIL MEMBER MATTHEW'S POINT IS LEGITIMATE AND IT WAS ASIDE FROM WHAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT. But can you just make it clear how we are not able to touch that tax or what does that tax have to do with this? Are we able to, you know, because a big thing that you heard during the Public Safety Committee meetings were comments such as, is it really that important to wrap another utility box when we have these issues over here? I feel you. But it would be important for the public's edification at this point, I believe, to understand how that tax was formed, first of all, what that tax paid for, and how it came about, and or does it have anything to do with public safety? Can we speak to that, just for clarification?

I'm going to phone a friend.

Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Members, Heidi Hansen, Econaut Vitality Director. You can change it. You can make a tax benefit whatever you want it to benefit. But when it was originated, it was definitely to support anything but police or fire or other things like that. It was to enhance tourism and community facilities. And so when it was first designed, it was really designed for tourism and a way for us to market the destination holistically because it was very hard for businesses to be able to do that on their own. And I would have to say, Vice Mayor, for instance, having owned your own business for 25 years, it would be impossible for you to be able to reach the amount of visitors that we reach for you. So I can't say that it can't go to something like public safety, but that would have to go to a vote to go to the voters. and anything that you want to do with allocation changes has to go in front of the voters. You couldn't just do that at the dais without bringing that back to them. Originally it was created so that it could help with administration of the tax for tourism and then it was beautification arts and sciences. I would like to tell you that all the groups that are currently getting allocation don't feel like they're getting enough. especially in tourism. I will tell you for the last 14 years, 13 and a half being at the city, tourism is pretty upset that they used to get 48.5% of the tax and now they get 30%. And they're the ones that are working their hardest to get the visitors here so they can spend more money, 64%, right, of that tax. So I think there's a lot of dynamics, but I wouldn't be able to sit up here and tell you that you can't change something, you can change it, but it has to go to the voters to be voted on. You can't just do this right here with this council body.

I just wanted to make sure that you're, so when you're saying you could change it, I feel like we can't. The voters could change it.

Voters can change it.

The voters could change it. The city council cannot.

That's exactly what I'm saying.

Okay, thank you. I was like, we cannot change this.

So, Mayor and Council, there are a couple things, and again, this actually came up during the budget retreat in a different context, a context of housing, when the budget When the, not the petition, the initiative, not the initiative, I'm using the wrong words, when the ballot measure went to the voters originally in the 80s, it was just as Heidi has indicated, it had to go toward tourism and beautification and things like that. I'm going to be very candid with you here, and I may not be very popular with some for saying it, but technically speaking, something like housing would need to go to the voters. Something like public safety could have a tie possibly to tourism. Again, there's a legal opinion on that as far as previous city attorneys that I have seen. I may not be popular with some, like I said, for saying that, but I need to make sure that you're all clear that technically it can happen.

Without the voters deciding that?

Correct.

Well, then that may be something that we could look into.

Can I add something? When we were doing the BBB renewal, I worked on it for two years. You have to worry about the groups that are already receiving BBB and where they feel like the amount that they receive, if it's adequate. So just so you know, what you would be doing is that large arts and science group that would be coming and asking for changes. Economic development might be asking for changes. So I just want you to consider that there's a lot more to it than just adding something.

Oh, it's simply on the surface there's a lot more to it. We haven't even mentioned parks, which is a huge part of that tax.

And if I could add, again, there would have to be a clear connection between tourism and public safety. There would have to be a clear connection between anything with the BBB funds and tourism, beautification, anything that you spend it on. Just need to make sure that's clear.

I just wanted to make sure that there was clarity because during the committee meetings for a while, there just wasn't enough. And we got stuck in that groove. And I'd hate for the public to think, oh, they could just use BBB money when we can't. So thank you for that clarification. I also would like to mention that in my assessment the voters voted on the BBB tax to support parks, beautification, economic vitality and the like because there was a deficiency there and we were able to tax the tourists which pay for most of that tax or a good amount of that tax for us to have here just like we are going to the voters again to ask them to help out with public safety. In the same way, just a different department that still needs help, and we're still going to be taxing tourists to the tune of 37%, which is great, because that's a good way for us to share that expense when we share our town with tourists all year round. Now we can get back to the topic at hand. I wanted to ask Shannon, about the Public Safety Committee. Can you speak broadly to the cuts that were made? And I really just want to emphasize the, I don't know if frugality is necessarily the correct term, but the Public Safety Committee meeting I think asked the right questions and got to the right number by chipping away at things that that maybe through development fees or time could be paid for in other ways, but really get into the meat and potatoes of what we actually need. So there was a significant cut there, if you could speak to that cut.

I think staff, as you heard, each group was able to present to the committee what their needs were throughout that process. We were, as staff, working on, okay, now what's that going to cost us over a 10-year period of time? As those numbers came to fruition and we started to hear feedback from the committee, we realized as staff that that wasn't going to happen. So we sat down and created some tiers. So that was our first approach at trying to prioritize all these needs. I think that went from about $511 million to about $407 million Then we kept talking about the different kind of funding mechanisms that could be used and heard pretty clearly that this committee was considering somewhere between a quarter cent and a half cent of tax. And so we as staff again came together and said, all right, we have our tiers. If we looked at the first two tiers, what out of those would you want to have funded to make sure that your most critical needs were met? And along with those conversations, we heard from the committee, station seven being in tier three didn't work for them. They felt it needed to be in a higher tier. And so we focused on that as staff to make sure that as we worked through those most critical needs, station seven was a part of that. And so just continuing, I think, in that conversation with the committee, continuing to have conversations as staff and whittling down to what do you have to have to make sure the lights stay on and knowing what that was. Does that help answer your question? Absolutely.

Thank you so much for illustrating that for me. So my next question, or maybe it's a comment, it's something that I heard from the committee that they were real serious about. You guys have obviously listened very well to everything that they had to say. But when this comes back to us, if there's just a clear illustration on how this tax and or bond if that's the way that the council decides to go, will be, I don't want to use the word, that's not the right word, will be drawn up to make sure that what we are proposing the funding to be, that it only be spent on that, if that makes sense.

Typically that's done through the publicity pamphlet. I have a hard time saying that word. Where if you look back at our 2022 bond, it outlined basically all of the things that we were going to spend money on. And then you as council have continued to hear presentations on how that spending of money is going, what's been accomplished so far, and what has yet to be done. And so I would imagine, and this is how the conversation with the committee went as well, this pamphlet then would cover all of these components that we've outlined for the sales tax as well as the bond to make sure that those things are completed. Similar to that 2022 bond, we also want to add the flexibility that if we're able to get grants that can help us pay for these things too. So that allows us to maybe get further on those lists of needs if we can, but that only happens if we're able to get grants and that's just unknown at this point in time.

Okay, thank you. We have seen plenty of emails coming in that have talked about, you know, that have mentioned the type of things that development should be paying for itself and the like, and I don't want to get too much into that today, but on that note, I would like to say that I encourage management's office and staff and council to... or at least my recommendation is for us to have that line item on June 2nd as another discussion. So that way we could have more public comment and folks that are sending us emails here now can show up if they'd like, or maybe I would like, or if they don't, then I'll address the questions that they had in their emails today then.

So what are you looking for specifically on June 2nd? Information about the development impact fees and what they've garnered and what they would use what they would be used for?

Yeah, there's a community group that reached out in an email, and if you could just kind of go through that email. I mean, they have some valid points that I would like to be discussed. I just don't want to take the time up today because I know we have an opportunity on the second, right?

Yes, absolutely. I just want to make sure that as we're putting something together, it's going to address what you want it to. Thank you.

I just don't have the specifics in front of me, but the email is in our council box.

Okay.

Thank you.

Council Member House.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Shannon and everyone that presented to us this evening. I wanted to go back to the big hard question that I asked earlier about just that overarching view of things. From each of the department's perspectives and I know I didn't ask everyone that same question but I think everyone kind of spoke to it of the I think Daniel referenced it as the trickle-down effect of of what we're seeing happening across all of these different public safety teams because of the fact that they've been operating from a place of Consistent excellence with greater needs but fewer resources and So where I'm, the message that I think I'm taking from all of this is that it's very clear that our teams are doing excellent work. They are meeting needs in our community in excellent ways. There's a difference though between doing excellent work and expecting excellence at a deficit. And I think that is really what this measure is working towards is recognizing that working excellence at a deficit is not sustainable, it's not safe, and it's not reasonable for these teams. We've talked a lot tonight about the mental health implications, the personal implications, the level of burnout, the stressors that each of these teams are under to maintain that level of excellence with the resources that they have now. And I go back to comments that were made about the fact that this work and the work of this measure is not getting us to a place where we're addressing the needs of the future. It's getting us to the point of meeting the needs of now. that we have not met for a long period of time. I strongly feel that we not only need to move forward in ways that are addressing those needs that we've had for a long period of time, but that also we in many ways owe it to these teams that have been providing for our community safety in increasing ways over time to meet those needs. I think back to the same email that you're referencing and thinking about the references to not only development needing to pay for itself and some of the considerations when we talk about what the teams have been able to do with the resources that they have. So why is there the need for more? And I think that we've answered that question repeatedly through the conversation tonight. is that the teams are doing a lot with very few resources that we want to be able to provide them. And I think that's a very serious question that we need to undertake. am very much eager to move this forward in the ways that we can. If we are wanting to come back with another conversation on the second, I am willing to do that. I don't know that there's much more information that I need from you, Shannon, or from the teams that I've presented, because I think we've gotten a very good picture of what this is doing. I think the only lingering question is ensuring that this as is being presented and proposed is actually doing enough. That we are getting to the point that we need to be at the present moment to ensure that we are not just putting a Band-Aid on a festering wound, but that we're actually dressing and addressing the needs that are being presented to us. So, yeah, I mean, that's all I've got. I'm very grateful to you and to all the teams that came out and spoke to us today, to the public commenters that spoke on this, Michael and Casey. I think just going back to something that Michael said, that this is not about politics, it's about people. And what we're looking at doing here is really serving the people who serve our people. And that is, there's, I think, no greater thing that we can do. Thank you.

Vice Mayor. Thank you. Shannon, I have a question. If this measure were to get approved, is there an accountability mechanism that we're going to use to track how we're spending the funds and what projects are getting done and what goals are being achieved?

I would imagine it's similar to what we've been building out in water services, and you basically take your report of the things that you said you were going to accomplish, and then you're tracking what year you were able to accomplish those things so that then in the end you've been able to demonstrate you were able to accomplish all those things. And in some cases, similar to maybe what we've experienced with the 2022 bond, at the end of the day it wasn't enough money to do maybe to buy a fire engine. And so then we'd have to be able to demonstrate we not only use that money, but we had to supplement it with maybe another $500,000 in order to accomplish what we set out to do. Other things are is we can't sometimes do the construction that we want. So sometimes we have to right size it. So maybe instead of getting three training classrooms, we get two. Some of those things will happen over time as expenses ebb and flow, but I think it's important to be able to demonstrate to the community, we heard that from the committee over and over again, repeatedly, you have to be able to demonstrate you're spending the money on what you're asking for. And to me, and I think to the team, it's super important because the only way we're going to continue to garner that community trust is to demonstrate we're doing what we said we were going to do. And here's what we've accomplished.

Thank you, I did attend some of the community meetings and we have someone in the audience who was on the committee and that was definitely a concern that was brought up often was how do we make sure that we're spending the money where We had approved it go I do appreciate all the extensive work that you have done Shannon and the committee has done and staff I know this has not been an easy lift so tonight really demonstrates how thorough and extensive you have really listened to the community and to the committee and I I don't know if I need another meeting but if the Council feels it deemed necessary. I will certainly be here with bells on to Listen, but I myself am ready to move forward with this. I want to make sure that we're being disciplined with our taxpayer dollars and and a couple of meetings ago I asked our leadership to turn over every rock to make sure that we're exploring all options and I believe that has happened and here we are tonight and I'm ready to move forward. I think that with the recommendations brought forth and listening to the committee meetings I feel very comfortable with where we're at and this is a big decision for our community But it's one that has been thoughtful and we are talking about people who serve us day in and day out and we have got to pay them back and And make sure that they're taking care of and this is one way to do that. So, thank you Councilmember Matthews Thank You mayor.

I just wanted to clarify too that I am a hundred percent on doing this. I'm just I want this to be successful and I I don't know, I don't have the confidence, not in the need, but in the court of public opinion if our community, maybe they will support a 50 cent sales tax. And that's what the point I was making was that I think it's important to show that we are also looking internally to say, look, we've exhausted looking at where we can turn over every rock to see if we need to make some adjustments. We're not just asking the public to take this burden on, that we also are doing the work. The BBB tax was just an easy to look at. There are several communities throughout the state that does use their hotel and lodging tax for public safety because it's so closely tied. The increase in tourism, impacts the rate of crime and other calls that go out. So if not that, and having that conversation, whether we could look at it or not, I know our general fund sweeps quite a bit of money out of each of those divisions from the BBB. So just to educate us on what's possible and not so that we can respond to the community. Doesn't need to come back next week. I think, well, at least the ones that have talked already We're all in favor of doing this. We need to do this, but I want to make sure it gets across the finish line. And so I want to make sure that we have not just thrown it out there and said well, you know, let's just hope they pass it. I want to be strategic and make sure that we are doing our part to make sure that we have made the community confident that this is the only way to now do what we're supposed to do to take care of public safety and to get it across the finish line. And that is my only concern. So I'm 100% behind it. I wish it wasn't so much, but here we are, right? And the needs are obvious and great. So, you know, I don't know that it needs to come back to council to move it forward, but I think we also need to show the community that we are being fiscally responsible and having hard conversations about other areas so we can look out into the community and say, yeah, there was just no other place for us to pull this money from. It may be partial. I don't think we could pull from 100%, but if we could soften the blow at all, that would be great.

So Councilman Matthews, to just clarify, do you want the BBB conversation then to come back so council can weigh in as to whether or not you want to reallocate that towards public safety? Because that's what would need to happen in order for us to change direction at this point in time.

City Manager?

Mayor, Council, Shannon, I'd like to weigh in on this item. I think this is a bigger discussion, and I'm not sure we're quite ready to have this discussion. I think there have been some comments made tonight. We do not sweep BBB funds into the general fund. Um, there are a lot of things I think that are being stated up here that aren't accurate. So I think what I want to do is bring it back to our team and, um, I don't think it should stop this discussion tonight. I agree. Um, so if that helps.

Council member Garcia.

Thank you. Um, I really just wanted to circle back around and, uh, and make sure I, was clear on my comments about having another meeting about this for discussion. It's not because I need one. I am here to do the job of council, after we did our job of pushing to get a community meeting together, or excuse me, the committee together, I'm happy with their recommendations. I'm really happy with their recommendations, but as per usual, I'm concerned that there's no community members here tonight. And I thought, well, maybe Maybe they just didn't get the memo and we could have another meeting so they could all show up and express their concerns to us so we can discuss those as well. If that's not poignant, if we don't need that meeting, then I'm okay moving it forward as is. But something that I did not hear much talk of tonight, maybe that's because everyone on council is cool with the committee's recommendation, which I am cool with too. but there's still that lingering number out there where 50 cents on $100, you go up to $1,000, and they start talking about buying a new car. Now we're looking at $2,000, $3,000, $4,000. Then we're looking at buying a new house. We're looking at like $30,000. It might be important to have the discussion. If we're going to if we're gonna talk about that, to have it on the second. But if not, then I'm fine with where we're at.

Council Member Aslan.

Thank you very much, Mayor. Thank you to everyone who spoke tonight and spoke so passionately and eloquently, especially Mr. Levin, who has since stepped out, but his presence is very much felt this evening. Nothing much to add tonight, but to just clearly state again that I understand the needs. I think they've been expertly laid out tonight by everyone who spoke, including Mr. Levin, the chair of the Citizen Task Force. These needs have been painstakingly laid out in public meetings all year and beyond. But I also understand the need from a personal perspective. As a former first responder myself, and as the son of a firefighter and as the brother and the brother-in-law of firefighters, I understand the demands of the lifestyle and the sacrifices that go along with this vocation and the sacrifices and the toll that it takes on families. I will be supporting the bond and the recommendations of the committee. And I just wanna add into that I don't think this is a zero sum game. We don't need to suggest in this conversation that there's an obligation to discuss robbing Peter to pay Paul Our community has numerous needs and we can figure out how to do justice to each of them. I think a lot of those budgetary conversations are valid and necessary, but let's keep this one simple. Our community owes it to those who put their lives on the line to throw them the lifeline they're desperate for. And I don't see any need to deliberate on this further, at least personally, not to satisfy my own thinking on this. So that's where I'm at.

Councilmember Spence.

Thank you Mayor and thanks to all of our presenters this evening. It is my opinion that this Public Safety Citizens Committee has done excellent work and we need to find a a venue, a means of communicating their hard work to our community as we present these two financing mechanisms to our committee. I am totally in support of their recommendation for the general obligation bond to be put before the voters. And I think June 16th, would be the time to let the public weigh in on the final for a final time before we call for that to be put on the ballot with regard to the sales tax I am, again, totally in support of it, and I think June 16th would be the time for us to let the public weigh in before we take that vote. So I'm in favor of revisiting both of these issues on the 16th of June. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember. I support this wholeheartedly, the 0.5% and the bond. And I want to say that I'm able to support this in part because to us and to the public, things seem good, right? And for that, I thank you all for working to make sure that things are at least to the public, you're showing up, you're responding, you're helping people, and we don't see a problem yet. And that's because of all of our emergency services personnel who go above and beyond to get stuff done. I also support it. in part because each division and department has rigorously evaluated needs and those needs have been further vetted by additional departments and leadership. Then the citizens committee reviewed, discussed and debated and asked very tough questions and any of us who either attended those meetings or watched them afterwards or online as they were happening, you know that staff got grilled about every aspect. I cannot imagine us coming up with many questions, although we managed to tonight, about this that weren't first contemplated and debated with this committee. So it can't... it can't be overstated how critical the committee was to this process. It helps all of us feel more comfortable to know that there were many other eyes and fingers all over this before reaching us here. And once you know, once you understand what the critical need is, you have to act. we can't be given this information and also have it explained to us how rigorously it went through so many filters before we're coming to this place. You can't not act. And so I am wholeheartedly in support of this and I know that we have a... I know that there's a good package that is going to be put before the voters of some very critical needs and I hope that voters will continue to spend the time to understand this because some of it is dense and we heard the committee when it was first presented to them struggling with why are there so many needs? How did we get here? if we can all have open minds and listen to that information before November hits. And this is a tough time to put something like this on the ballot, right? Cost of living is one of the biggest struggles for people living in our community, and none of us set that aside lightly. At the same time, we have a duty to act on this. So I am in support. I'm hearing that we don't really think that we need much more of a discussion other than when you come with the final package and maybe having some of those, the dollar amounts that were talked about presented. I mean, we've got the 50 cents on $100, but if there are any additional numbers that would be a personal impact to voters that might be good information to have. And I look forward to continuing to talk to Flagstaff residents about all of these needs and gathering their input and answering every possible question they can have. Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council.

All right, open call to the public. We have none. Announcements and updates, two from Council and City Manager. Council Member Spence.

Nothing this evening.

Council Member House. Nada, thank you.

Vice Mayor. Vice Mayor. Just real quick, there is something going on Saturday night and I'm trying to pull it up on my calendar at Buffalo Park. Yes, Blue Moon Rising, Buffalo Park Full Moon Concerts and I believe it's a gentleman that will be playing a grand piano out there and there'll be telescopes so you can look at the stars and I will be attending that and bringing a little picnic, should be fun.

Councilmember Aslan?

Nothing.

Councilmember Garcia?

We have a library board meeting this Thursday, 1 o'clock, the library. That's it.

Councilmember Matthews?

Nothing, thank you.

Nothing from me. City Manager? Nothing from me. All right, we're adjourned.