Township Board - Regular Meeting

Start here, so good to see our full board tonight and always appreciate our guys who take the time in their evening and Chelsea too. So, and the public who's here tonight, thank you for coming. Not a big crowd tonight, but we're glad for each of you. We're going to open as we always do with a prayer for guidance. So, Kelly, would you do that for us?

If you'll bow your heads with me. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for the opportunity that we have to serve as board members for this township. And we ask that you be with us and help us to make the best decisions that we can. Help us to remember that we're always on the same team and we are all acting in the best interest of this community. We ask that you be with our first responders, our fire, police, and anybody else who is working tirelessly to make this community a better place. And we ask that you be with all of us and the people in the audience tonight and help us to make it home safely. We pray all this in your son's name. Amen.

Amen. Very nice. As for the Pledge of Allegiance, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you.

You may be seated. And Kelly, could you acknowledge our quorum tonight?

They're all present.

Great. Is there a motion to approve tonight's agenda? So moved. Good for you. Any comments? Hearing none, all in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? All right, our agenda's approved and we're gonna start tonight with several members of the public here who wish to come and address the board. We appreciate you being here and some of the parents as well. So I don't know if there's a particular order or if you're all expecting to step forward but we're glad to have you and you're welcome to stand before us at the mic. Please introduce yourself. So we know who you are and maybe where you live.

I'm Cole Kuipers and I live right off Fillmore and Jenison, so not too far away. And I just want to start off by saying I'm sorry. I know you might not entirely believe me when I say that. My actions of what I did during that night were immature and dumb. I was being a stupid teenager, to be honest with you. I know there's not much I can do now to help out. I also just want to add that I am paying the consequences of my actions, and I'm very sorry for what I did. It doesn't matter how many times I say it, I can't express how grateful I am to be able to come here and publicly apologize. And if I was only two years older, I would have been in a much, much worse situation that could have ruined my life. So I apologize. I'm very sorry.

Thank you, Cole. And your sincerity is apparent and obvious, so appreciate that. I suspect each of you want a turn, do you? Is that all right? You're welcome.

My name is Tanner Greenbower. I live down in Jenison, right off of Baldwin. My actions that night that we went to 8th Avenue Park was definitely not the greatest actions I've ever done in my life. I am very sorry about it. I'm glad and thankful for all you guys to give us a second chance to come up here and do this, and we really appreciate it. Well, we said the fines split it four ways, and making it all, you know, a lot better for us. And we thank you guys a lot. Thank the officers for helping us out and being really polite. Again, I'm sorry for what we did at 8th Avenue Park. You know, we're not acting the greatest. So thank you guys again for bringing us here and letting us do this. And we're deeply apologetic. And thank you for all you guys' time.

Appreciate that. Thank you.

My name is Joseph Young. I live off of Chicago Drive neighborhood back over by Bursley School. And you probably know me from the 8th Avenue incident. I made a very poor decision by choosing to tear up the grass and that was not great. I'm very sorry for all the damage that we've caused and all the money spent on the situation. I clearly wasn't thinking about any of the consequences of my actions. I also didn't think about the amount of damage that I caused. I'm very sorry for what I did at the park and take full responsibility. I'm also very thankful for the kindness and generosity in letting me stand in front of the board to apologize for this. This kindness was not deserved in any way and I'm very fortunate to have this opportunity instead of legal charges. Thank you.

Thank you for each coming here and stepping up in that respect to address the board directly. We don't make light of it. We don't excuse it. And at the same time though, when you offer an apology, it's appropriate when a sincere apology is given that forgiveness is granted. And as much as we can on behalf of our residents, we extend our forgiveness to you. We appreciate the fact that it comes with consequence and that you've accepted that. And we appreciate that follow through as well. And to the parents as well who allowed this to be a life lesson, a teachable moment, which we all have experienced in one way or another over the course of our lives. And we learn from it. That's when we do well, right? So appreciate each of you. Anyone else is welcome to speak if you wish. Don't have to.

I think this was powerful. They were sincere. Wonderful to have the parents come, and probably one of the most difficult things they've had to do. But this is something you'll remember the rest of your life, but thank you for sharing with us and doing this with dignity.

All right, if no one else wishes to add anything, we appreciate your time tonight. You are excused to stay or go, whatever you choose. We certainly won't think less of the situation if you don't sit through our budget meeting, but you're welcome to, okay? So, thank you all. All right, we're gonna move on to item seven at this time. Kurt VanCoveren, who is our Ottawa County Road Commission Chairman has come to provide us with an update from the Road Commission. So Kurt, welcome and the floor is yours. Thank you.

Hand out. Thank you. Well, we are wrapping up projects this year. The roundabout at 120th and Fort Sheldon opened three weeks ago. Last week, the one at 144th and Lincoln opened, targeting October 12th for 48th and Baldwin. Hopefully, we don't have a lot of rain and that we can accomplish those on a timely basis. Next year, we're looking at doing a roundabout at 68th and Fillmore. south out of Allendale. Another one will be at 48th and Byron Road, kind of where Byron Road has the jog between Jamestown and Salem Townships. Then we'll also be reworking the one in Coopersville. That is currently a two-lane, and we'll be reformatting that to a one-lane. That's We have people that are confused going through it, and that's why we're having the accidents. We'll look at reconfiguring that roundabout. Next year in Georgetown, we really only have one project, Main Street from Baldwin Street to Kennewick, and that is scheduled to be resurfaced. If you wanna look at the front of this, these are the proposed road changes or road improvements for the next five years. Got the primary road listed, like 8th Avenue from Jackson to Port Sheldon. ADT is the average daily travel of the vehicles on the road. Miles is how long of a section that is. And we have the last time it was improved was 2021. It was resurfaced. Has a PACER rating of eight. nine is brand new road four is normally when we try to start repaving them in the future you see that it's scheduled to be five lanes from m6 to 44 is what we're going to be looking at so you can look down all your roads as to when we're going to be looking at improving them and if you've got any projects that go along that we need to dovetail together we hope that this opens the line of communication for you Before we had a 150-page document that you had to sit through. Now we've got the Reader's Digest version for you. So hopefully that helps you if you look at your different roads. Some of these roads, we worked with Holland Township on 112th Avenue. That was originally scheduled for 2028. They came to us and said that they would be willing to LOAN US THE MONEY TO HAVE IT DONE IN 2027, AND WE'D PAY THEM OFF IN 2028 BECAUSE OF THE CONDITION OF THAT ROAD. THEY WANTED TO MOVE IT UP, SO THAT'S ONE OF THE THINGS WE ARE WORKING ON. SOME GOOD NEWS. WELL, REALLY NOT THAT GOOD NEWS. AS YOU SAW, GAS PRICES COMING INTO HERE WAS $4.58. Two weeks ago we learned asphalt is going from $70 a ton to $93 a ton for next year. So some of these projects may be delayed, but hopefully petroleum comes back down and some of these projects can be completed and being affordable. But we have to be open to that. And when you're looking at doing your subdivisions, you may not be able to do as many as you did in the past. Do you have any questions on that?

Is there going to be a light on 8th Avenue that I hear at, what is it, Berry? Is that a false rumor? You said we're redoing, it's five lanes, Jackson to Port Shelton. Was there any intention about a light that I hear, or is that? I'll make a note and find out. I'm not sure if it's neither or not. I'm just asking a question. Is it 8th Avenue and? 8th and Berry. People have said that there might be.

but that could just be rumor check into that i have a question um in 20 20 29 i'm going to go 48th avenue port sheldon to baldwin street is there a way we could work to get a bike lane on one side of that road And I think we would be willing to pay for part of that if we could do that at the same time. But that is one thing that is a big thing that's talked about, the township trying to get bike lanes. We looked at putting a sidewalk there because we're in the waterline. Easements are difficult, but you have more clout than we do.

So I put it on you.

So we're going to do 48 from Port Sheldon to the roundabout. That's at Baldwin and 48. that's scheduled for 2029 and it's talking about three lanes been bearing north and i'm like is there a way that we could incorporate a bike lane on one side or any bike lanes on any roads that we do that we'd like to see you know the goal at least been talked about is trying to get access from south to north because the Grand Ravines, dog parks on Fillmore. And so to try to get there, it's either 40th, 48th, 42nd. Our access seems to drop off at Bower Road. But if we can figure out a way to do that, I know we got bike lanes on Port Sheldon from 40th to 48th. It'd be nice if we could extend them from Port Sheldon to Baldwin.

A lot of that would have to go to the Metro Council to get funding. Because we don't get the funding for bike paths, but we would permit them in the right of ways.

But I think as a township, we may be willing to pay for that if we know what the price is. Because if we're paying to put sidewalks and bike paths in, we can work with you. There may be a cost savings doing it all at the same time that we'd be willing to look at.

I think we're looking at doing that with London right now.

Yeah, yeah. With certain of the roads, or you mean on the blended side of 48th?

Blended side of, I think they were wanting to look at Port Sheldon.

Yeah. Blended side's an easier side to put a bike path than Georgetown side. I'm just going to put that out there because I've watched it and I've looked at it. I know that you've got the slide up there. Are you going to go on to that?

In a few minutes.

In a few minutes? All right. Yeah. I had some questions about that too, but I'll digress. I'll just go with this right now.

He's working up to that, Gary. Huh?

He's working up to that.

I'm not going to let you jump so far ahead.

I'm sorry. I wasn't liked by my teachers in school either, so I'm sorry.

Proportionally, do we get our share of the dollars, and is that done by formula or something? And if so, based on what? And then secondarily... What would you say is a range of investment that the various townships and cities make toward their own paving, especially the larger ones, if you can give some sort of guesstimate that way?

I don't want to get the budget broken down that far. Because we're, for example, we're having projects distributed around the county.

We're allocating potentially tonight $2 million toward this next budget for roads. And we've done as high as four in the past. We've done as little as none last year. And I just kind of wonder how we compare that way to what others pull out of their own pockets.

Well, the major ones are about right in that territory. You know, Holland is spending that type of money.

But my former question then, how about just how does the allocation come about? Is there a formula to that?

I'll give you a break.

What's that?

I'll have Brett get you that allocation.

Okay. He could show me the allocation, but it wouldn't tell me the why. Is it based on population or square miles or amount of roads?

Mainly on the roads and vehicle traffic is what I'm doing.

Then it's a generic question. In your view, is Georgetown Township treated fairly in terms of road disbursement and work?

I think Georgetown has challenges in that It is growing and we are funneling so much traffic through that the big question is more the capacity of the roads and having to increase the capacity. Like 48th Avenue, we're looking at making it larger. How do we get traffic to flow through Georgetown because like we're gonna discuss later, we have a bottleneck here and there's no land to do anything with it. It's more trying to get up to last year. We were basically getting money to fix and repair roads. For 20 years we were in that mode. Now we're trying to switch that mode and say, how do we start developing roads for our future? How do we get intersections to flow better? A lot of these roads need to be three to four lanes wide. We've just held them at two for the longest time and was trying to find the funding source. We finally got our first payment for the marijuana tax last month.

What about Bower Road in front of Jenison High Schools? That's a nightmare. Did I put it bluntly enough? I mean, you can't even get through there.

No.

How do you start? Are you going to widen? Do anything there? When they put in that new school, the new middle school, it's only going to be worse. So I'm just wondering what the plan is for that.

We don't have one yet. But what we're trying to do is why we come here is identify some of these things. So we start to incorporate them into the strategic plan.

I would start incorporating that one.

Well, it looks like they have Bower Road 36 to 28 that's gonna go to three lanes, and you would say, well, keep going or something, right? Is that, yeah.

You know, that's where we're looking for your input. Do you want it five lanes? Do you want it four? Not have a center turn lane.

Heavy disgusting on our bridge across the river. That is your solution. And I know it's an expensive and it's a long conversation. But a bridge across the river solves your traffic problems. I don't know how that discussion starts. I don't know if it starts with you guys, if it starts with the feds. But somebody's got to start a discussion of either getting Fillmore straight through and ending up across the river because the county parks owns all that property, or they go up 28th Avenue and cross the bridge there, the river there, and end up by Linden. Or you go across the golf course and you take Bower Road straight across and try to figure that out. But without another bridge across the river, the traffic in Georgetown will always be pinched.

But we have a $70 million budget.

I understand, but you have the podium when it comes to that. We don't, and yet we suffer. So that's why I asked the question, where does that conversation start?

Probably at the Grand Valley Metro Council. Because you are going to have to state, get state and federal funds to make something like that possible. Because you're probably talking, I want to see, how wide is the river there?

Right there?

Oh. What do you think, Kelly?

Wide.

Probably a couple hundred feet. Yeah, you're talking... Or more. The 30 million water bridge. Call the daycare.

about 36 in fillmore either a stop sign or a red light or something because getting off that's dangerous there off from 36 that so turn left turn left yep just hardly can't do it

I will say, you guys, I get this comment a lot from people too about it, and I encourage all of you, when you're at an intersection that you think is just the worst, get your stopwatch out because it's actually a lot quicker than what you think. I wait there five minutes. I've timed myself so many times and I'm telling you, I can make a left-hand turn either at 24th and Fillmore or 36th and Fillmore in typically under a minute. And I do have a traffic study for this area, so I've seen the data as well. Our emotions take over when it comes to traffic and the data doesn't always support it. i would just encourage us to really follow the data when it comes to traffic because i'm telling you these intersections are actually operating at acceptable rates whether we like it or not i think long term 36th and fillmore is scheduled for a roundabout yeah i think i saw that round ball front about two million apiece we get half of the funding from the metro councils just waiting

to get the list of priorities for that intersection versus others in the county.

But the 36th and Fillmore will become, it probably should scooch up on your list because like Loewen Woods is scheduled to make their next curb cut onto 36 in the next couple of years. So you'll have a pretty significant amount of cars potentially, even more so than what they are today coming out onto 36.

Where's that?

You can see it because they cut in the construction road right now. just north of Taylor.

It's kind of by the water tower.

Yeah, by the water tower. Yeah, they've already cut the construction road in, and it'll probably make its way out there with a true subdivision road, I'd say within the next two to three years. Okay.

Now can we talk about that?

Yeah. This next one is the crash report, which leads us up into this. These are the top 50 crash intersections in Ottawa County. As you say, the top one is here. It shows we had 59 accidents there, zero fatalities, zero accidents where people had to be transported to the hospital. Zero pedestrian, we had one bike accident. We had four accidents that were an angle versus straight-on traffic. Three of those angled with a turn. Two with a head-on left turn. Thirteen that were rear ends. Zero with a rear end left turn. Zero with rear-end right turn, zero head-on. We had 29 that were side-swiped from the same direction. Remember that. And we had zero that were side-swiped from opposing directions. 25 of the accidents were young drivers. 27 was from older drivers. No.

further down. There you go. What is currently happening is the traffic light is down at this side of the intersection.

And people are stopping right here at the crosswalk.

What we're seeing is we're having semis making the left turn here. What we are doing is, because of the proximity to the turn, the back end of the semi is striking vehicles right here that are parked, because you have a left turn here and a left turn here. That's the current situation. What we are looking at is moving the stop bar and the lights and traffic lights back here. That will allow the left turn traffic to come through left turn

So on the westbound Baldwin side, though, you would have to move that back as well because those cars there are the ones getting clipped on. Yeah. Everybody tries to make that turn as quick and sharp as they can.

Yeah, I sat there one day and studied in the parking lot by the drug store there and that stop bar that's on Baldwin needs to be moved further back because what happens is the semi always takes the outside corner and the car comes on the inside and if it cuts a little bit short they have no place to go because that car is too far into the intersection and they're either got to hit the brakes or fight with an 80,000 pound truck I'm going to tell you what's going to win on that deal and I look at it and go I think that cross I think The crosswalk on Baldwin should be further to the east, and that stop bar should be moved further to the east so that people aren't coming to that crosswalk. If it was back 15 feet or so, do a different curb cut that'd keep the cars back a little further and open up that opening. I mean, I see what you're doing on the other side. That's good, too, but I think it'd be additional. We should open up that opening on the Baldwin.

What if that's part of the work? It will open up at least just a few more feet?

Can you make the light longer? Because people run the light all the time. What if you made it a little bit longer? Would that eliminate accidents?

But Gary, you're talking about the semis turning west on Baldwin up from Cottonwood, or are you?

We're talking about the ones that are turning east.

These are too close, right? Yep. Gotcha.

Pull this back.

Pull that back a little bit. If you pull that back 15 feet, you would save. You open up that whole intersection, you're going to have to solve a lot of problems. And you put a sheriff there and you arrest them when they go past that stop bar.

You're next, Eric.

Of these numbers here, is there a stat on how many were normal passenger vehicles versus how many were semis or buses?

I'm sure Fred has that info.

What's the threshold between young driver and old driver?

I wondered that, too.

I mean, it's the elephant in the room. Like, who's young and who's old?

It's between John and you, somewhere in the middle.

That's an old is 60 and over, and young is probably under 30.

Younger is 22.

Oh.

Okay.

You know, originally when this area was redone, the township was very open with the road commission saying, we are willing to buy properties and we are willing to make that wider, whatever it's going to take. And I'm just surprised the lack of room there, that it would seem to me that on the east side, there seems to be enough room you can put another lane in there to turn. I think it would have dramatically helped. I feel it's bunched in, but this is very frustrating. And you know it's the fourth in the state as far as accidents. If originally when they were planning this out, the township said we are willing to purchase properties on both sides They give you enough room. And it was pretty much, well, that's not needed. It sure seemed to me like it was needed. And now we've got like a funnel here we're trying to get everybody through. So there was a willingness to purchase the land.

We're still not going to be able to get buses or semis to come off Cottonwood onto Baldwin going west. Isn't the school district kind of No buses are allowed to make that turn because it's so tight to come up Baldwin off of Cottonwood.

Turning right, going westbound onto Baldwin, yeah?

Yes, from Cottonwood. And I don't think some of these, I think the ones that are around here are smart enough not to do it.

Kurt, did you say that there will be some softening of that corner there? I heard you say a couple of times.

As much as you can get. Get as much as you can. If you go around that corner of the skid steer behind your pickup truck, you're going to have just a tough corner.

Any trailer, a boat, motorhome, or camper.

Then we could put space in here to force these two over.

I picture you at the commission level pulling up this picture and debating and talking about it, even if you don't live here. Is that true? Like if I saw your meeting, this has gotten attention and the minds of the commission, yeah.

Number one on the list. Yeah.

What happens when it's closed for construction?

Good things are coming.

would that be a possibility as far as the north-south traffic where they call that angle there but just to have it we're

only northbound goes for a series or a section and then only southbound goes for a section, just to stop that, maybe ease the flow that way. You know, instead of having to go at the same time.

I think you would have more problems with actions that people would be waiting for. You know, you have traffic flow through

but when they first started redoing that intersection wasn't there talk first of all i got to be too expensive from what i've been told to if we put a lot of that utility stuff underground so that we'd be able to i mean that was my corner there and they said that things were going to be better if i got pushed out like we did, but I don't see it getting any better. But if they would have put stuff underground, I know it costs a lot of money then, but it would have probably taken a lot of problems that we have now. Is that still maybe a possibility?

It's been a tough intersection as long as I've been alive because everyone's down to one lane. It was one lane for years when I was a kid, and there's always been issues on the intersection. That's why the DeWitts were on the fire department because they were right there all the time.

Kurt, anything else you'd like to share with us?

I'm all set. I'll take any more questions or anything else.

The Reader's Digest version is excellent. Easy to understand. The book you used to give us was a challenge.

Yes. Thank you for doing this. It's mainly, it doesn't cover the culverts, but, you know, that is... You want to know the major roads, what are being done and when they're being scheduled. And like you say, you want to look at bike paths on some of them. Hopefully this opens up that line of community.

Yeah. Thank you for being willing to let us ask you questions. This has got to be tough. We appreciate it.

How many sit on the commission?

Five of us.

Are any of the five from Georgetown? I don't think they are. All right. When is the application deadline? I think it's actually one. Okay. All right. So coming up here. And it's how many year term?

It's your term.

I see.

Myself and Betty Gajewski are up for reappointment.

And you're both wanting to be reappointed.

I see. Okay. So there isn't an opening, but there's a reappointment or is there an opening?

Well, they're seeking people for those positions. Okay. There are two of them.

reappointment but that doesn't mean that the board can't say we want different representation and kick one of us out okay we like you coming and you have obviously an open invitation if you ever want to initiate being on our agenda you could let us know but we'll reach out to you otherwise and in hopes that at least once a year we can see and talk to you.

Well, it's going to be once or twice a year, hopefully.

Okay, all right, thank you.

What I'm hoping to do is take the different quadrants of the county and have the planning commissions gather and talk about roads and get their input as to, you know, we got a lot of border streets that are becoming major roads and need a little cooperation from both sides to get something accomplished, so. hopefully we can start opening those lines and learn about what developments are being projected what type of land uses so that we can work with paul sachs for the strategic planning and creating a master plan for the counties that we're not just catching holes We hope to do a lot more, so thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks again for doing Parsons. I still got compliments on that road, by the way, because that was talked about last time you were here, and they got it done.

Oh, yeah.

It's going to let you know there's still a lot of thankful people having that done.

All right, Kurt, I'll tell you the same thing I did others. You can stay or go. It's not rude if you choose to move on. All right, item number eight, communication letters and reports received for information to be filed. Item nine is our public comment period for items on our agenda this evening. So is anyone, yes, Mr. McCloskey is going to be one of them. Or, oh, you're following him out. Okay. All right. Is anyone else who's here from the public wish to address any of the items on our agenda for this evening? Now is an opportunity. There will be a later opportunity to speak to either what you hear tonight or any other topic that's on your mind. So anyone for this particular opportunity? All right. Seeing none, we'll close the initial public comment period and we'll go to our item 10 consent agenda. Is there a motion to approve tonight's consent agenda? I'll move. Support. Comments or questions? Hearing none, all in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? And that is passed. And now we have our sheriff, Sheriff DeBoer, who's here tonight and would like to address us as it relates to the township and coverage, deputy coverage and so on, knowing that we're considering our budget for the new year. So... Sheriff DeBoer, thank you for coming.

Sends his regards. He was going to take this meeting. However, he is on vacation and asked that I stand in his place. So with him having operational control of operations out here in this area, we figured it was best for him to speak to it. But he's been working with Justin on a plan going forward. And I'm here just to present it to you and answer any questions. I don't know where you want me to start. Do you want me just to start presenting this proposal or?

You wanna briefly touch on current staffing and thoughts about future unless it's all tied in with what you've got here.

I mean, it's tied in, but there's a good place to start. So ultimately, I've been here in the past we've talked about when I was running and then in my first year about what what staffing looks like here at the sheriff's office and how we've been been able to staff as of right now I believe well at the beginning of the week we were even or down one we're even so we're even so that means we have many holes as we have people in the pipeline whether that be we have two in the academy right now or in field training which is a significant milestone however With some retirements and some positions that have come open in other areas and known retirements coming and a budget that's about to start in October for the county budget, we know we're going to need to continue to recruit. So we do have a position for lateral transfers open on the website. So you are seeing we're still recruiting, but it's more just to be ahead of the game a little bit because it does take so long for us to recruit, background, train up, and get ready for solo patrol. So that's where we are on the roadside. Now, one of the things that was actually pointed out to me by Justin in my first meeting here when you were still, I believe, the assistant, was one of the issues of there's a difference between staffing levels and actual operational levels, right? So we have a 24-7, 365 model, and we're on 12-hour shifts. So that means every deputy is expected to work 2,184 hours a year in order for us to always be staffed. But we don't have that. Everybody has leave time, training time, vacation time, all the things. And so one of the things that we had done in the past that you have in your exhibit is an overtime work in. And at the time, it was really only done because the only works that we backfilled were licensed paramedic units because by statute and by licensure, we had to. The rest of the time, we just said, well, you know, there's supplemental coverage, so I guess we'll just make two. The problem is that, A, it didn't work back then, and certainly not working nowadays with the fact that we're growing, not just here in Georgetown, but all over. We have four backfill positions in our general budget. Those should be used for backfilling our general budgeted cars. So in this area, there's one car, so actually four deputies that are always working this general area, which is all of District 6, which is Allendale, Lennon, Georgetown, Jamestown, and Zeeland. There's always one county funded car. We use those back fills to make sure that car is always filled. But the supplemental coverage that you guys have in Georgetown Township just goes unfilled. We were using some of that budget from the paramedic unit to go back and backfill some of those. But however, when we sat down and talked, we were sitting down talking about what our needs are going forward. We identified two larger issues. One is traffic in the area. Actually, three issues. One we don't have to, we can make the arrangements for without having to move funding around. But the main one is the traffic issue in the area. As you just had part of that conversation earlier, There's no lack of traffic enforcement needed here in Georgetown Township. With the traffic car that you already fund, that person is here half the days because they're a 12-hour car, right? So they can't be here both days. So adding a second traffic car so there's a traffic car on, scheduled every day. Now again, vacation being what it is. and the training that comes with a specific unit like the traffic unit. They're in charge of, yes, enforcing traffic, but they're also in charge of investigating fatal and serious accidents. They're also, I believe, Rory Keenis is your traffic unit, right? I believe he was helping with some of the data that was just used in that presentation because he sees that number one traffic collision area in the township and he takes that personal, so he's working on that as well. So we're not just, and they're also training. So they train deputies as trainers to be OWI for standard field sobriety tests. One of the traffic units, not Rory specifically, is one of our instructors for standard field sobriety testing and that sort of stuff. Those are the expertise that comes with a traffic car. And so we are pulling your traffic car from time to time for that. With that said, He also, when he's here, isn't beholden to the microphone, isn't beholden to the calls for service. He can go out and deal with issues specific to traffic. And so we said it would probably make sense to have a second traffic car so there's always an unmarked traffic car working the Georgetown Township at any particular point in time. And the second was, at first we were talking about maybe a second car add-on to just help supplement coverage. And we realized that it might not be It might not be that hard. We might not have to add another car. But we took some of that, added to this overtime budget line item, and then tell the newly appointed lieutenant whose job is to keep track of things around here to say, hey, let's just make sure these specific cars are always backfilled with that overtime so it's offered up and we can come back and just make sure that car is always filled. So the holes that Justin saw, the difference between the schedule and the actual operating schedule won't hopefully exist as much. I'm going to warn you. Just because it's offered doesn't mean it's taken, and I don't have in our contract with the deputies the ability to force overtime. We're going to work on bargaining here yet this year. We've talked about mandatory overtime or forced overtime. That's one of the things we'll bring up. That'll happen later, but I can't swear to it. So I can tell you it'll be offered. I can't swear to you that it's going to be done. And so this is part of... a longer term project that we have of a new way of incorporating through our cost of service, those float cars like we have in our general fund to exist within the fund that is funded by all the specific townships that are in that contract. So instead of having one, like you would hire, instead of just having you hire one deputy and have that person backfill all the open shifts, because that's not physically possible right because you're going to have a night shifter off one day the day shifter off the next day and that same deputy can't backfill the only way it works is if we do it spread out throughout the county so if within that funding we find a way to to hire with float cars within that funding then we might be able to do it in a way that's not just putting out overtime and it's cheaper because it's a deputy and not at overtime rates but that is down the road that's a project we're working on you'll see me in front of the um Finance Committee tomorrow asking for an external assessment from a company that's going to come in and help us with a lot of things. That's one of the deliverables that we're going to ask for from them to say, what does it look like to have backfills? What would that do for cost of service? Instead of saying, I need, you know, $137,000 in overtime. What if we split that up and had cost of service cost however many percent more, and that's built in automatic backfill that you know. And do we do that for all the cars or we just do it for specific cars at certain times? So that's something we're going to be working on. But this is a nice way of starting us, trying it this way, seeing if we get the backfill to work, fill the holes that Justin identified three years ago now and has been talking to us about since then. We can do that and not hire someone so we have to change later. We don't have to fire someone. We don't have to lay someone off. And we can work on it. And if it ends up being that we want to distribute that amount through your cost of service to do this, we can just move that line item around. So that is, I think this is a safe way for you to get the improvements that you're looking to, the things that you identified as issues within Georgetown Township, in a way that allows us the flexibility to change and shift if we get something new in this assessment. So I actually thought it was pretty good thinking by Lieutenant Grantzer working with Justin to kind of work through that process. The last thing that doesn't have anything to do with your funding today is back in the day when you had paramedic units, you had an odd number. And that was one of the things that I actually brought up a lot of the conversation with Justin three years ago was, what's this car doing? Second one, so there's one on all the time. One of the things we identified out in Holland Township was having someone who takes ownership of all the community events and all the outreach events instead of it being spread out throughout and hoping someone picks it up and runs with it. And so we put a position in the Holland Township, and that person's job along with many other things, crime-free multi-housing, neighborhood associations, that sort of stuff, but they take ownership. They don't have to go to, but they take ownership for all the events that are in that township. We thought, well, if we have the traffic car, now we have one on each squad, we still have that odd number car that's just out there. What if we move that to a position where someone can just be in charge of all of our community outreach? So if we wanted cops and bobbers here, they would be the ones that looked it up. If they wanted to do cops and cones here, they wanted to do a bike rodeo, whatever that looks like, they can work on it. Now, we already have that with some of our SROs. They have to take time out of their duties to do, like, super cool sheriff school jobs. At Rebounders, I don't know how many are familiar with that program, but it's one of the best programs we have around. And if you haven't, if you don't know when that is, next time it comes out, you've got to come check it out. Just stand out in the parking lot and watch all those kids super excited. But that takes a significant amount of planning, going out looking for funding, that sort of thing. That position would be kind of put in charge of that, too. So that's what we're kind of looking at as our plan going forward for next year. Any questions for me?

Thank you.

Can I be like devil's advocate here a little bit? I believe we have a need. I think you guys are doing an incredibly good job. And I'm picking up how you're working with Justin. Just being devil's advocate. As someone from the community says to us, you just hired six firefighters. Here you had the sheriff's department doing this duty for 50 years. And now you're looking at don't they have less responsibility? And now you're looking at putting even more people on from the sheriff's department. Now, I support that. But when someone asks me that, what do you recommend I say to them?

Well, one of the reasons we were getting out of it, out of the paramedic unit business, is because there was so much law enforcement work that needed doing. And you had, at that point in time, outgrown that service model. And you're working into this new service model that is happening throughout the county as well. Highland Township is the same place. They were They were right on the cusp of needing full-time fire, and this was just a push that was the excuse to move on. But we didn't get rid of it because it wasn't something we wanted to do anymore. Some of it was recruiting, no doubt, right? Some of it was staying up to standard. But the other part of it was it's not that we weren't, it wasn't that there's anything not, you know, to do out here in Georgetown with the growth that we're having, the traffic issues we're having, with the crime that's occurring here that's happening at night from people coming in from out of town. We have patrol to be doing. We have work to be doing. And one of the things that we looked at, There was an assessment. It was called a staffing study in 17. What they ended up getting was more of an assessment, something that we're looking to get again. There was an interesting figure that says that once deputies reach 70% saturation of their day working on responding to things, they stop looking to be proactive because they're worried that they're going to get caught up on something and miss the next thing. So we saw that significantly in a couple different areas where we stayed busy was Hey, I know the next call is coming. I'm not going to get caught on the traffic stop where I have to tow a car because they don't have insurance because all of a sudden I'm going to get, you know, a home invasion or a peeping tom or, you know, a beanie in progress. And so guys stop making traffic. Guys and girls stop making traffic stops. And they stop. And traffic stops, yes, they deal with traffic issues, but they also are the easiest way for people to know the police are active in the area, so not to target that area. It's a sign of an active police force. And so that's where I would say this is something we still need to continue to look at. One of the other deliverables I hope to have from this assessment is a good way for us to sit down and say, these are the benchmarks. This is the framework we use to figure out staffing levels. Because you can't just use calls for service, right? I mean, I might have two townships that are right next to each other, and if we do it in a very small time frame, you might have five traffic complaints in one and a homicide in the one next. And if you just use traffic number, you just use complaint numbers, it's five times busier in one than the other. So it's going to be complexity, how many deputies, how many hours. So we're going to try and build out something so I can say, this is what our base level is. Now it's up to each individual municipality to say, what do we want our stance to be? We want to be an area where, you know, hey, we don't have a lot of police presence here. It's kind of, you know... kind of free and if that's your stance, great. If it's, hey, we want everybody to know that if you're going to live here, you're going to live in one of the safest places, then you're going to say this is the average. We're going to put a couple more deputies on. I want to make that a deliverable to you. I just don't have one right now. And so ultimately, at the end of my first term, I'd like to have something where I can say, this is where you're at. These townships, you probably should add something. These ones are probably good for a little while. These ones, hey, you might even be able to make some cuts. We'll have to see what that looks like. But ultimately, it would be nice for me to be able to stand here in front of you with a good, thoughtful matrix of hours used, complexity of case, what that looks like. But I just don't have it yet. We also don't have it. The systems underlying to get that data as well, which is the issue I'm having. Because if it's just sit down and figure out what your matrix is, that should be easy. A record system as such that's antiquated and it's going into service and it's a very long conversation for another day. But I'm a data-driven person and I'd like to be able to provide with that data. I don't have good reports right now to give you clean data to say we should do this or do that.

That's a little bit where I'm kind of come from you talk about this been talked about for three years But it's a little bit unfair. I think saying that because two of those years was that that missing sheriff's car was affiliated with the unit which were seven personnel so that kind of skewers it to me a little bit that which part i'm sorry well we're talking about the three years that justin talked to you we need we had goals we had gaps but on those two of those three years seven of those guys are also part of our unit program so to say you know now like you say you'd like to do data I don't know if we've gone far enough with our seven officers that used to be units in Georgetown Township. Show me the data of what they are doing how they're doing how georgetown's being handled i know we're working on the same thing on the fire department side is that we want to see data for the next group of guys that hopefully could come to georgetown to help what we got going on cover our west side a lot better than we're doing now we need to see the data so i kind of agree with you on the part that maybe some of us should wait just a little bit longer until you can get that data to us so we can really see a good metric on this whole thing. Because I think saying that we really needed that car and that those two years was where the unit was doing medicals and was busy, wasn't able to handle those domestics, those BB doms.

Yeah, no doubt, because we couldn't fill it because of recruitment at the time. There's no doubt that data could be... a little bit better of a data set however that's why at this point when we were talking about two cars i thought it was more wise to say let's fill the cars we actually already have with that overtime and when we come to tickets we're not talking about calls for service we're talking about just traffic services and that's data we actually do have because we can see how many stops we're doing and we can see how many crashes we're having and we can see that there's still data that says that there's there's significant traffic enforcement that could happen here in in the township and I know there's a lot of complaints even without the data anecdotally from from residents about the traffic in Georgetown Township and I know I've heard members of this board say the same so that's why when we talked about two cars you know if I wanted to make it really nice I could say yeah let's just put on two cars and let's move on but we said let's just do one traffic car like we said and we'll do this first part to start see where we're at and give you the time to be able to move that around because again This will be set aside and we'll work on trying to get those cars filled if all of a sudden six months and we realize guys aren't making the fill and we can readdress it very simply.

Yeah, that's been my observation too because I will say this, I get around the whole county in my business and I do see much more police presence in the township than I did a couple years ago, which is good. My concern is, though, it seems like Georgetown can spend a pile of money on officers, but are those same officers getting robbed over to townships that aren't paying as much as we are?

No, if the person is paid for by Georgetown Township, barring an emergency where life is in danger, they're staying in Georgetown.

I mean, I have no problem with that. I'm like, I get on the north side, I'm like, I'm going through Conklin and Crockery, and I'm like, oh, there's an officer. And I'm like, okay, who's paying for this officer? Because I know what my budget is, and I know what budget they don't hardly have up there. No doubt.

So what you're seeing is... Is I can sit and tell you that if Georgetown Township is paying for it, they're staying here. Then again, you have that one district car that kind of scoots around. And so does that car get pulled into Blendon and Zeeland Township more? Because Zeeland Township only has one township deputy and Blendon doesn't have, they have a portion of one traffic car. Right. When calls come up, they have to go that way. But as far as time goes, deputies are looking to stay busy. If there's a traffic initiative or some sort of issue that's happening in one of those townships, yeah, they're going to spend some time there. But also you go where the traffic is. So generally those district cars are coming. One of the other things and the reason you might see them in Conklin more is one of the things that happened during our redistrict is we got rid of some of the beat. Areas in the north. So it used to be there was one here, one here, one here. And we said, you guys free range. Lieutenants, if you feel you need to make a decision to say, hey, I need to keep one in this area or whatnot, that's going to be on them instead of waiting for decisions to come from headquarters. For the most part, we were letting them free range. I think as of what was it last month? Last month, we said, no, we're getting a little bit too much creep where you guys are all disappearing in the same area to go wolf pack, and we need someone to be kind of in the, I'd say, Coopersville East area down in Allendale and help in this district in Allendale because Allendale is a bit of a draw, especially with the start of college. Then those cars are kind of coming there. So you might have just seen those three district cars were free to range up north because it's a big area and we have three in that district.

I do see more coverage around here, though, because for a while that was like,

I think some of that might be having that lieutenant and the specific lieutenant we've chosen. He was chosen. for being a team builder. He was the CRT commander and turned that team from an also-ran into the team that is now. And we watched the camaraderie in the work product build. And that's why he was chosen. He was promoted directly into this position and chosen for that reason. And I have no doubt that with him out there running around and the supervisors we have out here now, with them being four of them in this district. They're out and about doing more. That's good. And we're doing some more things. We have a lot of other projects to get some of the administrative work off the deputies so they can spend more time making contacts, whether that be traffic stops or just stopping on the side of the road and saying hi to the kids that are in the lemonade stands. Those are projects that we have ongoing, whether it be a couple different technologies we're looking at for efficiencies or just not taking reports on some of the things we've taken reports on historically. We're evaluating all those things to try and get more face-to-face time because that's where the service actually is provided.

Not trying to go down probably a long political road, but just a quick question on flock cameras. There's obviously a lot of negativity out there. talk wise, you know, social media wise, just wondering what's your quick stats, you know, the 30,000 foot overview.

I'm going to have a work session with the county board on Friday. So for a very detailed look at that, I encourage you to either find it on YouTube. I think they're going to do it, or you'll be able to find details for that online. I don't know how they're publicizing that. I just know I have to go and give my spiel. So for the 20-page report and slide deck, you can come for that. But what I can tell you is this. A lot of the worry that's coming from this is based on not having full knowledge of what the system is. So what I'll tell you is this. The cameras do not enforce traffic regulations. They don't have the ability. They do not take pictures of faces. They're aimed at the back of cars. They do not have live stream, and we don't have AI other than the necessary AI that would say, yes, that's a blue Ford Contour. THOSE READS ARE HELD FOR 30 DAYS AND AFTER 30 DAYS THEY'RE AUTOMATICALLY DELETED UNLESS ONE OF OUR DEPUTIES PULLS ONE OUT FOR EVIDENCE AND PUTS IT IN OUR EVIDENCE CONTROL, WHICH IS THROUGH AXON, AND IT'S KEPT THEN AND THEN OVERWRITTEN IN THE SYSTEM. THERE ARE, WHAT DO WE HAVE, 31 CAMERAS SHOW UP IN THE ENTIRE COUNTY. 15 ARE PAID FOR BY THE COUNTY. SOME TOWNSHIPS PICKED UP SOME EXTRA ONES AND SUPPLEMENTED THEIR COVERAGE AND WE HAVE THEM AS A LINE ITEM ON THEIR EXHIBIT. ULTIMATELY, The concerns are, is it legal? Yes, your car is open to the general public. There's case law that says that you can have pictures taken of your car while you're driving down the road. It's no different than having an officer on the side of the road with a camera. The caveat being, and I'm not going to say that this is something that the courts have completely finished with, the caveat being, depending on how many cameras you have, We only have 31 over the course of the county, but there's a city, I believe it's Norfolk, Virginia, that had 176 of them, and they said, yes, that still isn't enough cameras to say that this is minute-by-minute monitoring of a certain person. People try and correlate this with cell phone data. But cell phone data is taking specific, constant, where you are at any moment. It's not just your car, it's you personally because your phone's in your pocket. So that's why a search warrant's necessary for cell site data that we get in some of our investigations. So no search warrant is necessary. No facial recognition, like I said. Two real concerns that I think are real concerns, and I had them as well, and we really looked at this when we were looking into it, is misuse by officers, right? You see that that's always, but I know this guy or there was this cop in this place that was using it to check out his ex-wife and see where she was going. Yeah, that'd be an issue. But we have specific settings within FLOC that say you have to have a complaint number associated with it. You have to have a crime reason associated with it. And then FLOC has initiated certain technologies within their system that shows some of the patterns that were used by people that are misusing it, and it automatically flags that for review. Captain Douglas goes through and reviews those. So we will catch someone if they're misusing it. There's not a law that says that that is criminal justice information. I would support a law that says it is, and we would then charge them, but I will discipline them when I find that. Second one is, all right, you can control your data, but you're sharing your data. Can Flock sell your data, or can another agency come and see our data? Flock doesn't see our data. They can't use our data. They can't sell our data. It's an end-user agreement. And we choose who we share with. As of last Friday, I turned back on nationwide sharing. We had turned it off because I can now say you can only use it for certain crimes. What I did is I was looking on our section and I saw a bunch of people in like New Mexico were using it for a traffic search, for traffic infraction. You don't need that. I saw the one that really concerned me was a federal agency and it said other. Well, there's a lot of things that you can say. If it was terrorism, if it was not, they can put that. I don't know what other is, and I don't allow my deputies to use other. At the time, I couldn't turn that off for outside agencies. As of last Friday, I could. So we are able to control our own data, and if I find that an agency is misusing it, it's very simple just to turn it back off. So that's kind of our stance on both the legality and the systemic issues with it. Ultimately, we have a ton of success stories. I think I put out a news release. I sent it out to the townships when this whole conversation kind of started. Since then, we've added another $100,000 of recovered stolen property, a couple more stolen properties. Vehicles recovered and ultimately you saw in the news media release over the two weekends ago, we arrested three people that were involved from a Colombian criminal organization out of Chicago that were coming into Holland to rob people's houses. The only reason we knew they were a part of that larger group was the flock system. And then in Allendale, there was three men that were arrested on their way back to Detroit through Livingston that had broken into a house and held someone there against their will as a home invasion on lawful imprisonment. So we're having success. It's an unbelievable tool for us. I'm aware of the concerns of civil liberties. I'm on top of that. We're going to continue to change our policies. I'm not so proud as to say that we've got it all figured out and it's all perfect. And as problems come up, we can change our settings. We can turn things off. We can turn things on until something happens. And if a Supreme Court decides to make a change or state law changes, then we'll deal with that as it comes and we'll obey those rulings. Thank you.

That's the shortest answer I can give on that. I think it's fantastic. I have a follow-up question. Sure. Would you consider body cameras more intrusive than a flock camera? Oh, 100%, because I'm inside your house.

Honestly, I mean, without going too deep into it, you're putting more personal information out when you sign on to Facebook, and that doesn't have the backside security like flock is on a government AWS server. It's locked down probably tighter than your bank, but your Facebook account that you're going on to to talk about flock You've liked and then unliked, and you all of a sudden took an inventory and said, maybe I shouldn't put my birthday on there, and if you think that it got deleted out of their servers and isn't just not being displayed, I've got a bridge over the river I can sell you for a couple million dollars. I like one, Tom. Also, just so that you know, all our cars have license plate readers as part of the in-car camera. So there are already 155 vehicles driving around with in-car cameras doing the same thing. 31 more cameras posted in one spot is not much of a change. Thank you.

Thank you. I had a couple of questions back about the budget. Sorry. Thank goodness. I just want to make sure I understand this correctly. So if we look at our current Exhibit A, our current budget, we've got $2,098,000 in this for the community policing, 12 full-time equivalent deputies. Do we spend that full amount no matter what, or are we paying per hour?

Yeah, you pay that no matter what. So what happens is that, so if you took that, N number divided by 12, you'd come up with what our cost of service is. Every year my finance department sits down, and I don't know how they, I've tried to get it explained to me a couple different times, but they take and they say, okay, this is wages and benefits. This is all the licensing for all the vehicles. This is what depreciation on one year on a five-year car is. This is what all these, and they come up with an amount that says this is what cost of service is, and that's what it costs to fuel the deputy, whatever.

My only concern or my hesitation comes in at, What I heard, you can correct me, what I heard was that we are often not completely filling those spots. There's some issues if we have vacations or leave, etc. So if I were to calculate what a standard number of hours that should be worked is over the course of a year, I would argue that I shouldn't be paying overtime charges until I'm fulfilling the basic hours of what that 12 contracted employees should be. The point I'm making is if we are paying overtime but not necessarily getting the maximum available hours by those 12 people, I would rather not increase the number of officers. In fact, I would just decrease the number of officers and just offset the officer expenditure by overtime expenditure then. I mean, to me, it's like a little bit of a game. And I just want to make sure that we're not going to be taken advantage of by adding more FTEs.

So what you hit upon is, because we were looking at this and what our departments do in my understanding of Kent County, and so we're like, well, what does their cost of service look like? And what you hit upon is the fundamental distinction of what you're actually paying for. And you aren't paying, so one deputy at cost of service, you aren't paying for 2184 hours a year. You're paying for deputy so-and-so. So you're paying for him. He's on leave, but that still has to be paid, and the county's not going to pay that because it's additional coverage that the county chief's asking for. So ultimately what it comes down to is, yeah, that person, when you pay for that deputy, you're taking it warts and all. You're getting the good. You're getting the fact that he's here. He has to leave for training, and he has to leave for court, or he gets family vacation time, right? And so that's part of what that is. One of the things that Lieutenant Grenzer and I worked through is working on a spreadsheet that he can use to figure out, okay, this is about how on average our sick time, this is on average our vacation time for 10-year debt, this is how much training we generally do a year. What's it look like? How many deputies do we need? How much time do we need to fill the backfill on that? And that's that project we're working on. And so that's why I would say we're not asking for a second car or a second deputy at cost of service. We'll just use this over time to do backfill. The part of it that's going to be a bit of an experiment is this current generation doesn't necessarily line up for overtime like all us old dogs used to do. And so it'll be interesting. We have a new system. We have a new time card system that pushes out those overtime that you can get it on your phone. It's a lot easier. We're noticing a little bit more ease of use, and maybe that'll help. They're also more apt to take a full 12-hour shift than the two-hour or a four-hour detail that we also have available, because I'm not going to put all this on, and it's a lot easier with the new stuff, but especially the old stuff. I'm not putting that on to come in for two hours for a couple hundred bucks after taxes. 12-hour shift out in Georgetown. It's known as God's country. I think you should all know that. Everybody's looking to work out here for 12 hours. That's a good hit to the check. So it'll be interesting to see what kind of fill rate we have. We're going to keep track of fill rate.

Okay. And then we're not making any decisions tonight, right, Justin, necessarily about how to handle this. But I guess my follow-up question would be, we've taken a lot of your time. My follow-up question would be, if we were interested in trying to understand, and I know it's not going to be, as you explained, fair to gut check the hours people are working. But if we wanted a breakdown of just, like, how, like, these 12 officers, how much are they working? You know, can we get that information? So I want to...

I sort of remember off the top of my head, we did the math because it was part of this larger conversation of, okay, we have 60 some deputies that are paid for by townships throughout the county. How many deputies, like, okay, how many hours are they scheduled to work? How many hours do they actually work? What's the remainder? So that's the time we have to fill. How many deputies does it take to fill that remainder? And make sure not to figure out how many deputies it is based on 2184 hours. It's based on this. And I want to say it was 1700 and some hours.

Okay. I guess ultimately what I'm trying to understand is like looking at the proposed budget, right? We've got another community policing deputy added in and significantly more overtime dollars. And I'm just not feeling necessarily confident that it's going to dramatically change our coverage. Like, that's what I'm feeling right now is that I'm just concerned we're increasing this budget, and I'm not quite sure that we're getting a significant change in coverage.

And this is where it's unfortunate, and I wish Lieutenant Gretz was here, but the reason he picked the number on overtime that he did is he intends to make sure that, and I would have to, I'll defer in case, if you want to fact check me or if you have different information, please feel free to interrupt. But they will always, no matter how many deputies have off that are funded by Georgetown, there will always be a six to six morning car, a six to six evening car, and one afternoon car. They will always make sure that those are backfilled. And those are the numbers that he's providing you saying there will always be every day that backfill. And that was the issue that was kind of found during the course of both Justin's initial blush back in the paramedic days, but also one of the things that we're dealing with in areas that are significantly busier where it's like, well, Well, okay, half the guys in this area are on the CRT team, and on Thursday they're gone. What are we doing? We're not backfilling it because the county, you know, first thing we do is use a fill car, then we use a canine car. Why is the county paying for that one but not paying for this one over here? and so we're hoping this overtime shift is the way to do that and again feeling that the traffic car is something that we can easily sit there and say you know traffic in georgetown township's a bit of a bear and i think we can we have that car so if we were willing to then go to what the proposed new budget is then we would be able to have confidence that the coverage is changing relatively dramatically and we'd be able to like consistently confirm that through i think you'll have a fill rate yeah so we have this new we have a new tracking software for our scheduling and it's head and shoulders above before and we'll be able to sit here and tell you what your fill rate is so for of the you know of the the shifts that are supposed to be there um your fill rate should be right around whatever that percentage is and so we'll be able to see that go up yeah throughout the time i just bring it all up because when we were looking at the change with the loss of the e unit we were spending a lot of time talking about gaps in coverage and and so i

I just want to make sure that we're not continuing to throw money at a problem that's still going to have gaps in coverage.

Ultimately, the math comes out. We can sit here and figure out what the math looks like for overtime to backfill every one of the Georgetown Township call-taking cars, not the... Not the traffic cars, but the ones that are making calls for service. That was significantly more money than even what two deputies would cost. We were not going to stand here in front of you and say, let's take a first blush at something and then let's make it cost a ton of money. So this was a first way of saying, okay, let's figure out what our base coverage or our, for lack of a better term, minimum staffing should be. Let's fund that and see what that looks like. Now just the other thing you should keep in mind is every year until the end of, not this upcoming, but the next one, you're getting a reduction in cost because of the payment for that sergeant position. So you are realizing some savings there. This coming October or this coming January, I can't remember when it was, you'll go down to one-third paying for that sergeant, and then the next year you're not going to pay for sergeants at all. We absorb that within the county.

Okay, thank you.

Does a resource officer show up every day at school?

Yes, school resource officers are assigned to the school specifically. And so they spend their entire days. Those schools sometimes probably get better coverage than the township, though. Yes. So the school, I mean, the schools, it's the high schools, though. So how many buildings do you have?

So they spend their time generally.

So both Hudsonville and Jenison High Schools, which incorporates some of your townships, have two officers. Wait, hold on. Jenison has two as well? Yeah. Hudsonville has two, but one is generally the high school. and then one starts to try and work its way through the middle schools as well. So there isn't one in every building, but the high schools themselves are generally covered. Same thing like West Ottawa. West Ottawa has two. They have one at both the high school buildings on the high school campus, and then one works at the middle schools as well.

My other comment is, have you guys ever thought about doing your budget negotiations earlier in the year so that we don't have to see what's going to happen? So which one, for cost of service for you guys? Yeah, for like the sheriffs, you know, you guys are in negotiations, I thought you said earlier.

Oh, yeah, our contract negotiations?

Yeah, so you're in negotiations, but the county's doing budgets, we're doing budgets, and how does that affect us? When you're in negotiation, you go, oh, by the way, we're going to get... 10% more.

So that's part of what's looked into during now next year's cost of service. Okay. And so generally what happens is if let's just say something weird happens because they have binding arbitration and so all of a sudden they go to binding arbitration and some arbitrator gives them some unseemly amount. We build it in so that we can make that come up and not hit you all at once. So what we do is kind of gradually do it. So when, you know, I was talking, I wasn't talking necessarily to Justin about this, but other township superintendents and supervisors of, I would figure when I'm budgeting, I'd just as soon have three years at 3% than a nine and a zero and a zero because budgetarily that makes my head spin. So we're trying to do our best to make sure any hits like that are spread out on time, right? And so we've get that built into that fund because your money from yours goes into the same fund as all the other townships. And we kind of build that up. And then if something happens, we can kind of, we can, we have a fund balance for that. So we try and, but there's a lot of reasons we aren't in budget negotiations. Some of it had to do with some different positions at the county that were, that had some turnover. So we had to put it off to get a new HR director and a new administrator and all that sort of thing. So yes, I would have liked them to start it in August, possibly even July, but they have not started yet. They are going to start here this next month. Thank you. How many cars are in Allendale? They have, I want to say four. Yeah, they have four cars in Allendale.

What is the resource officer, don't they?

Oh, that's not counting the resource officer. There's a school resource officer in Allendale schools as well. Not calling Grand Valley. What's that? Not calling Grand Valley. Grand Valley has their own police department.

Anyone else? Good questions, good dialogue. Yeah, I appreciate the conversation. Excellent. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you for coming.

Thanks for your time. We're going to move on to item 12 in our budget. We're calling it the budget workshop. And so we're going to open the floor and the discussion on the budget. This is the third meeting for which has been a line item, but this is really the more substantive of us collaboratively looking at it, discussing it, and debating whatever it should be or is debatable with an eye toward the next meeting two weeks from tonight being the meeting which we need to officially approve of the budget, set the millage rate, et cetera. So I appreciate, I did touch base I think with each of you or maybe not quite all of you, but just to, hey, are you doing your homework? Are we, you know that the resources are available to you, whether they be key employees, whether they be Justin or Andy, read everything there is and I appreciate it. I got positive responses from all of you. I know that all of you have been very diligent and careful in looking this over. And Justin appreciated, as we said, I think in previous meeting that you had more or less kind of like Kind of like the sheriff did in this instance. Here's your budget, but here's a little bit of a cheat sheet, if you will, of the things that are going to look different, right? And so you're going to have questions about them. I'm just going to bring them to the forefront. So appreciated that. We, of course, in finance have discussed things among ourselves, but we have not then corporately here with a quorum and open meeting and so on had discussion among ourselves as is proper. So that is tonight. And the floor is open. And final preparatory remarks, just I think we've all been through at least one cycle of this, right? Those who are new and those who are not have been through more than one. We have a certain baseline, I guess if you will, that carries from year to year. There are times when there are certain things that are only on there for a year and they they get done and they're gone right by and large we we kind of know our We know our template if you will and each year Justin you spend time Early enough talking about the budget process early enough to find out okay Each department is there something on our radar? What's what is coming? What do you need? What is it looking like? And We as a township talked about in terms of long-term plans and so on, whether that be the expansion of the cemetery or things like that that we know are coming. And we try to put numbers then on those. We generally guess high on the expenditure and we generally are conservative in guessing lower on the revenue. so that we try not to get caught short that way. I would say most years, at least I've been on the board, we come in under budget on the whole. We might have to raise one or two line items for one reason or another, but then others come in lower. And on the whole, we've tended to come in lower for the reason of that form of budgeting. And revenue-wise, I don't really know whether on average most years we exceed what we project, but I would think we probably do because we are pretty conservative that way. Justin shared with our finance committee at my request, I said put together a PowerPoint so that we can see on things related to the things related to the budget items that you've singled out to say, hey, these are a little bit out of the norm. These need to be discussed or debated openly and directly. Hey, what do we look like historically for millage? What's the state revenue sharing looking like? How has that changed? How is the loss of ARPA affected? I said, put all that together, if you would, in some form of a PowerPoint. And this is my request to him, and he did so. For those who are in finance, you've seen this. look at, I want us to look at millage. I want to look at what it would look like to change the millage. I want to look at an administrative fee like so many, in fact, the great majority of townships, cities, villages, and so on in the county charge. I want to look at all of that. So that was in part my request to him because of the reality that We have seen a pretty good dip in our rainy day fund, if you want to call it that, or our general fund, we call it. We've always been really proud of the fact of, you know, no debt, lowest millage rate, you know, in the county and so on, and a good reserve. Well, our reserve has taken a hit. And it will potentially take more of a hit with the loss of state revenue, the ARPA fund dollars being gone and the like. And so all of that I think brings us to, I said this with our master plan as well, maybe a unique year where you go, okay, we need to look at this, you know, we need to make a concerted effort to look at both the revenue side and the expenditure side this year because I think we're in a, you know, a new position, if you will, from what we've been in for a number of years. And so I appreciate that Justin has done that. I'd like you to share that with everyone, and I guess it may as well be right now in the front end of the discussion, but I don't mean for this to necessarily distract entirely from whatever it is you've each come for in the way of the line items that you have either questions or opinions about. And I want this, we will take as long as we need to take. So much like with the master plan and other things, it's important. It's 8.30, we've got time, okay, so... we want you to leave feeling like, you know what, I was heard, I gave my opinions, we all debated, and then we've come to some form of consensus. So with that, Justin, would you go ahead and show us your PowerPoint?

Yeah, Chelsea's gonna put it up on the screen for us or for the viewers at home. And we're gonna just click through this. So how we got here? So historically, looking at the village rate in Georgetown Township, I went back to 2011, we're at 225. for a few years there, we're up to 275, and then in 20, we've been locked in at 225 since then. Federal funding, so due to COVID dollars that came in during the Biden administration, there's a huge influx of those dollars that very had very few strings attached to them so those strings uh primarily were used for use for water infrastructure a fire truck and we have that on our website so if people are home like well what did you spend your money on well we spent five million dollars on additional items that we normally would have bought in our budget so we didn't go out and spend extra things on it. No, these are the day-to-day items that we spent money on. A lot of it was wastewater, water sewer items, and we had a fire truck and some roads. And that money is exhausted. It's been spent and we used it to maintain our community. Revenue sharing, so this is money that comes from the state of Michigan that comes quarterly typically to us unless there's a State government can't agree on a budget then it gets delayed and we've historically since 2023 has really been decreasing every year. One item that I like to point out is 125 million was given to other communities through legislative directed spending items in 2026. So at the same time they have this budget, they said we gotta reduce it, they gave $125 million out to other communities, was not us, and they said, you need this for your pet project, we're gonna take money away from communities like Georgetown. One note, as I got conflicting data over the last six months, I sent an email to the state treasurer's office, and they sent me a little note at the bottom, and that's really concerning, and I highlighted the one part that I go, I don't like this, is projected amounts may also change if there's a legislature revisions or shifts in the economy. So this is not a guarantee, this is a maybe. I also tried to get on the bandwagon for the free money. So I spent time going to Lansing, working with our state reps, and I had two different projects that I submitted, I testified for, and we were denied. One was for a fire truck, another one was for pipes down our transmission line. So to sum it up, we're at historically 275 for millage rate pre-COVID. Federal dollars, COVID brought in a significant amount of additional funding. The federal funding has now dried up and state dollars, state revenue sharing has significantly dropped over the past four years. So I had Connor put this together and look at the lay of the land and basically take all the millage rates, operating rates, extra items that communities have bonded or voted for, and authorities to look at the lay of the land. I compare, like, Holland Township has the MAC or the Macatawa Area Transportation Authority. I compare that similar to our Georgetown busing service that we have through Georgetown Transportation. And he put together this awesome graph that lays all the millage rates out. It's like, man, this is great. I'm going to put this in a graph that's easy to understand. So before I get to that one, I have this one. In Georgetown Township, I compared the top 30,000 communities with a population of 30,000 or more, that's a charter township, and look at the millage rates, and we are the lowest. For a community, 225, we have Georgetown's the lowest millage rate of any Michigan charter township with a population greater than 30,000 people. I also took the graph from two slides ago and I put it in and look at the whole gambit. Look at the whole county and where we land. We are hands down the lowest. And I even put Granville in there, if you see that. I know they're not in Ottawa County, but their neighbors too are east, just to show you that I think they're at 12.55 mils. So hands down, we are the lowest. I also looked at how millage impacts your home. So at 225, there's no increase. At 25, it comes down to $35 a year on an average valuation of $141,100. That is the average taxable value in Georgetown Township today. And I have that laid out on what the costs are. The question also is, what is taxable value versus assessed value? And I put this slide in here that say your house is worth $300,000, your SEV, your assessed value is half that, and can your taxable value be the same as your assessed value? Yes. It depends on when you bought your house. If you've been in your house for 30 plus years, there's a huge gap between your taxable value and your assessed value. So we also looked at the lowest taxes in Ottawa County, and I compared apples to apples to show who has an admin fee for when they collect taxes. So there's only a few that don't, and we're one of them. The next one that's closest to us is Tallmadge Township. And majority of the other communities do charge a 1% admin fee. So where do your tax dollars go? So 75% of your tax dollars go to the schools. That involves the state of Michigan, school debt. We have three different school districts in Georgetown Township, Granville, Jenison, and Hudsonville. And these, well, 93% of all the taxes that we collect, they do not pay for assessing, collecting, or appeals process. Today was tax day in Georgetown Township. One of my clerks' loan processed $54,000 in cash of loan today. One teller. It filled up a machine. So they're coming tomorrow. And ACH payments today alone, we took in $20 million. It's unprecedented how much money we take in for these other organizations. And the current school collection fee, the $3.25 that we charge for the schools, is intended to care the cost of the collection cost of the school district summer property tax levy, not assessing, collecting, or appeals process. So these other agencies, 911, Our County Parks, Ottawa County Operating, they all, we collect for them, we send them a check, they don't charge us per parcel. And there's nothing legal that I can go to them and say, I wanna charge you per parcel. They say, no, the state legislature a long time ago created this 1%, that's how you can collect and collect for the fees for us. But they have a great deal. Community members want to make an investment. They want to approve millages. That's fine, but currently every time a new millage is approved, we now collect even more money than we did before. So the average taxable value in Georgetown Township, again, is $141,100. I have different tables that if there was discussion about increasing taxes or what taxes would be, this is a table that we could reference. Again, it's taxable value, not the value of your home. But going back to this slide right here, this is what it looks like. This is the lay of the land. compared to other, if we were to entertain that idea or discuss it. So I also have, Chelsea has a document that we're gonna put up that we can go through. And basically it takes the capital expenditures and major items. So I took all the major items and I kinda walked through this a month ago, before the master plan, and basically it walks through and talking to different board members of what items they're like, I just don't want to do this, or I have questions about. And this is the time that if you wanted to eliminate items, this is the time to do it. And then we can adjust the budget, or if there's non-items you want to get rid of, then we can move forward. This is the best time to discuss it.

Thank you, Justin. I appreciate that. And the top of that last document you put up there shows the worst case scenario of a projected contribution if everything was approved and no revenues was increased and we truly hit the expenditures that we budget for.

Correct. If we, how my budget that I presented a month ago, if we knew no changes to millage rate and we do all the capital items, this is what our fund balance would look like. Moving forward, we're getting to that point where taking this amount of money of a rainy day fund is not sustainable and we need to have the hard conversation of we need to either find a new revenue source, we need to cut items or a combination of the three or I guess option four is we don't do anything and just let future boards deal with the problem. And I think we, this board, and other prior boards have, again, kept taxes low, have done a great job of preparing for the future, and have looked at different processes, like the sheriff's office was here, and looked at it, scrutinized it, and make sure this is the best value for our dollar. Looking at our comparables, again, we're the lowest in Ottawa County, We're the lowest in the state of Michigan with a charter township of 30,000 people or more. And we're going to have the conversation of what direction do you want to go?

One more, I guess, remark I would make from the chair's position as it relates to this is I don't want the board to see a reality check that way or the present set of circumstances as a huge negative or somehow an indictment of this board or of the township in any way, shape, or form. In other words, we've always been in an enviable position. I still say we are in an enviable position. I dare say if you were to look at other cities, villages, townships, whether it be in this county or elsewhere in the state, these conversations are being had everywhere, okay? Because costs are going like this, revenue sharing is going like that, right? everybody's feeling it, just as our public is feeling it with ourselves being part of the public, right? Your food, your gas, your whatever, right? We're all feeling it personally in that way, and we are not immune from that, right? We are, as a township, part of that increase. So when we need to put a pipe in the ground, it costs more not just, you tell me not just annually, Gary, but almost monthly, right? Everything is changing in that respect. And so I still sit here and I want you as well, as we consider a budget that doesn't have frankly, you know, wish lists for expendable items, right? But rather looking and going, okay, what is important? What is necessary? What is a well-run government? What do we need to look at making sure we provide for and how we project what we use with our funds? We are so blessed to sit here and go, okay, we not only have that lowest rate of anywhere in the county or in the state, arguably with charter townships, but we also have no debt. And as Gene pointed out when he went to his meeting in Lansing here a couple months back, a healthy rainy day fund, albeit small, in the range, I think is the way you put it, not necessarily as high as they might wish you were, but not at the bottom of that range either, but to say, you know what? You have a healthy rainy day fund and you need to keep that because it's important because things can change in a hurry, right? So I know there was talk in the past about, oh, you've got so much money, give it back. No, no, no. That's not prudent planning. And in fact, when you see cuts into what we have set aside, you start to go, uh-oh, right? I liked how you ended what you said, which is we are looking ahead not just for our term, we're looking ahead at the next board and the board after that, right? And saying what is going to be necessary? What is coming? What do we know in the way of expenditures is coming? What are we experiencing in the way of either revenue decrease or need for greater revenue? And I call that prudent planning, right? So with that in mind, I guess as we look at this budget, we need to do some prudent planning on all sides, okay, revenue, expenditure, and all the rest. So I think we could start with looking at budget line items, whether they be on Justin's cheat sheet, as I've called it, or whether, not be mentioned there, but somewhere within the budget itself, the floor is open to discussion.

Well, I think that the two things that I, when I look at the budget that have to be addressed is the full-time fire department, which is basically in addition 1.8 million, or 1.4 million if I remember right, no, 1.8 million additional for the fire department. And I'll be honest with you, when I look at the, and then adding to that, not having the revenue sharing. So you're looking at a couple hundred thousand dollars there. So you're looking at almost $2 million difference from last year's budget to those.

Can you scroll up just a little bit there, Andy? You're talking about right there. Yep.

Okay, go on. So, and I talked to Gene about this too. My biggest takeaway is we don't have the data for the fire department as far as vehicles and how much more use they're getting. So I can't really say whether we need to buy another million-dollar fire truck or not. I also don't have enough information. I don't think anybody does. I've been going to a full-time fire department for several months. Whether or not these vehicles... are getting more use than what they did previously because we had an on-call fire department because we're making more calls because of uh emergency calls and so that that's the one thing that i'm struggling with whether um we don't you know spend a million dollars in a fire truck and we can take that million dollars and spot it over a couple years or three or this fire department says hey you know what we're putting that much more wear and tear in these vehicles We don't want, we can't have these things in the shop. I don't have enough information. But the fire department is probably our largest increase from last year and then the loss of revenue sharing. So that's where I look at it. We gotta try to figure out how to replace that almost $2 million.

and i need i need more information on that truck as a fire truck 500 000 we're putting away for future advancement to be able to you know house more firemen down the way and i think that's smart planning um you know just some of the things i know the fire truck i mean that fire truck that that's going to replace is like 28 years old already yeah it's it's a 2000 what is it, 98 or something like that, it's not set to any of the safety standards that are put in place from 2009. Crash cab, rollover things for the cab, a black box or whatever you want to call it that they recommend now from NFPA and all this other kind of stuff. And that station now, because of two firemen running there, not only run the squad 872, they're also running that engine, that first line engine a lot more than ever do. So that means when they do have paid on call fire, the engine gets used more than it probably should be, is that old 28 year old truck. And so I think if we put it off too long, we're gonna get out of sequence on how, because if you even look at how old some of these other trucks are, You know, we're, you know, 2020, 2013, 2006, 2005. I mean, we've got to keep a, or we're going to get caught like buying one every year for a little while just to kind of stay on top of things. So if we be smart and start now, that'll give us a gap of three to maybe five years before the next one really should be bought.

And I don't want you to miss control because I'm basically saying, is it enough? Is the $1.8 million enough for future? Because I don't know the data. You know what I'm saying? Maybe we need more money. We need to be looking at more trucks because I don't know how much use these things are getting.

We could, I mean, as far as a lot of our data, though, aren't we talking about just more or less for what we think we might need for more firemen down the road?

How many runs are we making with these trucks that they're getting more wore out quicker? Yeah. Because now we're making more runs.

As opposed to a year ago. Yeah, as opposed to a year ago.

We weren't making that many runs. We got rid of the unit. Now we're making that many more runs. Our vehicles are certainly getting more wear and tear.

We're halfway through the year. We've doubled what they ran all year last year.

On average, we're doing eight runs a day, approximately, plus or minus.

But we're still doing the runs in conjunction with life EMS prior.

So these typically are EMS calls. Again, there's other calls for service. I think typically, I think last year, Gene, I think it was around 1,200 calls for service. But now we're, again, running about eight calls a day. Okay. So there's some days I think in early June, like we're in like 22, that's problematic. If that was every day, we would have a lot different conversation right now.

Because we've run so many calls, we do have another service on for Saturday, right? I mean, I think that ended now?

We did it for the summer, just to see if it was needed or not. Just because our paying on call wages have dropped so much, and we didn't know with the full timers what that was going to look like for coverage during the Saturdays. Really, the need in services declined during the summer, which I thought was odd. But again, it's data-driven, right? We're going to make decisions on data. When I developed this budget, I spoke with all the department heads. I took different input that we've had from committees, subcommittees, and just more goals and put it together. It's not a mandate to spend, it's something that a conversation we need to have though.

Part of the challenge though to really like understand the overall budget is it just feels like we consistently have used that mentality of like put it in there as a placeholder. But then when we also year-over-year underspend by millions of dollars, it is very difficult to track the year-over-year changes to actually understand what percent increase is happening and if it's following just a typical cost of living and inflation or whether there is more necessary spending that's happening. for ease of understanding it all. I mean, I've plugged the last five years of budgets into AI, right? And I'm having it help me analyze things. And it's like difficult for it to even understand because it's like pointing out to me, your actual spending in 2025 was $3.5 million different than what your budget was starting at the year. So now I can't figure out what my year over year changes are because our actual costs are so different than our budgeted. So it's good to be conservative, but now we're in a position where, where if you look at what we budgeted at the beginning of every year, five years ago, technically remove all capital outlay, we're experiencing a 73% change in our operations budget from 2021 to today. 73% in five years, and that's removing capital outlay costs. That's incredible, but that's not accurate. And now I don't know how to figure out what's accurate. So it's sort of like how do we figure out what we're, if what we're doing is just a natural consequence of costs rising or if we are kind of, maybe we're using my phrase too frequently that we deserve nice things.

You know, maybe we got to reel it in a little bit.

I don't know. It's very hard to like decipher. So that's where I spent a lot of my time was like looking at the year over year. than really like per line item, but I'm kind of looking at them the big ticket line items going, I'm not so sure that we need to spend a bunch more money on additional share of deputies because I don't know that that's where the biggest bang for the buck lies, especially if we are truly looking at potentially a millage increase because of significant operating costs. That was just a general statement.

other thoughts on because she's just touched on the deputies as well which falls under fire sheriff the rest is all fair game but sticking with that category still other thoughts about either deputies or fire related expenses or requests gene with the fire department do you feel comfortable with this budget that we would be in good shape

as far as the engine and and justin putting money away for this new station to you know the property that we bought um i i i'm a little hesitant on the deputy part of it if you're asking me about that how about gary's comment that uh it could be exploding right now because of all of our calls and to have 23 in a weekend or eight a day that's yeah i mean If you just really ask me what I really think, instead of two additional deputies, I'd rather see you put two more firemen on to handle our west side of the township so we don't have a lapse in time thing going on there. But just saying one more thing about the fire truck and stuff, too. I think they're not looking to get... They're looking to buy one off the lot. They're not going to customize anything. So... I think that price even I don't know what extra equipment I haven't talked to him about what extra equipment they might be talking about that, but I think there's a possibility that you might be able to looking at maybe 850,000. Kevin said something about HME. HME has come a long ways from what they did before to buy one. This still has to be a five or six man cab, but they were coming down shrink down the truck a little bit. If you don't have a walkthrough. They got new things about loading holes, keeping it lower for firemen to get at as far as safety thing goes. Still holds 1,000 gallons of water. Still has a good pumper on it. Shorter base, easier to turn for the guys on the first responders to get it out and to get somewhere. And then use the one that they're using now as the backup. The information that I did get from the deputy chief and stuff too, you're talking about waiting next year, stuff like that, with the increases, even what the sheriff was talking about, looking at probably $50,000 or $60,000 more money, even if we wait. But I mean, you could say that, I guess, with everything.

Gene, can I ask you a question with your experience with the fire department? Why... Is there a need to keep buying large fire apparatus when so many calls are medical? Could we not just have a bunch of suburbans with medical gear if that's what...

The only thing that comes in because we're limited staff right now, which is two on, about the time you take 872, which is a pickup, which has got all the stuff on they need, it's MFR... qualified and working on EMT. But by the time you get that one out to run a medical to Sunset Manor for a lady that's ill, that's when the call's gonna come in for house fire or car fire or something like that. Now they got that vehicle there and because there's only two and they have to wait for a paid on call to get the first line truck, they usually either gotta come back to get the engine to get there at a timely fashion. So it gets to be a bouncing game almost. So it's like, should I take the truck to these medicals or should I take this? So you really need something that carries water, carries no canoe by. And I think the next truck that they're looking at, if they built one off the lot like HME or whatever, would definitely be a smaller than what we're used to because we're all custom built. So it would definitely be a smaller overall truck, which I think would definitely help.

I mean, how often does that happen where they would take the, pickup truck and need a fire truck, I mean, get a call. Does that happen? Is there any data for that?

I'm sure they're collecting it, but for me to answer that, you know, but I know it has happened. And there's some guys that will, because I've watched the Ripper runs that have come out that every once in a while I'll see the 823, which is the engine, is out on some shifts more than others, but they're playing the game a little more proactive. It's like, okay, I got the truck. I can do anything now. I can pump water. I can go to that car fire. I can go to the dumpster fire. Plus, I can do that medical. It is a little bit more wear and tear on that engine. In the middle of the night, when the whole community is sleeping, you go to a medical for somebody at Sheldon Metals. They're going to take the squad. And if anything comes up, they'll call paid on call because paid on call is, of course, a lot more available than two because everybody's around. We still get the staffing issues during the day between that eight and five time and everything else. But to say specifically, I know what that is. I know it has happened, but I don't have a good number for you.

Okay. Yep.

It was interesting to me, I've kind of learned from listening to people like Eugene over the years, the tension between the Sheriff's Department and the Fire Department. Like, one feels like they're competing with the other for dollars, and I hear negative from one versus the other. Like, hey, we get the dollar, they don't need it as much. Does that color your view of the need for deputies, that you feel like it might short money to the Fire Department?

You know, to be completely honest, and like I asked a lot of... sheriff is here, I still got a little bit of bad taste because I think the township really took it in the neck with as much service as we were supposed to be getting from the unit that was turned into sheriff work. We weren't getting our money's worth, I would say, as the units operating as units. They were running other calls and they weren't available and we'd have to call our guys out. I And I think it happened way too often. And like Kelly had asked him right out, you know, can we get reimbursed or some of that? And I think we did at one time, Justin, is that possible?

So yeah, there one correction item. When I took over in 2025, we were still getting a reimbursement because the seventh unit was not filled. So per month we were getting a credit. So they had their bill and then a credit. And that was when Deputy Garza came on. Then we started getting, we started having seven and that filled our roster. So when that seventh car wasn't filled, we were getting a credit. So we were, from when I started in 23 to I think it was early 25, for that two years, we were getting a credit almost every month.

But even despite that, when we were looking at going, some of the data, and you had like a calendar up and there was like blue boxes where you blocked out. Like we were supposed to have somebody here and here's all the times it wasn't filled. And it was pretty shocking, I would just say. And so that's why I agree. I'm a little hesitant. It feels like we kind of got, Sold on a couple of things recently we got to remove the unit because we need more time and we'll have more time to dedicate to Community policing and let's also get these flat cameras because it's also going to alleviate some you know administrative or extra work So now we've got no unit and 31 flat cameras around, but we still need more police officers I'm sort of just like it doesn't add up. It's like all these changes were supposed to be sort of help alleviate what was happening. Now you keep asking for more, the royal you, right, not you. So it's like it doesn't totally add up in my head. It's like we haven't even had a full calendar year really maybe it's been about a year, where we've really leaned into the fire department taking over the full emergency, having no E-unit, having the sheriff dedicated to just community policing, letting the flock cameras do their thing. But now we already got to test the waters on hiring more. For me, it feels like we haven't even figured out if what we have really works or not. We're kind of jumping the gun, I think.

Well, I think if you look at the numbers and Sheriff DeBoer laid them out, Crime's not going down. So you have, I think, need for more policing because there are more traffic accidents. I mean, how many just in Georgetown alone on that list? There's more crime happening. There's more calls for service in all different areas. I mean, yeah, it'd be great to say, hey, this is God's country, as he said. People want to live what is, but it doesn't keep away people crime. It doesn't keep away bad drivers. It doesn't keep away. You know the need to have that policing population growth alone increases the need to have more public safety. So I mean obviously we had that firemen why not just so much because we lost a unit. But we we had to add firemen because we have more people to protect. I mean, that's been over the years, too. I mean, so I don't see a discrepancy in why you want to add firemen or why you want to add deputies. It's public safety. It's regardless of what side of the, you know, what badge they wear, it's public safety. And that's, I think, probably the top two or three things that we should, as a township, provide for the 55,000 residents we have. So, you know, to me... I think when we added the six full time, we probably knew that was a beginning. And knowing that somewhere down the road, we're probably going to add another six full time. But that's not just because it was something that was going to be fun to do. It's because we have an obligation to provide public safety for 55,000 residents. And on the same token, we have an obligation to provide the safety part of that, too, is the policing part of that. So... I mean, I get what you're saying, Kelly, but I still think if crime was going down and the numbers were going down and everything else was going down, we'd say, yeah, well, this is Mayberry AFD. We don't need Bruce Manning. Barney Fife is perfect. We don't have that, though. They just said they've got people coming in from Chicago doing home invasions. And why? Because this is a great place to find good stuff again, apparently, right?

Nobody locked their doors that night around here.

Exactly, but it happens.

couple of clarifications and things i'm hearing first of all the presumptive nature of the future growth of the fire department to me is still as yet undetermined oh i get that but we'll see right and you could say if you take a long enough view you know it will okay i get that but i'm not necessarily saying next year right no and i think plot cameras too to say 31 i just want to be clear for the record that we have three in our township all right and none of them by this township, right? How long has it been since we last hired a sheriff's deputy for policing?

Outside of a school resource?

Outside of that, yeah.

Before I was here, so over three years. don't know how long back before that i don't i i i can't speak to that i i know on average we build up roughly 100 homes a year uh if there's two to three people per home so we're adding roughly 300 people per year so roughly every three to four years we have an extra thousand people that are living in our community even during a moratorium we're still building houses from prior approvals and plants. So I guess I'm gonna be mindful of that, is that we have slowed down in growth over the last couple years, but we're still adding people and responsibility to our community.

We don't maim and kill people here, but man, can we speed and run red lights. And that's where I think some of that focus would lie. I wonder, Gene, Gary had said earlier, And I think I heard you say, well, the price will increase, and that is a reality, and that is a factor. Do you feel it's absolutely imperative that this happen this year, or could it happen this year or even possibly next year? Can you set aside half as part of the budget and sort of expect to have the other half the following?

How strongly do you feel? I strongly feel that it should be done this year, because I think it's going to come and bite us if we wait too much longer.

The challenge is it's going to push into them the next capital improvement that you have to do. So you kick the can down the road and now you're scrunching it into the next one that you have to do. I think when you think about running your capital improvements at certain yearly intervals, if you don't stick to it, now you're going to be like, oh crap, we've got to replace this one. And now only a year later we're looking at another one. And so do you just keep kicking the can down the road or spreading it out or do you just do it because it's 28 years old so that you buy yourself three more years before you've got to do the next one?

But even a stock truck, it's not going to Boardman Ford and buying off a lot. A stock truck is probably still 46 months delivery time.

It might take, if you order it in January, it might not come until the end of the year.

As opposed to how long it would take us to get our ladder truck. Three years? Yeah, because it was a custom deal, right? You can call up peers. You can call up with friends. You call up with the other guys and say, hey, I want to order this truck. And they're going to go get in line. It's going to be a three-year wait. And who knows what additional costs will add to it between now and the next three years when you get the truck. Even the stock truck program that HME is running, they're still four to six months because they have a lot of people that want to buy stock trucks as opposed to, hey, I'll wait three years and get a truck. People can't wait three years.

I appreciate Gene's explanation on fire trucks showing up at accidents because I get asked that by the public quite a bit. Do we actually need it? But the way you explained it, it makes a lot more sense. and I appreciate that.

Would it make a difference in people's minds if it is a smaller truck that is stock and therefore would come in maybe $250,000 less than what's on the board there?

Is that a... Fair assumption. It's fair.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And as far as the deputies... Should we move forward with the deputies? Eric said tonight that they're getting together new software for scheduling. I should hope that would get shared with us, that they can prove that we're getting these deputies in the township. Because there's got to be proof in the pudding. Because I've seen those stats a couple, three years ago, too. And we had nobody covering this township for a whole week. It was terrible. It was a business. You're talking unit coverage, yeah. Basically not anybody in here for a few days in the entire township. It was bad. They didn't have enough people. And so it was very frustrating to see what was going on. And I get it. They were understaffed. They couldn't get guys. They're up to staff now. But I'm looking at it and going, we're paying a lot of money and we're not getting the staffers. That's why I asked the question. The guys always show up to the high school. Those guys are there every day. But the guys that are speeding down Cottonwood are bald on. There's nobody to do anything with that. That's disconcerting, to be honest with you.

And I just want to make sure that I say this, because I want to be very clear. I want our community to be safe. But we talk a lot about Georgetown getting the short end of the stick a lot of times. And this is one where I don't want that to happen. If we're going to pay more money to the sheriff's department, I'm fully on board. I understand crime is increasing. But I... fully believe that we deserve to see the data that those positions are being backfilled in our community.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. Because I sit on the fence with the same thing for the same reason. Because I know what's happened in the past. And everybody's, you know, we're the ugly stepchild of the county. We pay our fair share. But then if the townships to the north aren't paying hardly anything and our guys are coming over there to go help them all the time, that's not a fair deal. is that we're going to send them a bill.

Yeah, I agree with you. But one thing, just the last question I asked them, I guess the reason I asked them, is Allendale, if you look at the data that was, well, the sheet that he sent out, it's in our pamphlet for the Sheriff's Department deal. The closest one to us, really, if you want to do apples for apples, is Allendale. Allendale's got 26,000 people. And if you look at the They run 450, we ran 450 calls, county did, and Allendale was half that. So it's like we're split in half, which makes sense. They got 26, we got 50. They ran 250, we ran 450.

But they're doing that whole thing yet with a college in front of a place.

Now they do have college policing, which I totally understand, but there's times that that group needs help also. They're doing all that with four people. We got 12 and one in 13. I totally agree. I don't want anybody to think that I'm totally against it, but if we got the money, let's just do it. If we're talking about trying to be conservative or whatever, and I agree with what Gary and Kelly both said, he's got a lot of data things coming out here. As long as we're doing it with fire, let's do it with police too. Maybe get just one more year behind our belts and then... LET US SHOW US A NEW PROGRAM. WELL, LET'S SEE WHAT THE FIRE COMES UP WITH, WITH THEIR PROGRAM. AND IT'S NOT GOING TO GET ANY CHEAPER. I MEAN, WE CAN GUARANTEE THAT. IF WE NEED MORE POLICEMEN, IT'S GOING TO BE MORE. AND IF WE WANT TO DO SOME DECENT COVERAGE OF FIRE, THAT'S GOING TO COST US TOO. BUT WE STILL NEED A SAFE COMMUNITY.

BUT IT'S ALSO A LINE ITEM, AS JIM MENTIONED, AND THERE'S OPEN COMMONS AS WELL, IS AS WE KIND OF OVERESTIMATE ON EXPENSES, RIGHT? THINKING THAT, WELL, IF WE DO NEED TO GO THIS FAR, then then then we have it in the budget that we are going to go that far but if we didn't we decide maybe we don't need that extra deputy then guess what that's again to kelly's comments about we we underspend but we overestimate you know that's one of the ideas where okay well we didn't grab the extra deputy but so there's a little bit of a surplus there so but but i think you probably have it as a line item in the budget for that reason because you

the numbers or the data probably speak to that we probably will be adding an additional deputy or additional fire over the next year or so the only concern with that is that what we're talking about like the additional deputy that's an operating expense not a capital outlay expense and so if we don't spend it then our operating budget decreases which is a good thing but if we are potentially looking at a millage increase based on an operating budget, expecting a higher operating budget, but then we don't spend it. The optics of increasing the mills for a budget that you're potentially going to underspend on, does it warrant then a millage increase if we are going to, for sure, historically like we've always done, underspend? You know, it's one thing to... plan well for the future, but then you're sort of like, does it have to happen this year? Are you looking at next year? That's what I want to be careful of is, you know, under spending, but then planning for the top line budget.

It seems like a major concern is Georgetown respected. And Justin has done an incredible job. I mean, he's going to Lansing. He is hammering these people. And I'll tell you, Jim is doing an incredible job, and so is Gary. I mean, people come and speak to us. They mention Gary right away because you're on the phone with them all the time. And so I think we have a different mentality now that we're going to see more respect. And I think you were tough here, Kelly, as far as with the sheriff. That sends a message. And I think we're going to see things turn around. I've never... Justin's been incredible behind the scenes, but so have a number of you. I talked to you. You are making phone calls. You are out there. This is a different animal right now. I think we got the respect, and I'd like to see us go ahead with supporting the sheriff, supporting the fire department. I think we're going to see things fall into line, and I think we need it.

I think... If we were to cap, for example, a fire engine replacement at, say, 875, if it ended up being a little more than that, it has to be discussed. It's not that it won't happen. It has to be discussed. Or even 850, whatever. I'm not in tune with that, but I've heard you guys say you are. yeah that isn't unheard of you could say you could cut that by 200 and say yeah we're looking at doing it this next year uh if it's going to come in more than that it's going to have to be justified you know what is it why right and i think the same with the deputies i tend to favor kevin's point of view on that and it sounds like maybe john we can cut that number back because we would we would only do one we would increase overtime what does that amount to in terms of the difference if you know justin

So the difference between the budgeted amount and what he presented, it would reduce the $333,000 at roughly $85,000. Okay.

Roughly $250,000. He's got so much overtime on there that it really almost comes out even.

No, that's factoring that in. What he presented, and it's in the sheet in the packet, is adding one deputy as a traffic car and then trying to backfill positions when people are at training, sick time, vacation time, and there's no one gonna be there. They're trying to almost have like, not a guaranteed minimum staffing, but they'll try to fill those positions, those critical issues. The idea is trying to have roughly three deputies on at one time. The problem that we've kind of run into that's, I say it, the agreements that we have in place is that during the summer when school's not in session, we have the school resource officers, we could be paying, have like five depths that are scheduled to work and I can be down to one. And that's problematic is that I can be paying for five, four could be training, sick time, vacation. During the summer they're spending time with their families, which we support, but now We're paying a bunch of money for one person. And this new model that they came up with is that, no, when those individuals are on vacation, sick time training, they're gone, this backfill will then pay for a different deputy who mainly is on their off day. They come in for 12 hours, work overtime. We would pay them, but then we would have a body in a deputy car.

So two points to take away from that, in my mind, is you have... one deputy, and you increase the overtime from what it was to what they're projecting it would be, and you're down to roughly 250 on that number.

Roughly.

And more importantly, from my view, kind of like what we were tackling with fire a year ago, hey, you were just mentioning it, Gary, you'd look and sometimes we'd have no E-unit anywhere. in the township. That was part of our reality. I don't think it was ever true we had no deputy. I hope that was not the case.

We always had one.

Yeah, we always had one. We were saying part of the reason we wanted to go to full-time fire in addition to other reasons was we want to always know there's at least two people on the clock ready and so on. This tells me that we would have at least, it sounds like, three or maybe at times two, but more always present in the township. And that to me is analogous to what we did on fire. It seems important.

Yeah. Yeah. Because you got to understand, we had three meetings. We didn't have a deputy here because there was nobody in the township to cover this meeting. Three meetings in a row. Yeah. So when they say they can't send a guy for our meeting, that tells you that they're short guys in the township. That was proof right there to me. As I said, where was the deputy tonight? Well, we didn't have enough guys. Okay. And our meeting is scheduled the second and the fourth every month, so it shouldn't be that hard to schedule that.

I want you to scroll down. Anybody can say anything more they want on anything we're covering right now with Fire Sheriff, but there are other line items which we've I get confused now. What we talked about in here and what was in finance, I know I've had discussion with you folks, some of you or maybe all of you at a previous meeting on some of the rest of this. And we've heard some of the explanation. But you know what? What are your thoughts? You can keep scrolling even beyond that, Andy. I'm sorry, Chelsea. And then it goes all the way down. So yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, yeah. We as a board have to answer to all of our residents, and truth be told, many are struggling right now with higher grocery bills, higher fuel, car repairs. Obviously nothing is going down in the township. And the township is also having to pay more for gas. for their company vehicles for our DPW to go all over. People are even resorting to breaking into homes and cars. So we need to find ways to adjust or to pivot. We also need to help our budget and also answer and help our residents at the same time. And yes, public safety, like you all said, is very important. And in our last services meeting, Lieutenant Griser and Captain Douglas did suggest only hiring one officer and then backfilling with overtime. that i thought was a good suggestion to save some money because we're looking to save some money i like the suggestion of a smaller fire truck to save money we do need to do the cemetery expansion that is a given we owe that to our residents we have to keep up with our infrastructure and spend money you know on drains that's necessity so some things can't change in our budget but I believe our local road budget could be cut Grand Valley Metro Council does a survey on local roads It's coming out at the end of September. So I think we should take a look at that. It's called a PACER rating, where it's rated the roads that are the best and the worst in terms of what maybe we need to do. So I think our Utilities Committee would have to look at that. And like looking at different budget things on this list, the senior center needs a new dishwasher. Well, that's not that much money. They are approaching their busiest time of year with all their Thanksgiving, Christmas, holiday. So that's kind of a necessity for them. Yes, we are losing $190,000 in state monies. So the township obviously is hurting from that. And like we said, Justin's doing a great job by pitching for us, but you saw the big denied across the screen. So I think we need to be fiscally responsible and put a pin maybe in Woodcrest and the veterans memorial parking lot and benches there i mean i'd love to do that but maybe right now isn't the time maybe we need to put a pin in that hold off on anything at pioneer park for right now this is just being fiscally responsible because maybe we don't need to raise our rate if we do some self-checking of some of our projects that yes we'd love to do them all But looking at the township banners, that costs us a lot of money. We charge $100. I bought one for my 95-year-old dad, who is a Korean War veteran, and he loves it. But the township funds it. I mean, how much more? And then to pay our staff to hang them?

We have a contractor that puts them up, and it's a fraction of what it costs.

Yeah, exactly. So... you know maybe we do that every other year maybe we don't do it or maybe we charge more for the banners because right now we're funding that and I don't know if we should be funding that I mean it's a great thing it's good it looks great but if we're looking at maybe cutting some costs maybe we should think about that so we as a board must find ways to cut our expenses even though the township expenses have increased like for everybody else so i mean i've just been trying to look at stuff item by item on that note i do want to point out though because i do find it really interesting that

Our capital outlay is pretty consistently around 30% of our budget every year. And what is significantly increasing is our operating costs. So no matter how much we cut back on capital outlay year over year, the reality is our operating costs are increasing significantly year over year. That is not something I think that we can, accomplish and navigate simply by cutting capital outlay projects. That's not going to balance our budget. The reality is that our operating costs are dramatically changing, and that, I think, is the piece that is warranting the discussion around. It's true.

Yep, I agree.

Justin, as you put this together, did you pretty much feel this was bare bones? Because, I mean, we could have... had many, many pages up there of things we could have done with a township.

So again, I took conversations with department heads, conversations, we had committees, subcommittees, and goals, and put it all in here. It's not a have to, it's everything encompassing that we've talked about. And the feedback I've had for, hey, we sign contract for, you know, for like Woodcrest Park, and we talk about Woodcrest Park and Veterans Memorial Park. So we sign contracts to do the initial step to look at the park. Do we have to invest money beyond that? No. For Veterans Memorial, are we spending right now for engineering that may, drag on 2027? Yes, but we can cut it off and say we're not going to do it. Well, my intentions for Woodcrest Park was apply for a DNR grant in early part of 2027. We won't find out till the end of 2027, so it would be a 28 item that we'd actually budget money for. But the hard conversation is if we can't, you know, if we cut things out and we don't have enough money for like a fire truck in 2027, how we're going to have enough money for a fire truck in 28 or 29, or the roof. Again, for the fire stations, I put in $500,000 a year for the next five years because we bought that property. If a future board wants to take that $2.5 million in five years and use it for something else, that's their choice, but I need to... invest in roofs at fire stations that are 30 plus years old. That's reality. Any building I have, I have to take care of. I'm not gonna let it fall by the wayside. We are not gonna fall by the wayside. So we have to do this. This budget, if you take out Pioneer Park, Woodcrest, this is meat and potatoes and this is not a steak, this is a hot dog.

Seems pretty practical. Yeah. pretty bare bones, and we are very, very proud of our parks, and they need to be maintained. The banners was something new. We just tried it this year, but the feedback was just overwhelming.

It was great.

People crying because they would see their loved one up there. Personally, I'd like to see that go for a few more years.

I think we have to charge more, though.

Well, maybe it'll have to come to that. for the impact that it had and how it dressed up our community and just the feedback that I had. I mean you drive into the community and there's soldiers up on the screen and they're local people. People just loved it.

We do remember when we approved that I said we're going to do this for one year, right? And everybody said yup. Because I said, Dutchmen always want to do everything annually. That's what we do. And then a future board's got to try to get rid of that. And so every time you do that stuff, it stays on forever. And another board's going, why are we spending 50 grand on this now? Well, we always did it because everybody felt good about it. I understand. Okay. I'm just telling you, that was this conversation that we had when we decided to do that.

And I felt the same way, too. So for me, it's like, you know, whether, I guess I don't know the actual amount that we technically subsidize that, but moving forward, I think to keep it as something that we do, we probably need to charge a more substantial rate so it's not something that we're subsidizing a ton. in my opinion, because it was kind of a special year for it. But it is great. You know, it would be nice to do, but I don't think it should come at too significant of a subsidization by the rest of the taxpayers.

I agree with Kelly, and I think it could be a matter of discussion and services. Even if it's on a budget, it could go, you know.

Right.

Or it could get limited to just this parking lot, or it could be, you know, whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And that would be fine. You had mentioned, yeah, and you had mentioned, Amy, previously, you've got away with other sponsorships potentially. If we want, if the reality is we want it to be an annual program. Yeah. You want to work your magic.

Kelly, I tend to agree, as the other service member here, services member, I agree with the pioneer and and the Woodcrest Park just putting a pin and waiting on going beyond plans. Do you think that's?

No, I think that's totally fair, but I think it does need to be said that that's not the thing that's driving this budget up. So it's like two things can be true. We can put a pin in it and get the planning done for it. I do think we should finish our plan for Woodcrest and apply for that grant.

I do too.

We can get the money that changes the budget. So I'm in agreement with you. We can put a pin in it, but yeah, let's be clear.

That's not the thing that's making our budget $18,000, right? But it's just ways to cut to be fiscally responsible. Fully agree.

So my recommendation of Woodcrest Park Independence Memorial, if we went from $500,000, take it down to $75,000, that would cover the commitments that we made to a degree.

Yeah, I think you always have to remind yourself that The township is a service-orientated business, right? The people that work here serve the community. We really don't come up with a product. So you're right, the operating budget is big. But we're paying people to serve. We're paying people in the office. You're paying the librarians. You're paying the fire department and all these. But they're serving the community with that money.

I think we're saying the same thing. I know.

The thing is, though, is when you're in your business, and I have a business mind, I'm looking at return on investment. But a township or a government really doesn't have return on investment because it's basically a service. Our return on investment is how we treat our residents and whether or not we do the good job of being good stewards of the money that we've been given. And so I look at the budget in a whole and I go, we're doing a good job with it. It's just that in order to do the service, it's probably going to take a little more collection to get it there.

I fully agree. And I think we're just saying the same thing a couple different ways because I think I wanted to just be clear that I don't think we can eliminate enough capital projects to like get ourselves out of the dramatic increase in budget. That was my point is that the reality is that our operating budget is increasing significantly and that is what we need to focus on because it is critical. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, eventually, and this discussion is not over, but eventually we're going to have to be pretty specific in terms of a tentative adoption. And I feel like we've gone through some items on here. Maybe there's more you want to touch on, but it would be good if we're ready to say, hey, modify this, that, and the other. We should be specific about what we think that should be so that they know. And then we can, as you're saying, Kelly, we need to then take up the discussion as it relates to operating expenses and that. Yeah. if I heard correctly, I feel like there's somewhat of a consensus on a fire truck for 2027, but putting some sort of threshold like 875, and then if it's going to be above that, there would be discussion and approval of going above it.

What would the 1075 or the 1,000,075 come? I mean, was that...

I was looking at what other communities had bought their engines for, and

added five percent the chief and deputy chief come up with any estimates or anything like that and a capital i think a capital plan from historical to subaru that number decreased yeah i i think it could that's why i wondered what if there was extra equipment involved with that or if it's just what i've been hearing too so what i've been hearing is you know 850 you know but nine or whatever you want.

Anything more than $20,000 has to come to the board.

I think $850,000 is the top of the line for an awful lot. Yeah, I could check whatever, but between $700,000 and $850,000, I think without a doubt, you could get everything you need and more.

That's kind of what I came up with.

But we, again, with our budgeting, we tend to grade up a little bit. That's why I say the $875,000 might leave you know i don't know cushion for whatever right right but i i'd take the number on on the sheriff's down to the two 250 or yeah yeah the one deputy plus the overtime yeah i would agree with that i agree on that um and then we we talked about where you just described it justin where we'd be cutting pioneer and woodcrest correct we would cut uh pioneer playground

cut Pioneer safety surfacing and reduce Woodcrest Veterans Memorial from 500,000 down to 75,000.

And I can't remember if we've hit everything thus far that we've covered or that we want to cover. I mean, the road thing got brought up.

I mean, Gary's big with the roads. What are we...

I mean, it was... Well, we didn't even do any roads this year. Right. And we've been blessed with the fact that the roads that were done were done with the Ottawa County budgets.

I mean, a lot of the big ones are getting done this year and the next following year is the main roads. What are our... I mean, Andy's been driving.

What... Last year.

I mean, can that... Do we have sidewalks, bike paths that we know that we're already going to be doing, or can we combine that $2 million for both? 28. 28. 28. So 28 is ongoing.

To do a sidewalk in 2027, we kind of have to get the preliminary numbers and engineering together to actually do the project in 27. What about the sidewalk we talked about? Yeah, so we have Georgetown Industrial right next to Speedway, close to the commercial park. filling in that. There will be special assessments on the back end, but we haven't done that yet.

So we'll get last remaining lot at Fillmore on 28th.

Yes, and then we get economies of scale when we bid out sitem projects together. So then we'll pick up 24 24th and Fillmore, there's one parcel that we should do too.

We've historically on the roads, and I can speak to the past almost two decades, we've been between two and four million a year, and I bet we averaged about three million. Or was that a high watermark? We've never done less than two except this past year. It's one of those things that sort of like fire and police, people notice and it directly impacts them pretty hard if you're not keeping up. It's a little bit like your fire truck. We've got that cycle where if you get off that train, how do you catch up, you know? So I think we dare not go less than that.

And like you said, tar just went from 70 a ton to 93 because of diesel fuel. So we're going to see... A TEN OR 15% INCREASE ON ROADS FOR NEXT YEAR.

SO WE'RE NOT GOING TO GET AS MUCH DONE FOR TWO MILLION AS WE HAVE IN THE PAST.

WELL, WE SHOULD LOOK AT THE PACER REPORT FROM THE METRO COUNCIL, TOO, BECAUSE THAT COMES AT THE END OF THIS MONTH. BECAUSE THEY ARE DOING, WHAT IS IT, 1,700 MILES OF FEDERAL-AID ROADS THEY'RE LOOKING AT, AND THEN 1,000 MILES OF LOCAL ROADS.

You know one thing I was thinking, too? We had this conversation last year. It was like, you get the roads, the list of roads, local roads, subdivision roads that were set to be repaved. And we asked the road commission that one time. This was a year or so ago. How did you guys come up with that? And they couldn't really tell us. They didn't have a good answer. Everybody was like, don't they have this truck that kind of measures it? And it was like, no, I don't think they do. Is it too much to ask? The DPW guys, when they're out and about, they really see an egregious one to make a note of it.

Yeah, so I get feedback and phone calls. We take phone calls all summer of complaints. We're like, have you seen my road? And luckily, we haven't gotten into the neighborhoods that don't have sewer. Typically I get those phone calls every summer, but that's a different conversation. But I take the roads from last year, we kind of figure out where we're at for roads, and then I send Andy out. And then I say, hey, here's our, Here's the ones from the prior year that we didn't do. You give them the Andy Pacer scale. Because persons, they wanted to tar and put the little pebbles thing on. There's no way. There is no way. And 40th. So we worked with them and partnered with them to get that done. They got it done this summer. But we take an independent look at it and make sure the roads that we're doing are really in need.

And this past winter...

Yeah, we had a hard, cold winter. Yeah, and even like our parking lot out here, it turned to mush over winter. It's hard plowing and salting and freeze-thaw.

And one of the things we've learned to do in the last several years is we try to get all the roads in one area because we get a better price. If they're going to come and mill or they're going to tar, if they can drop a truck there, they can do a whole suction. And the other nice thing is that Then that section is done. It'll probably have to be done altogether several years from now. Because prior to me getting on the board, it was helter-skelter. It was one over here and one over here and one over here. And one's like, why didn't we do that little cul-de-sac while you were there? Well, it wasn't that bad. Well, now you're sending a truck over there for one little cul-de-sac. We were getting some big, not getting good bids because they were dropping. It's nice if you can find a section to repair them all at once and then have that done, and then you're done with that area for a while and get a better price for it.

Are we leaving in this Township Banner line item, the Veterans Banner line item?

Yeah, I wonder about that, Kelly. Do you think that's one where you go, okay, it's $25,000 you put in there, but with the understanding that services is going to take a look at this and say, you know, do we continue it? And if so, how do we make people attribute more? Do we limit where we put it as opposed to making a decision now by cutting the number?

Or do we get sponsors? Does Amy get sponsors? What's $25,000 going to get us?

Our parking lot and Baldwin. To do Baldwin, it's exponentially more than our parking lot.

And that's at no cost to residents or the same cost as what they paid this year?

This is on the expense side, not the income side.

Yeah, okay.

So I think, how many banners did we put up this year?

48.

48. So we've taken $4,800 for banners, and whether it's projected, it'll cost us $20,000. If we did the parking lot, what's the parking lot here?

24. 24 and 24. The good news is the brackets are already up. You don't have to pay for new brackets. The brackets cost more than the banners. The brackets are good. We didn't have brackets before.

And we had some donations, too. Didn't we? Like West Michigan Community Bank, didn't they donate?

But again, that's on the income side, not the expense side. So this is just the expense.

Places like Sunset. They would jump right on this. They did. I think we could probably charge them probably three times more than what we did.

Yeah. I could fill an entire year's order at just on 10-9.

Yeah.

Like they have 100 more veterans they would like to do.

Oh, I think do that. I think Amy's thoughts here of going out there, we could probably do this for a fraction of what's up there right now.

Mm-hmm.

And then it might be self-sustaining.

Yes.

That's what we ultimately, it'd be wonderful to see.

That's what I would like to see. Incentivize us to get those sponsorships by decreasing the budget amount.

I'll help with that. If you let this roll. Give a number. Even if you didn't.

Yeah, decrease it to 10 or 15 then. And incentivize us to work harder.

But again, this is the expense side, not the income side. So... if you if you decrease this from like to 12.5 and cut it in half then we're going to do half as many banners like this is the expense side so how we listed side is annie just said include included the brackets right and the brackets are already on baldwin and comes from the insulation on hold yeah that is

exponentially higher than anything else.

Because they have to have a blocking vehicle so they don't get hit in the back and there's liability involved.

And you're coming off a highway, right? I mean, you're coming around the corner and you've got... So they have to do an aero truck, they have two guys, it's exponentially more. Just to do our parking lot, it was a fraction of the cost to install here than it was there.

And I think we might want to use those brackets on Baldwin for other things besides veterans. You know, it could be another... something we want to promote within the community. We could end up restricting it to this area.

The ones before were falling off, and it was almost borderline liability that we had to do something about them.

So we saw a couple of broken ones as well that caused them to do that.

They got us in high school. They're pinked out.

Budgets can be amended. I think we should only be on the expense side, then including our parking lot and not Baldwin. And if we can figure it out, then we can amend the budget later. But if we're going to be... piecemealing this thing and really like trying to see where we can cut costs. I think that if we're going to eliminate all the parks from our budget, essentially, then we should not be keeping the full expense line item for the banners is my opinion.

So my recommendation is go from 25 down to 10.

And then can we go out and solicit and see if we, because I think we could get three or four times more from... individuals, and mainly from these businesses, because it was terrific public relations for them. I think they were surprised that it wasn't as high a cost. But it was important to kick this thing off, and we needed to have it happen for the 250th. And terrific success, and Andy really killed himself on it. I like the banner that was out there by the library. That was just wonderful. Then a magazine did an article on it. That was great.

Well, and maybe somebody like Meyer would pick up on it and pay for the installation in their parking lot here in Jenison.

You bet.

Pay for the brackets.

Are we ready to move from the expenditure side to the revenue side?

I don't want to cut you off if you're... What are you going to do about the soccer field and that kind of thing? That has not been brought up or anything yet? Or park amenities?

I think we need to do the soccer field.

Okay.

Yes.

Drain things, nobody's got a problem with that?

No.

We need that.

We need to do that. I mean, that's infrastructure.

Okay.

I think we're good.

Anyone else? No? Justin, you like to remind us of this, and you'll remind us again in the next meeting, but these are budget numbers. They don't mean we have to spend. Decisions get made. If we exceed, we have to come back and get approval. You can amend the budget if there's something that you need to change your mind about or otherwise. All right. Moving to the revenue side of things. So it's not really a screen to look at. I'm looking over that way.

Let's go back to the PowerPoint probably. Sure, sure.

So I think I'm the only one. Well, John, I should... John and I think we're on the board at the time we last raised it and the last time we cut it. If you could take that chart back further than 2005, which is what you had, and I know you can't, but I'm saying it used to be a political football. I guess we go back to 11. It used to be a political football where, remember, my position was a full-time, well-paid, highly-benefited position that people vied for because it was a good career move, right? And when people lost in this position, and I don't know if we ever had two consecutive terms by a supervisor back then. I don't think we did. It changed every...

I think decades went by and it was every time.

It was like every four years. And sometimes the outgoing supervisor and board would punitively either cut the tax rate so as to give the next board less money or sometimes raise it. And it would do this sort of thing without being tied to a strong rationale for either the need or not. So the one time that has been raised since we got away from that old model people have behaved better in that respect. It was largely, but not entirely tied to the library. That was sort of the latter of those years. And some of it was expenditure within the township as it relates to some of the improvements you saw, whether you viewed them as such. Back then you guys were on the board. We have a lot of things we're happy about and not everything was perfect, but we had a period of time where we raised it for purposes of some of those capital improvements. We brought it back down to the two and a quarter and it's remained there since. At this point, at this inflection point, I'm personally not just in favor but feel compelled to advocate for a bump up again. Not as much now based on, hey, we need a library. but more from the reality of what kelly keeps hitting which is operational expenses just like we've experienced in our own personal lives are going exponentially higher um for the township as well as for our residents right and uh i think it would be impudent it would not be good planning and budgeting to say, well, you know, we're okay right now and let some other board have to deal with it as a crisis. One of the things I heard loud and clear with water, and we were, I think, fairly criticized, albeit our motives were pure, but, and John, that was only you and I, but back in 17 or whatever the last water rate increase was, we didn't increase it annually from that point up until 2024. and we rightfully took a hit from the public to say why weren't you raising it instead of just you know why weren't you doing it you know each year right and i feel like the same criticism would be in rightly leveled at this board if at this point in time now you know several years into the inflationary period which began around 21 22 when others were jacking their rates and you see it on the chart. I know, for example, it was at Granville last year or the year before, like, boop, let's raise it a full mill. Never a word, not a debate. Everybody was just sort of pumping it up. I love the moniker of being the lowest and all that, but it's important to be good planners and good stewards. We know we can't live on two and a quarter indefinitely. The expense side, you might say the non-discretionary expense side, Kelly, right, is increasing at a faster pace than the revenue side. And budget 101, it can't go on that way forever. And part of the reason that, other than the fact that none of us likes to raise our own taxes or that of our residents, but part of the reason we're reticent oftentimes is because with all that's being assessed to our people through the schools and the county, it becomes a good-sized number, even though we are the lowest in the area. Because when you combine what they're being charged for schools and what they're being charged for the county level, which admittedly they vote for, it leaves them with the overall impression of, I'm paying enough, right? Well, you're not paying much to the township at all, especially for what we need to do and what you expect us to do. If you could somehow flip some of the millage from those other two and put it on ours, I'd love it. You know, even give me a five-year run with, you know, we'll take half of what the millage rate is with the county or the schools. But obviously we can't do that. But we need to be prudent, in my opinion, in addressing our revenue side going forward here. And personally, I think I'm in favor of both an increase in the millage rate and also an admin fee like everyone seems free in the county. Because what we get from the schools for what we have to do is nowhere near what it costs us, which is why so many communities charge that admin fee because their admin expenses are that much. We don't get any medals for being, you know, for losing money. I mean, hey, we have no admin fee. Yeah, and you're losing money too because you're spending my money on all that administrative cost. Just be a good planner. So in my mind, both of those things need to happen. And if I had to put a number on it, I'd probably, and I don't mean to be gimmicky here, but I'd probably do .45 because .5 would make us tie with Allendale. And I want at least for a little while longer to say that we are the lowest uh in the county still if you guys made arguments for something more than that i would listen but i think with an admin fee and just enough of a bump here to stay just beneath the next one i think the revenue generated along with what we've just discussed in terms of not not stepping out on discretionary expenditures in our budget would um would balance this off. So I've said this in the past and I'll say it to this board again. These are things that you can disagree about and I don't arm twist, right? I give you a perspective just like all of you do. We each have a vote. That's my perspective. It maybe has a few more years behind it, but that doesn't make it any more credible than yours. So I thought I would at least start the conversation by putting a stake in the ground and saying, okay, the floor is open.

One thing I haven't really seen yet, I don't know if Justin had a slide on that or what, to be full transparent, what it would cost the average homeowner for the admin fee.

So it would be 1% of the cost of their taxes. So they have a $4,000 tax bill, they'd pay $40 in the admin fee. The bigger the house, the bigger taxes, the more you pay.

So with what I'm proposing would be about 70 bucks per household on average and an increase in their taxes. And then, again, depending on, take that average home and give the average admin fee then based on what you just said to Gene. If you're the average home.

I would say approximately $40. So the average taxable value in Georgetown Township is $141,100. They would approximately pay roughly $40 for an admin fee.

So together, what I'm proposing would be a little over $100 on average, $110, $115, somewhere in there. I think we all get this, but you made it clear. It's like, who's got a house for $141? Nobody does, but again, that's taxable value.

But I would say is the average being, is our average skewed because we have a lot of older homes on one side of the township and then we have a lot of larger, bigger homes. So is the median home value significantly higher than our mean home value?

That's a counter question. I can't give you the answers to that. I would say that Georgetown Township, typically when you move here, you don't move away. Because, and then that kind of skews the average, because there's some individuals that have been here for 48 years, and you look at their SEV versus their taxable, and that's half of their SEV. And it's like, these people have been here, they haven't moved, you look at our population, you can see that through our master plan, primarily we have a large a population of individuals who are growing older in our community and they've been their home for 30 plus years. But to go back to your, that'd be a counter question, I couldn't give you that.

My second question is does the admin fee, must it be a percentage or can it just be a flat fee? Because it takes the same amount of time to process you know, a 4,000 square foot home as it does a 1,000 square foot home. So rather than being a percentage of the taxable value, can it just be an admin fee of $25?

I think according to MTA, I think it's got to be a percentage. It can be a half percent. Yeah, you can adjust the percentage. And you can't go over it. Right.

I don't think it's. And that would be a question for our legal counsel. I couldn't give you that either.

To me, it's like it takes the same amount to process everybody's tax bill.

I think the idea behind it is that equitable that someone with a million dollar house has to pay the same fee for someone who has a $250,000 house.

And I would say that's true. I pay more taxes than somebody, but it still takes the same amount of manpower to process my taxes as somebody else's. So I would say that's where the equity comes in your tax bill. but the admin fee feels like it doesn't take any more to process somebody.

You're trying to make the tax system fair.

I guess I'm just, I don't, I don't agree with that. So I would say if we were moving at some point towards a motion, I would ask that the admin fee be a separate motion from the millage rate. So, so that we can have a fair, on both of these costs.

I agree.

And if Jean's right that it has to be a percentage, does that defeat the question?

I don't love that. I think that that adds more than, I think that potentially adds more than reasonable to a decent portion of our township in terms of an admin fee. So if we were willing to look at a half a percent, you might have my attention again, but I would rather see that be a flat fee if possible.

When Justin put out these numbers, and I guess just looking at this since PowerPoint, because I didn't see it through the finance committee, but I guess I would go back to Jim and John, maybe even Gary, and the people who are on the prior boards, and say I guess it surmises that when we cut rates in 2019, that number one, we didn't realize that the EU net was going to go away. And number two, we didn't realize that revenue sharing was going to be cut every year. And number three, the ARPA dollars probably were the reason why we decided it was a good time to cut rates because we have this big surplus of dollars coming in that, hey, we have this dollars we have to use, have to spend, it's going to cover a number of the different things that we would have normally done out of our general fund, but now we don't have to because we have ARPA dollars. Well, three big things are gone. and going backwards I know we also take from our rainy day fund every year and at what rate and how long will that last that if we don't raise rates will we draw from the rainy day fund and also one day Justin goes guys there's nothing left in the rainy day fund and we should maybe keep at least a year's worth of expenditures in the rainy day fund So the rainy days funds gone and also we're sitting with our hands tied again. I don't want to run into another situation like we did with the water rates that we didn't raise rates for seven years because why not? But we absorbed so many different rate increases and we didn't raise rates and all of a sudden we had to raise rates probably an abnormal amount, not once but twice and who knows what Wyoming is going to do to us again and have to raise them again. And then it looks like we're gouging. So I really do think that we need to be proactive. I like Jim's idea of the .45 to stay the lowest on the kid on the block being the smallest number. I like that thought process. But whether it's this board or the next board or the next board, I think somebody down the road is going to say, probably pretty smart that those guys did that. Because our costs aren't going down. We know that from everywhere, whether it be homework, our businesses. the township, things are more expensive. It costs more to live and it costs more to buy insurance. It costs more to pay our employees. It costs more to, I mean, you name it, everything costs more. And I don't think it's abnormal to say, hey guys, I mean, There's a golf adage, we played the front nine, okay, we're going to the back nine now, and we need a couple extra strokes because you're a much better golfer than you thought you said you were. But I think we just need to go back and say, we did it. We got through a five-year, six-year period of time because we have extra funding coming in. We had extra dollars coming in. That's gone now. Now we need to go back and go back to the normal side of it and say, here's where we should be. And whether it's 2.70, fine, let it roll. If it gets to the point where all of a sudden we've got a surplus down the road, then we can go cut it back. But I don't see that happening. I don't see us going backwards only because things are not going to get cheaper.

Is 0.45 just a random number to stay at the lowest rate, or has there been any sort of extrapolation of like can we look into the future to say if we if the fund balance has been decreasing year over year and here's what we can see in terms of our pattern of budgets it really needs to be x in order to replenish that fund balance you know what i mean like is there is there there's got to be a calculation i just don't know if we're we can run it and if we have

Going back to trying to look at the budgets and how much we really spent and analyze, like you were saying, it's really hard to do the way that we budget, but... Do you think 0.45 is enough?

Or is it just a number because we know we have to increase and it sounds good for a little bit, but is it actually the right number?

I think, this is just me speaking, right? I think it's an incremental... move that you could I would only feel good about that in terms of addressing the true number like you're seeing the true number if we had an admin fee as well because I think the combination of the two would be sufficient if it was standing on its own I don't think it'd be enough so 2.5 what's that going to get us to say I mean we're talking about this but anybody know what that number is right I think it was calculated 700 some thousand 2.70

So if you went to roughly for every quarter mil is roughly about 750,000, roughly. So if you doubled that, took a little bit back, so it would probably be 1.4. It's going to be in the ballpark. So if you went, instead of going up a half percent, like 0.5 and went up 0.45, it would probably roughly bring in 1.4.

I don't have that number. I was looking at a point going to 2.75 because that's why I brought up the lack of revenue sharing and the additional fire is about 1.8, 1.9 million. 0.50 additional raises about 1.7. If we had the 1% ad fee, we'll be back what we're losing. And in addition to the fire department covering our fire department and the loss of revenue sharing, I think adding 0.45 plus the 1% will get us there this year. And I'll caveat with that this year, because next year it might have to be revisited again. But I think 0.45 and the 1% will get us where we're at with what we've lost and what we're spending for fire.

So are you talking, Jim, are you talking, I'm a little confused, you're talking, we're at 2.25 now, and you're talking about adding .4, like almost another half percent then, so you're gonna be closer to two. 2.7.

Two point seven.

Two point seven zero. I thought your total number, you wanted to be close to two and a half. No. I misheard that then.

Okay, thank you. I agree with Kevin, except maybe it's golf analogy, but otherwise. The smartest thing though for us politically is to do nothing. That's the smartest thing. And we probably have enough revenue there we could squeak by. The next board that comes on will have a nightmare. And a lot of it would be our fault because of poor planning and not getting some of these bills taken care of. And given the tools, you know, we're fortunate to have these guys. And they need the tools in order to get this stuff done. And we are so far behind everybody else. And we're proud of that, and we should be. And this is built on the shoulders of other boards for decades, because they have been very, very conservative. And the staff we've hired, they work incredibly hard, incredibly hard. And we get a real bang for our buck out of everyone that works here. But there's so many things that are coming up. And when Kevin mentioned about Life EMS, we had them for 50 years. What an incredible change for us financially. And then just the growth that we're experiencing here. I agree with Jim. I would support that type of increase. And both Jim and I voted to reduce it a few years ago because it worked. It made sense at that time. And now to be good stewards, and this is going to be tough for us, and we will take a lot of heat if we go up. But as Justin had mentioned, and he worded this better, but it's almost like we've been taking care of the schools and Ottawa County, doing their paperwork, and it's consuming our people. And this last election, just the election responsibilities. Now, we've hired an election person. We didn't used to have that. We're being buried in extra responsibilities. And to help us to grow for the future, for good planning, we're still going to be the cheapest around. I felt for years we were being taken advantage on this administrative fee. But no one was brave enough. To really, I hate to say that because we've had wonderful people work for us. But Justin made a lot of phone calls and went after some people and this is where we're at. I think we need to support him. And I think they need to be paying for our people to be doing a lot of this work for them. And the average person does not know that 7% of all their taxes is what runs this township. They have no idea. I have people asking, why aren't you helping the schools with some of your extra money? They're in incredibly good shape. Incredibly good shape. And the same thing with Ottawa County. And we had a half a mill here that passed for Ottawa County for the roads, and there was no opposition to it. And they said we got the bang for our buck. I want to believe that. But I sure liked it when Gary said to them, what kind of representation do we have on your board? And it's zero. And I applied. I was turned down. And I was willing to do it. But we don't have that representation. But I do think, and I said this to you before, I think we've gained a lot of respect. And I think that's because many of you are making many, many phone calls And Jim is going to these meetings, and Gary, and with Justin and Andy, things have changed. We've had a paradigm shift here at the township in a very positive way, and we've got the right crew here right now that can really lead us into the future. The smartest thing for us is to not raise it. That's the smartest thing, I'm telling you. The most responsible thing for us to do, and we're going to take a whole bunch of heat, is to raise it. I think we should raise it.

I think you raise the rate and add the admin fee, not so we can put more money in the bank. I think you raise the rate and add the admin fee so you can take less money out of the bank. Because right now we're borrowing every year for ourselves. Yes. And that number is going away too, because again, It just like the ARPA dollars, just like the you know that Ottawa County changed there and adding firemen. Those are things we didn't see. We see this it's coming OK and by if we keep borrowing from our rainy day fund, it's not going to be there anymore. So we have to stop borrowing from ourselves. And so we can keep a healthy rainy day fund and be able to, you know, be responsible going forward.

What is your suggestion then, Kevin?

I guess being the same boat as Jim, 0.45 and the 1% admin fee.

0.45 added to our...

So take from 225 to 2.7.

Maybe you give a counterpoint. You alluded earlier to the idea of but maybe leaving it alone. What are your thoughts?

You know, I mean, I understand our responsibility to future boards and, you know, looking ahead. So I do agree that it probably needs to change, although I like Kelly's idea of a flat fee for the admin fee, not a percentage.

So I kind of think that.

What would be your thoughts on a flat rate?

What does the MTA say? I want to know my thoughts. I mean, is that something that's...

I just kind of tried to look it up on my phone, but it's kind of hard to get everything, but you just can't go over 1%. I probably asked the right question. But you can do a flat fee on certain parts of admin fees, but I've got to get right down to nitty-gritty. It's not a very good place to do it right now.

Thank you for coming. Didn't pass her bedtime.

Is there a motion on the table? No, there's not yet. I was just looking. It's all done in percentage. but I'm not here to give a legal opinion, but I was trying to look at it as well, Gene. I didn't obtain a motion, and this is a motion to tentatively approve. This is not, obviously, the 28th year yet. So, and I think there was a request by Kelly. I think there's... two different motions here potentially one would relate to the budget as as revised in discussion tonight as well as the millage rate brought into that same motion and then i think it was requested by kelly that the idea of an admin fee be addressed separately if i have that right i that would be my request yeah yeah which I think that's fine. You guys have an issue with splitting those? I think it ought to be split anyways. It's really not part of the budget.

So just for clarification, are you on item 12 or item 13 agenda?

Actually, we just moved to 13. But before I do that, are people ready for the calling of a motion and moving on?

Well, I got one more. Well, I guess that goes. It's under 13 or not. I guess that's under 13. I got a question down there.

I'm okay with combining them. I think we need a full amount. But we can make it separate.

Anybody else have strong feelings one way or the other? Okay. I think we can separate them if that's all right. Okay, so there's proposed language for a motion under 13. Does anybody wish to make that motion subject to the changes that have been made on the record tonight? I'll move that. Moved by Gary. Support. Supported by Kevin.

And that motion is to make the adjustments to our budget as discussed and to make the millage rate increase of 0.45.

Thank you for clarifying that. Yes. Thank you. Yes.

There's a little bit of discussion on that. The township superintendents authorize set wages and all that kind of thing. The next paragraph, appropriations de maximum authorized to occur expenditures. Then it says the fiscal officer shall exercise supervision. Who is our fiscal officer? Does that have to be spelled out a little bit better so that It's Eugene. It's like we got a lot of language in a lot of our things that just, you know, it's not really spelled. It's like, okay. But should that be more specific or is that fine?

It's fine. And then Tim, our new finance director, will also have oversight of it too. So this is the maximum amount this board can spend in 2027 per line item. So as we get towards the end of the year is we have projects that come and go. If we have to increase the budget per line item, because we can't even go $1 over, we have to do a budget amendment. I have a couple coming here in the next couple months because of different items that we've purchased. So that's a normal budgetary process.

Other discussion, further discussion? Okay, hearing none, this is a resolution and we'd have a roll call vote on this.

Okay, I'll call roll. DeWitt?

Yes.

Grassman? Yes. Kelly?

Yes.

Kuyper is yes. Schwamm?

Yes.

Feldenk? Yes. Wierenga?

Yes.

All in favor?

Thank you, so that's tentative, and we'll take it up at the next meeting. Now separately, the idea of an admin fee, as has been explained tonight, related to the cost of the collection of taxes and assessment and so on related to that, you gave the subcategories, Justin, I'm forgetting that 1015 here, how to articulate those, but the various costs you articulated earlier that we spend, that we don't near cover, that admin fee would be designed to cover those things. So is there a motion as to whether to implement an admin fee? And I guess, would this be a tentative? Tentative.

Yeah. And then I'll look for legal opinion if we can. And I'll try to have two proposals at the next board meeting, one for 1% and one for like a fee per parcel. And I want to see if that's legal. I can look into that.

All right. So it's not going to be adopted much like the budget, but it will be tentatively. Approved, perhaps, and then brought to the next meeting. Yes. All right. Is there a motion on the admin fee question? So moved. Be specific as to the percentage.

So I'm going to move that we add a 1% admin fee or per parcel fee according to what legal allows us, and that would be approved immediately. in our next meeting.

And that next meeting would necessarily, if it were to be, if it were to go the direction of a per parcel fee, we would necessarily have discussion and debate about it. We would, we'd have to, but either or, we've got to, but I wouldn't. Is that satisfactory to you as far as how you phrase it?

Yeah, you shared that concern. With a per parcel fee, could we end up with less than we're collecting right now?

per parcel. So we have roughly, I think, 19,000 parcels, and then we would have to come up with a fee per parcel of what it costs. So I think the average tax bill is roughly around $4,000, so it would be $40 per parcel. So I think, Kelly, you brought up $25. That's what you felt comfortable with, or that was the number floating around, or?

or half a percent roughly then right yeah option two would be like a half percent so we can look at that too all right but for purposes of the motion as gary's articulated that is there a second for that support all right moved and supported a discussion does everyone understand i don't want you to have lost okay um but

I want to clarify this motion, though, and this is why I wanted them separate in the first place, was because I didn't want too much language in one motion that sort of pigeonholed me, because now the motion on this floor is to tentatively implement an administrative fee of 1% or a flat fee. By that very nature, I'd can't vote for that because I don't agree with 1%, but I would potentially agree with the flat fee. That's my struggle is that we're not, you know, it's like there's just a lot of, without saying or what the flat fee is, it feels too ambiguous for me to support it. And maybe that's okay.

Maybe that's- That's why it had to be decided in two weeks.

Yeah.

Because we're not, we are moving forward to see what we can do. But we will decide in two weeks whether we're going to adopt either one of them.

So it could be half percent or a percent or a...

I don't know, but right now we don't have enough information, but tonight we have to make a decision we're going to add admin.

Got it. Yep, that's fair then.

So would the motion then be to tentatively add an administration fee based on findings?

Yeah.

There we go.

Yeah, based on findings in two weeks.

Is that a revised motion?

It sounds different.

It sounds very different.

How about... How about this? Let's first of all have a clean motion, if you think this appropriate, about whether to implement an admin fee at all. And then if we see we've got a great consensus there, then we could move to a secondary motion and say the avenues which will be considered would be either a percentage fee or something in the way of a flat fee to be determined through and debate at this next meeting.

Okay, so I don't know how that works.

So the motion would be that we would adopt an admin fee.

So let's have you withdraw your motion. Yeah. All right, so you want to withdraw your motion? Yes. Okay, I'll make a new motion. What's that?

I'll withdraw my support. All right, go ahead.

So I'll make a motion that we look into adding an admin fee.

I'm going to clarify that. Help me out with that. Is there a motion on the subject of an admin fee, whatever that may end up being? Yes. In other words, you may just be like, I don't want any admin fee, or I want one, but it's got to be the right one. So let's have an up or down first on whether to add an admin fee. Yeah, an admin fee, right. Is there a second to that, that pure question? Support. Okay. Any discussion, debate on just the question of whatever it might be? It could be small, it could be the maximum, whatever. Is there a... a readiness to vote on the question of I like the idea of an admin fee or I don't. Yes. All right. So this doesn't have to be roll call. So all in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? All right. So now the secondary motion. Go ahead, Gary, if you want to do that.

Secondary motion would be that we look into whether what, it's going to be tough to do because we don't have enough information. We need a motion. to look into an admin fee of either a percentage or a per parcel to be decided in two weeks. That would give us two weeks to get information, and then next time we can decide on what percentage that would be or per parcel would be. Is that fair enough? Or per tax bill? Pardon?

Well, tax bills are per parcel, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, every parcel gets a tax bill.

Yeah. I mean, I want to be very clear too. I mean, make whatever motion you want. I mean, I think it's a reasonable assessment if there is a majority here who just flat out supports 1% make the motion. That's a fair thing to test the waters on. I don't, you know, you said it best right when we got elected to this board, Jim, it was, you know, if all of us felt the same way, there's no point in having seven of us be here. And so I don't think, I think it's great that we all have a good working relationship and we wanna work really hard to come to a consensus before we make a motion, but sometimes a motion just needs to be made if you feel strongly about one and I don't have to agree with it, that's okay.

I'll make a motion that we add a 1% admin fee. Is there a second?

I support. I think it's a good idea, though, to just see what those numbers are going to be. We've been talking about it all night. To do $25 or $50, what is 1%? Well, my understanding is getting it on the books.

Getting the tentative motion even at 1% on the record puts some sort of placeholder in for actual formal budget adoption. We still have the ability to look into it further and change it to half a percent or a flat fee depending on what we come up with. That's how I'm viewing this.

We'll phrase it the same way we did the budget. You could call it a tentative adoption, if you will, and there's a majority.

We already know we're going to do some kind of admin fee.

Yeah, fair enough.

Do we need a motion then to figure out what that is? A motion is on the floor. I'm not sure it's been seconded.

There's a motion that's on the floor that's been seconded to tentatively adopt a 1% administrative fee and that in two weeks, much like with the budget, we will make a final determination.

Is that going to give us enough time? Because that's going to be final vote. Yeah. And things got to be.

I'll counsel with legal.

Because you only got a few days to get it in by the end of September.

So I have to get the L4029 in two weeks from tonight. I will get it signed by the clerk, the supervisor, and then send it in and it will meet the cutoff. If you go past the next week or two weeks, we can adjust the millage that's locked in. So that's why we do the budget right now, not in two months at the end of the year.

Okay, I'm going to call for a vote on the motion that is on the floor right now, which is a tentative adoption of an administration.

Are you going to do a roll call vote or are you going to do a voice vote?

Let's take a roll call, sure. Okay.

Wierenga?

Support.

Beldink?

No.

Schwalm?

Yes.

Piper is no. Kelly?

Yes.

Grassman? No. DeWitt?

No.

Four in favor, three against. The motion passes.

Okay. All right. And I expect that both, whether you be in the four camp or the three camp... You listen, debate with an open mind the next time, and it might well be that there's good reason to come around one way or the other. I just want to see the numbers. Yeah, right, exactly. In other words, your no could be a, yeah, I just need more information.

All right, fair enough. I voted yes for the admit fee, but I want to see... break down like Justin said.

At this point here at nearly 10.30 here, we're going to have our second public comment period, item 14, on the agenda tonight. Anyone here tonight wish to address the board on any subject, whether what we just covered or something else that's on your minds, please step forward. Yes, sir. Please identify your name and your street address. And you have up to three minutes. Thank you.

All right, it's going to be a fast three minutes. I brought up a lot of stuff, but initially I walked in and there were some kids in here talking about apologizing for some grass damage apparently. So my name is Randy Van Dyne and I'm at 2448 Tyler Street. uh fourth house west of rosewood school welcome i've addressed it with andy and justin ottawa county road commission ottawa county commissioners uh rosewood school principal everybody the grass that you're talking about that was damaged at the park sounds like you guys didn't like that this is not a dialogue this is your turn they damaged grass uh they've damaged the grass in front of our house because of the cars coming up and picking kids up and according to justin a lot of it is because school of choice is that acceptable to have your yard trashed out because you got cars going through there 20 30 in wet weather just dragging all the mud and crap into your driveway not at all yeah no it is The Ottawa County Road Commission came out and after a lot of arguing, they said that they'd put limestone in would fix it. It's probably made it worse. Any of you that would like to come to my house tomorrow and watch the cars come through and spray all this gravel and mud and limestone in my driveway. The road got broken out because there's no support there. They've dug a trench. If I could show you the pictures. They spread gravel down in front of our driveway, left it, created a safety hazard for me on a motorcycle coming in and out of my driveway, and basically said, screw you, ain't doing nothing. Then they dug it out. They didn't compact it. I'm stepping in mud. The first car came through. There's a big trench. And they've said they're not going to do anything. Justin has said it's an orphan drain situation. It's not a drain issue. They said it's a ditch across the road. We don't have a ditch on our side. It's not a ditch issue. It's traffic coming down that roadway, destroying the grass, creating mud, dragging it into our driveways because we've got all this traffic. It's not on the other side of the road. There's nothing there. We should have pavement. They're talking a pavement, asphalt, 80 bucks a ton or something. A couple thousand dollars, they'd have fixed it. Gary, you said they're doing all these roads in the area, it'd be cheap to do. They should have done it with pavement, done it right up to there, but once I'm done, and the Ottawa County Road Commissioner, Mike and Ken, said, screw you, ain't doing it. So I got to live with this for the rest of the time I'm in Georgetown. I've been here 40 years. So... Nobody's going to take responsibility. Everybody says, it's not mine, it's not mine, it's not mine. Nobody's doing anything. Commissioner out there showing them that water runs down the road. My time's probably up. The water runs down the road right into my neighbor's driveway before it goes into the ditch, and nobody wants to fix it. All the taxes that you're talking, I paid in for over 40 years. I'm not getting anything. You're talking about fire trucks? I served for 26 years for Georgetown Township Emergency Services. We protected our men in blue. Come across an accident, can we help block traffic so you can do your job? Don't need it, so we'll hire some more policemen. This church burned down here. I spent hours in traffic.

Can you put a bow on it just because we got to be fair?

I want to see something that they can come through and put pavement in our road, be done with this stuff. Come to our house tomorrow. Well, or 3.30, watch the cars come through and make a mess out of it.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

Please. Thank you. The police officer was out there saying, I wouldn't want that in my front yard. Everybody said I don't want this mess in front of my front yard.

Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.

2440 Tyler Street, my name's Randy.

And thank you for waiting through a long meeting to have your say.

2448.

Hello, my name's Pete Plowman, 6877 Creek Ridge Court. So I heard a lot of things about the budget. I was going to talk about other things, but man, that budget thing. You guys are managing a $47 million total budget. $47 million. That's a lot. And a lot of those dollars have been decisions you guys have made. You know, the fire department could have went with light EMS, didn't do that. Decided to go with Ottawa County assessing. You know, that's $550,000. You made that decision. You know, we pay that every year. I think the political right thing to do, to coin a phrase from John, is to go over the budget and cut all the things you don't need. Priority one items only. Fire, lease, water and sewer. All those parks, projects, you need to put them all on hold. Maintain the parks where we're at, but don't build anything else. You can strip stuff out, like the crossing guards. That's $140,000 in crossing guards we pay for. The school could do that. HOW ABOUT WE RAISE THE RATES HIGH ENOUGH THAT WE COLLECT TAXES FOR THE SCHOOLS THAT COVER THE $140,000 ON TOP OF OUR ADMINISTRATION FEES WHEN WE TAKE CARE OF THE TAXES? THE OTHER THING IS, IS THAT THE LIBRARY, YOU GUYS SPENT, WHAT, 20 MINUTES TALKING ABOUT BANNERS? WHAT ABOUT THE LIBRARY DOLLARS THAT YOU'RE SPENDING? WHAT, $1.8 MILLION? Gary had a great point talking about the fire department. You got no data. You're making decisions on stuff you have no info on. And it was clear that Gene had no information on it either. He didn't know. So the political correct thing to do is to be cut everything out of your budget before you raise it. And this administration fee, Would you just, you just wanna have a low millage rate so you can tell everybody we have the lowest millage? Is that what we're, why don't you have the kahunas and just raise our millage to three? Because that's where you're at anyway with the administration fee. But you know, you won't do anything. One other point as it relates to fire and the fire department, maybe it's time you look at a hybrid system in that you use life EMS. part of the time to keep the cost down, to keep the trucks from getting driven too hard. Why don't you look at a hybrid system and partnering with LIFE EMS to take on some of the load that we don't have been for yet because you're growing out the fire department as you already told us. So that's gonna be a lot of construction.

Anyone else? Seeing none, we'll close the second public comment period discussion. General information among the board. I'll lead off with that to remind you that to the extent you're able and your schedule would allow, I think our annual employee picnic is Thursday, correct? So 11.30 to 1-ish, anytime you can drop in. And it's a good chance to tell the employees how much you appreciate them.

Anyone else? I just want to say thank you to all of you on the board. At least I've seen Gene wants a budget meeting. And I do appreciate that we went at it this way this year to at least have some good candid conversation, then wait until the last very minute to try to make some decisions. So I do appreciate everybody. like Jim said earlier, coming prepared and having some good discussion on it. Hopefully everybody feels the same way and just can continue on in the years to come. But I just want to say thank you.

All right. Anyone else? Hearing none, is there a motion to adjourn? So moved. All in favor?