Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

All right, Chief Von, you follow Lunch? The unlucky character. Awesome. So, you got to be energized with some special videos. Yeah. Oh, I'll I'll have to follow up on the uh on the video side of things.

Uh so, good afternoon everybody. Um appreciate the time today. Uh so my goal today is really just to give a clear snapshot of where our police department is stands today and the progress we made over the last few months since I've been uh uh appointed to the role of chief and uh where I believe it's important for us to invest in our people and stay ahead of the growth and the expectations of a department and uh and talk about planning responsibly for our future. Um so the agenda for for uh my slides coming up I'll have state of the department some personnel and staffing updates compensation and incentives organizational structure space needs equipment technology and then an update about the uh Northmech magistrate. So as far as the state of the department goes so we'll start here with the uh UCR crime totals. So again UCR is a uniform crime reporting. So these are the reported crimes and it breaks it down more on the next slide um specifically about crimes. And so when you look at our data, we're always looking across a five-year term and and um and evaluating it over a course of the period. So we're not looking at a specific spike or a single year. So the takeaway that I see in our uniform crime reporting is that there's consistency. As you see, we're not seeing dramatic spikes in violent crime. And uh and when we talk about the crime and workload, you can just see that there's trends there rather than us reacting to a single year's worth of data that's uh present in front of you. And then as as you can see on this particular side, 2023 seems to be an anomaly because if you go back 10 years again, you can just kind of see this steady trend with the exception of 2023. Um, I had our uh Kayla Duffy, our crime analyst, go through and look at the 2023 stats, and

she also says, "Hey, nothing really sticks out from 2023 other than that this has had a spike that year." And that's why it's important that we police and staff and put people out there on the road based on trends and not just this spike of of numbers from 2023. So, a single year it could be influenced by short-term things like um staffing shortages could impact this because there is some self-initiated activity that goes with this special enforcement that happens during the year. Maybe we have some sort of a a a drug um specific case that we're working and maybe we've hit things harder one particular year or maybe there's major construction projects and then even having like one or two repeat offenders. Maybe we have somebody that's come to Huntersville and they hit 30 cars one night and then we haven't seen them again for five years. And so that's why it's important that we don't overreact to one year's worth of spikes because then we'll have to overcorrect and and some of those things pull back the reins on on decisions we made can be expensive. So looking this is the breakdown. So, part one crimes, again, you've heard this before and for the two newcomers, these are the serious crimes that are listed there of the uh murder, aggravated assault, forcible rape, robbery. And again, as you look across those um across those numbers, you'll see that the 2023 had the spike, but then you've seen a a gradual down tick of the numbers, but then we look at the five-year pattern. we're on par with what it looks like with that exception of that 2023 stat. And so this this approach of looking across the five years keeps us in more of a uh proactive stance uh as far as our response instead of being reactive and it protects us from making any crazy uh staffing changes.

Part two crimes to the right. I know it's tiny. It's uh broken down uh pretty specific. If there's something there that you'd like for me to specifically cover on this sheet, any questions about any of these stats, please feel free to ask. Um, a couple anomalies that I'll say that stick out on this. Under the part two crimes, you'll see under um, forcible fondling, they had a significant uptick. That was from our one specific investigation with the gentleman that was the at the nail salon. And so you see how one offender can affect the entire year's numbers and why we don't target our efforts on forcible fondling because that's not the trend of the five years. That was one offender that's responsible for more than half of those particular crimes. And so as you look across those crimes, you'll see where they stand. And then overall, even even with my staffing involved, uh staffing shortage that I have right now, our officers are still being proactive and still out there catching the bad guys and and we're still able to get a crime reduction in place. Um that has happened consistently over the last couple of years. And so overall with part one crimes, you see that we're down 5%. And then uh it cut off the part two crimes there at the bottom. It also was down 5%. I don't know if it's on your screen or if it's cut off there or not. I apologize for that. Didn't format. Is there anything on those two particular slides that anybody has any questions on?

What is a frame? Fights. Oh, two kids get in a fight at school. Two people get in a fight with I'm sorry. With the welfare fraud, I see that's on the list because that is housed in Mechburg County. Um Do you get that report? Does that come from Mechanburg County if someone is prosecuted for welfare fraud that lives in Huntersville?

Well, if if um it it just depends because they have jurisdiction over that as well. And so unless it gets directly reported to us, it's not similar to the same circumstances like a child abuse, you know, where it might come in from the county and we get referred that. Some of those things are prosecuted at a different level and and so they aren't necessarily reported to us first. Um a and occasionally they come as a referral, but they have the ability to charge those. So the these would be specifically what was reported to us where you would have to go out like if we I'm sorry, let me not say we. If if it was Oh, no. We You're right.

If it wasn't requested, and I'm speaking in terms of the weapon fraud, that's why I said I can't say we. Um to ask for like a warrant because that does happen with welfare fraud. So, if we were to request a warrant, is that kind of like specifically in how um that's been reported to you all? Yeah. So, you know, I I think that um and as you see, the welfare of fraud hasn't had like a stat in at all at all. And so, um what I would say to that is if if we had taken the report, it would show up here. If if there was a warrant, say the county or state or whoever took out a warrant on the person and we arrested them, that's not going to necessarily be on here.

Ah, okay. Thank you. This is strictly reporting that we have done. Okay. So, I see instances of uh pornography. What exactly? Yeah. So, we have um we have a uh undercover officer that does uh works with CESAM, child sexual exploitation. Okay. And um and so he he gets referrals from Department of Justice or US Marshall Service and then he goes in and does those investigations. And so a lot of the pornography charges come from that um where a lead has come in through some other agency and then we actively pursue it with our undercover officers. Got it. Okay.

Anything else? All right. So again, this is calls for service by year, and this breaks down between citizen uh calls and then officer calls. Again, as you go across the bottom, you can see uh citizen calls. You know, I'm I'm looking at that one and seeing that that we've had a reduction in 911 calls for service. There's a couple reasons for this, I believe. Um, one is is that we've implemented online reporting in the last couple of years where if somebody would have picked up the phone and called 911 and said, "Hey, I want to make a report of um, you know, a fraud, a credit card fraud." Uh, maybe they've gone online and done that report online. This is not going to capture that. And so, you're having to look at both of those sets of statistics to look at both the crimes that we have reported to us and then look at the the trends that are here on these slides. um and try to marry the two together because we can't I can't make crime happen. I can't make somebody call the police and file a report. And so the red the red bars across the bottom are the number of times that somebody picked up the phone and called 911 requesting an officer. And then uh the officer initiated calls for service. Again, you've seen a decline there. I've got you saw it. I've got 28 openings. And so um that we were really impacted from 24 to 25. That was our biggest drop in in loss of officers. And you'll see on my recruiting slides coming up about how that is starting to stabilize and and the recruiting coming back up. And so on the officer initiated side of things, I see the decreases there, but you know, a couple other things that go along with it. the intricacy of the cases that are coming in. The people officers are having to spend longer amounts of time on some of these uh cases that involve um uh artificial intelligence or frauds,

and it's taking more of their time and effort to get into investigating those cases. Again, I'm looking at the five-year trend, and overall, we're down citizen contact and um officer contact. This is a top 10 calls for service in Huntersville. 40% of our calls for service of officers coming in are fall under one of these categories. You see the top is check the welfare. That's hey, I haven't heard from uh mom or dad in a couple days. I need you to go by the house. I don't live there. I need your help to go by and check the welfare of that person. I see someone standing on the side of the road. They look like they need help. An officer goes by and checks the welfare on the side on the side of the road with that person. So again, that that's every time somebody picked up the phone and asked for us to help them uh check on somebody. Any questions on this?

Yes, ma'am. Would um what about mobile crisis unit calls? Does HPD still handle that or

Yeah. So um a couple years ago, we have our we implemented our own victim response team or victim advocacy unit. I don't have their specific stats in this particular presentation. Um, but what I will say is that they have been worth every penny. Um, they have done a great job of coming in and identifying underlying factors in domestic abuse cases. Um, we saw an uptick about a year ago. We started seeing an uptick in domestic violence calls or uptick in the in the actual charges. And a lot of that was because of people feeling empowered by our advocates, you know, helping them come and come forward and file those reports. Um, I feel for certain, I have four right now. I feel for certain in the next 24 months I'll need to make that five. I don't need to do it this year, but they are um they're working their tails off as far as that goes. We will call mobile crisis after hours out of Charlotte. um we'll have them come up and help us with calls for service. But anytime we can get our advocates involved here in house, they are more intimate with the specifics of the crime and our the way we the Huntersville way of doing things. And um so it's helpful with that. I I can get you those stats of how often they were used this last year, but I don't have it in this.

Um okay, the next one is on traffic crashes. Again, we're trending down on traffic crashes uh with a peak in 2024. Again, I think some of this is attributed to the fact that we do very proactive traffic enforcement, a lot of education. Um, you know, I have somebody on my end of things now doing full-time social media, uh, that's been absolutely killing it and, uh, getting the education piece out of it. And so, uh, Trot and his folks, there's engineering, there's education, there's enforcement that all go into traffic safety. And I think all of that has really stepped up over the last year. Um, not to mention that there is a lot of traffic. And so, um, even the severity of crashes is probably lower than it's been in the past. Again, I'm looking at the five-year trend, and for 2025, we're a little lower than overall. Last year we had eight um eight traffic fatalities. And the reason um that this is again this is an anomaly. Um we're probably a two to three a year average of fatalities. In fact, 2024 we didn't have any. And so um you can just see that it it is there's no rhyme or reason to these things. Uh, I included a little snippet summary of of what happened where on your slide that you can see a lot of crossing over the center line, a lot of inattention. Um, and when you look at our stats, there was it's said one homicide. It act that we have, it's actually as a result of the investigation from one of these traffic fatalities and that we were able to charge the person in that case with the secondderee murder charge. So, when you see that on our UCR reporting, it says one But it was out of this fatality. It was not uh it was not a act of violence. Uh outside of that, again,

all over the place, all over town, all hours of the day. There's just there is no there is no predictability to this piece of uh this piece of our job. Any questions on the fatalities? There was PD road and sample road. There's two. Is that I heard Badies Ford and what uh sample? Yes. Is that Are we seeing as a trouble spot or is that just

No, it's a nice It's a nice straightaway and the two you see two there. One's one's listed uh one was going south and was at a high rate of speed and and ran off the road. The second one that's listed in April was somebody that was fleeing a hit and run crash going north. You know, they don't uh you know, neither one was any particular instance and the site distance is so nice and straight at Batties Ford and Sample

that people tend to pick up speed through that area. Um but uh we believe in the instance in January that it was health related on top of the fact that they were in this crash and died. We believe that there were some health issues there at the same time. So just a perfect storm.

Great. Thanks. Next one, 911 calls. From placing a 911 call to arrival on scene, uh the red is the amount of time that it takes dispatch to dispatch a 911 call to us. Somebody picks up the phone, calls 911, and based on the priority of the incident. You can see priority one through nine across the bottom. One is obviously our most pressing case that we need to get to immediately. your robberies, crashes with injuries, what have you. Um, we are up like eight seconds from last year to this year. I don't have last year's numbers on here because it would just clutter up the screen worse than it is. Uh, but for priority one calls for 2025, uh, from the time to dispatch is 51 seconds from the 911 picking up the phone, taking the call, and dispatching it to an officer. This is an average. And then on average, it's taking the officers about and half minutes uh to get to the scene. And so you're looking at a total of about six and a half minutes response time. Priority two calls are you're eating lunch, you need to put your food down and you need to go uh and go answer this call now, but it's non-emergent. And then as you go down the line, you can see based on our response times how h how it's prioritized. And our dispatchers do this for us. Um, a lot most of you have heard this before, but the dispatchers prioritize the calls for us. Um, and the supervisor based on the facts that they give out on the call, they can decide if they want to escalate the response for the officer in order to speed that time up. Anything any questions on 911 dispatch?

So, dispatch on priority 7 to Does that mean it takes it took him 20 minutes to get answered? That took him 20 minutes to dispatch the call. Got it. That this is I I don't like the wording. I put dispatch delay on that. I'm I was trying trying to account for that's the time it took from the dispatcher to answer the call and the first call to go out on the radio to an officer. Okay. So, they're not on the phone for 20 minutes. They're No, no, no, no. They they have taken that call and it's now sitting in a queue waiting for somebody to answer. These are going to be like our animal control calls. Okay.

Chief, do you recall how much longer uh what is our u contract with CMPD about dispatch? How frequently do we update that? Yeah, this last one I believe we did three year. No, I think we did five years. I'm I'm I'm I'm having trouble recalling that piece. We're in year two of whatever our most recent uh renewal was. And so we either have a year left or another two two or two years left. So, there have been times before when boards have said, "Why don't we do our own dispatch?" And so, there's a cost and a PAP, primary public response, public safety access point. Uh there there's there are reasons why we don't just snap our fingers and get into that records management and and it's very involved.

Yeah. A couple things that I could get on my soap box with this is back in the early 2000s an NC 911 government organization was established and uh they decided then every time somebody picks up a phone and calls 911 that particular jurisdiction is going to get so much money every time they get this call. And those those primary public safety access points were established in early 2000s. And so when you look on your phone bill and it says 911 fee, that is going to a bank of money that was predetermined to go to specific locations uh across the state. We can't go back and ask for that now. And so any opportunity for us to do this, we would always be a secondary uh public safety access point, which means somebody's going to call 911. 911's going to pick up the call and they're going to have to transfer it to one of our dispatchers if we had one. and then they are going to have to put the call in and they're going to have to dispatch the call. So you can see the delays across that the dilemma with it. Um are there times that people are on hold with 911 at Charlotte? Absolutely. Would there be times if we had our own people in our office answering these calls also? Absolutely. And so when you look at the greater picture of the the record system that uh we're using, we have access to their uh helicopter which probably would come anyhow, but we have we have immediate access to these things uh because of being on the same radio channel and uh having access to those resources. But the short answer is is we can't have the the dispatch center primarily be us because that was established nearly 20 years ago. Um and there's there's no going back now. I think they were going more for a regional type thing back then and it's

they want to consolidate consolidate. Yep. And and you're not uncomfortable with being dispatched by Charlotte not and occasionally you're able to recruit an officer and there's less training time because they're already familiar with the dispatches done it and has dispatch but it a long time ago and they were able to keep it and we used to be were a part of that many years ago. U but it made sense um due to location and all the other things the chief talked about for Huntersville to break apart from Cornelius and actually go with CMPD.

Yeah. If if it was ever entertained up front, it would be millions for us to move back to have Cornelius helping us. But you're going to run into the same thing that we're if if the concern is I'm on hold with 911. that concern doesn't change. Um, and the fact that we've already been with Charlotte and have this relationship with them. Um, I don't think there's any reason to break that at this point. Very happy with the service that we get from them.

Uh, lastly, before I get into the fun stuff, uh, so this is just I put this up about on an average day what's happening in Huntersville. Just some kind of quick facts about what's happening on each day. Um, you know, again, I'll go back to I I I hear people say, "Hey, you know, the the numbers aren't what actually are happening in Huntersville." Well, I can't, you know, we we can't report stuff that's not happening and we can't do reports for things when people don't call the police. And so, I guess my my caveat to this slide is that, you know, if somebody needs the police, uh, calling 911 is more advantageous than taking to a platform somewhere and saying, "Hey, I saw this illegal thing happen." um because we don't police from that. We don't police from uh from any of the social media platforms. It's important for people to call 911 and and get an officer out there or whatever is whatever is the case there. Any questions before I move on from our stats?

Um we see a lot of screenshots that come from that citizen app. They get emailed to us a lot. What's the accuracy on that app?

Yeah. Um Commissioner Charles and I actually talked about that briefly on his um his top 20 radio show that he has. So the the thing with uh the thing with Citizen any of those apps, they're all driven by some other source. You know, they're not getting their information straight from Charlotte dispatch. Some of them are s sourcing their information from radio traffic that it might be picking up from a police scanner and AI is involved with that somehow. Don't know. That's that's a Larry. I don't understand how that piece works.

Um the problem is is that we we don't um we don't supply any information to that platform. If and if you're specifically referring I I'll use citizen as the example since you're referring to that. So say somebody on New Year's Eve calls in and says, "Hey, someone's shooting shooting handguns down the street." And you're like, "Well, it's New Year's Eve." No, fourth of July. How about Fourth of July? Hey, you know, someone's shooting a gun down the street. And you're like, "Okay, it's it's Fourth of July, you know. fireworks. More than likely that citizen app does not correct itself. And so what happens is a a call comes out from an officer to respond. They respond to a shots fired call. They get to that call and it's somebody shooting off fireworks. It is not a shots fired call. The officer corrects that mistake in the system and then clears it and moves on. Somebody opens Citizen app the next day. Oh my gosh, there are shots fired at uh you know on Gilead Road by the post office or whatever it is. Um there there's no opportunity there for us to engage with that. And so what I always tell people is like for the most accurate information about specific crimes, please come to our social media so you can get those things. And those apps, they're they are what they are. You know, they're they're worth it. You know, if it's letting people know about crashes and maybe a road's closed, but um actually looking at that and thinking the world is on fire and we've got all these people shooting guns everywhere every day during Fourth of July. You know that the accurate information is coming from this and coming from these slides and things that we'll be posting like all these slides will go up tomorrow uh with our crime stats.

AI goes out to the internet and aggregates things and pulls them. So it could be the call is a shots fired thing and then someone also puts it on Facebook or next door and it then it pulls it together and makes that thing. But it says right across the top, this posting is a, you know,

and sometimes it has radio traffic tied to it also where something has captured the police talking on the radio. Um, but again, I'll go back to say like HPD has always kicked butt on communication with, hey, we need people to lock down. We need this to happen. Um, you experience it with your school. like we respond quick and we alert the people that need to be alerted and then when we need to alert everybody else then we get to that point but the people that are immediately impacted by whatever's happening you know we're on that fairly quickly. So when we get these kind of emails we we should I mean say the best way to verify this is to go to the HPD social

come to our social media they can they can heck they can call in and ask to speak to a watch commander if they saw something that that concerning they can call into our non-emergency number and ask to speak to somebody or we have a police services at huntersville.org if somebody had a question that goes out to all of our supervisors and so yeah the opportunity is certainly there uh for followup to be done if if somebody wanted to do that. Do we have shot detector? No we don't because we get a lot of like car backfires, fireworks and then some places in the town of Frable you are allowed to legally shoot a gun where they live. So correct, like by the farm, lots of construction, lots of equipment, boring, lots of lots of things.

Yeah. Um that make noise that sound like fire alarms. Yep. So Chief, you mentioned kick. I want to compliment you guys. One, the social media, the fun posting you guys do. You mentioned the crimes and things that nature, but that right there, I give kudos to who's been doing that. It brings a lot of fun and humor. make you guys seem like you really are human. But another thing I want to do is your community outreach department. Um phenomenal job and they do things such as

active shooter training that makes our community safe and we don't look at those kind of things. We don't give compliments for that but they're doing a phenomenal job. And also uh we like to travel and when you travel you can contact the police department say hey I want someone to patrol my community or my home. Um, I salute you guys for a job well done.

Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, anybody can go on and do those things. Vacation requests. I mean, all that stuff is available readily available on our website that they can get to it. Let me let me keep going because I don't want to I could eat into time next. Michael Barrett is the gentleman that I hired a little over a year ago. Um, no, not even quite a year ago. Uh, summer of last year. doing our social media stuff. Um he come came to us with uh from print newsp print uh media and did some TV work. Um and the social media world is completely new to him and I just let go of the rain said have at it and he is he has he's been doing an amazing amazing job with that. So um that's engagement is important to us. good, good, bad, indifferent, you know, as long as somebody's looking. Um, one, they're not they're making fun of us and then they're not making fun of somebody else and then two, it gets our message out there. So, when we sandwich those stalking posts, we're talking to uh we were talking earlier about when we sandwich some of these serious posts between the funny ones, it helps getting the engagement, getting the word out there. When we're looking for somebody, uh, there's more eyes on it to get that information to us. Chief Vaughn, I know I don't know, you may bring this up, you may not, but we've gotten some concerns about Burkedale. Do you have any updates

about anything that

Yeah, I don't have any slides about Burkedale, but uh uh we certainly have had some calls up there. Um so this week, uh this past week, myself and Commissioner Corals and Commissioner Walsh went and met. I took my uh patrol captain Ryan Smith and Deputy Chief, uh Sean Freeston. Uh we all went up to Burkedale this week to just kind of sit down and say like let's let's figure out a game plan. Um you know there's positives and negatives to to what's happening up there. What we're not seeing is uh an influx of crime. Um clearly people still still feel safe being in that area. Do we have a large number of kids and teenagers hanging out? Absolutely. Um it is it is a multi-use facility that has some expectation that some of that is going to happen. Um the the important piece of this is looking at the crimes that are actually being reported to us and not seeing any. Are we getting calls about people pushing and shoving and being teenagers? Yes, we absolutely are. Um uh we also are trying to work with the the people the teenagers that are hanging out there trying to figure out like what what's an alternative. you know, we're they feel safe coming to Burkdale.

I mean, that's that's not a bad problem to have. Um, and so I think over the coming weeks, um, we're going to continue to work on this partnership with Burkedale and kind of delineate some of the expectations of private property versus public property, where the police have the ability to do stuff and where we don't, where they have ability to do things and where they don't, and uh, kind of come as a unified front at this uh, especially like leading up to spring break and try to address some of these things. But um, disturbance calls, yes, we had them up there. Um, uh, we have had no other we have had no crimes actually reported. You know, the police go up there and either the kids all scatter, um, and run and leave or whatever.

Um, but, you know, actual assaults, I think we've had one in the last couple of months has been reported to us. Um, another piece that's troubling to this that I think in a couple weeks I'll get out in front of, uh, in front of a bunch of cameras is, uh, the fact that people are sticking their kids in Ubers and sending Ubers up there and just dropping them off. And so, um, just kind of working through this education piece of you can all the way down to a 13-year-old can get in an Uber. I didn't know this until a week ago myself. Yeah, they have 13 or something.

13 and you can request an Uber to come get you and take you wherever you want. And so, as long as a parent has approved it in the app or something. And so I think the education piece is important that as long as we continue to be proactive with it and don't just let this broken window fester, um I think we will be fine. Um and and it's the it's at the forefront right now and and uh and we'll get a handle of it and work with Burkedale to make sure that it continues to be the safe place that it is already. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Yeah, absolutely. the meat and potatoes, personnel and staffing. So, this is uh this is really the most important part of my presentation and I, you know, I'm no making no qualms about it. Like, we have openings. Um 28 uh and I made sure I got with Laura beforehand to make sure our numbers were the same, but they are. We do have 28 openings right now. 13 of these positions were approved by within the last couple years by previous board. So, we're talking that we added 10 bodies a couple years ago. We did last July one, we added three more bodies in anticipation of trying to to uh um staff elementary school resource officers. I have some update about that coming up as well. And so, we're we're just trying to you we're trying to adopt the staff that we already you know trying to get staff in the building that we've already adopted. So, this particular piece you saw, I'm I will be asking for um a couple more positions. Doesn't sound great with 28 openings, but you'll understand my reasoning shortly. Um the good news is is that I believe that recruiting is stabilizing. We have uh as you can see here, we got seven cadets starting rookie school February the 16th. Um that is not part of that 28 that is open up there. So, that will come off of that 28 number. I've got two lateral officers that will be starting by February 16th. And so again, those two will come off of that number. Um I also am not accounting for any of my nonsworn or what I refer to as my professional staff in these openings. On on um on Miss Kaggel's presentation, she has that we have seven uh civilian openings or professional openings. Right now, four of those are are are nonsworn civilian crash investigators. All four of those have conditional offers of employment out right now and I hope to start them uh by the end of February to

uh where they can start their training and so these numbers don't count that. I have a couple of records tech positions from promotions and one resignation and so none of that is listed here. A couple of the things that I would that I really want to point out here though is in 2024 we had a total of 262 applications for the entire year and with a with a success rate of under 5% of people making it through our process. Um you can see that the the laws of averages don't line up. Like we just are not going to be able to fill our coffers uh with 262 applications. Hey Chief, just quick clarity on the seven BL cadetses. Are they starting school in February or they're coming here in February?

They're starting school. School. Okay. Thank you. Yes. BL is basic law enforcement training and that's the rookie school uh for new police officers. So in 2025 from January till the end of August we had received 248 applications. So they were slightly trending up and then you see from September to December we received 256 applications during that last quarter. Uh what happened that last quarter?

Oh that's right. my last board really took care of supporting our police and helped me get my salary up where I could be more competitive in our market. And so what you saw is a drastic uptick in applications. And specifically from what's not on this slide is from uh January to September uh we had only received five applications out of that total of lateral interest and from September to the end of the year we had another 18 lateral uh potentials apply with us during that last quarter of the year which is huge um because the more laterals that we can get uh the better. just breaks down again uh some of the other um I'm sorry I just messed up on that number. So we had 18 total through September and then we had 32 lateral applications between September and December and that's a part of these numbers that you see listed here. So I I also showed a breakdown of the uh resignations. Again this is just the sworn positions. So um but we did have a retirement. We had the unfortunate uh deaths of officer Broadway and Officer Harvey. And then we had seven resign and then you can see the breakdown of that of two went to private sector jobs for more money. Uh four went to other local law enforcement agencies where they were offered specialized positions that either we just we either don't have or I just don't have the ability to fill because of the staffing on patrol. And then one went to a federal law enforcement job. I have no idea where, who, what, he just came in one day and said, "I'm going to work for the feds." Okay, have a good day. Um, so I don't I have no idea where that person ended up. Uh, for FY25, so far though, this is the first uh net positive that we've had in a couple years of of employees coming in uh versus employees going out.

So when I look at the resignation I you the resignations and really looking at the resignations over time um you know it tells me a couple of things is that our people are marketable. So I really want to keep them here. You know I don't want them going to another department. That means that we are training them up and we're giving them the tools to be a successful officer. And so we need to continue to be competitive uh on the pay side. when I came up here in uh in early September, end of August, you know, it was important to me and I said this is the first step of looking at our entire uh compensation and uh this that indeed is just the first step of that. And so we need to continue to work aggressively and be competitive with that and and continue to reg uh recruit uh aggressively. So I wanted to tell you a couple things that I've done that you just would not see on the forward facing side of things. Uh so when I talk about internal personnel restructuring, so uh Sergeant Jason Cowser is our recruiter. He absolutely does an amazing job, but you can't get blood from a turnup. And so he had like three or four extra jobs that he was doing. So uh about a month ago, I restructured some of the things that he was responsible for and now he solely focuses on recruiting. He has no other responsibilities. And so he at one point was uh supervising our um property control um that was taking up 8 to 10 hours a week of his time supervising property control. And so taking some of those other responsibilities off of him and letting him focus completely on recruiting has made the difference in the world. Uh the second thing I've done is I've temporarily moved a patrol officer. Um I I didn't want to do this because my patrol is my backbone of my agency, but I need to get staff in the building. And so I've temporarily reassigned a police officer to work with Sergeant Cowser to go out and do the recruiting fairs because again if he has

to stop and drive to a college and go try to recruit and come back you're interrupting a day of time that um that he can be working on these events. And so, um, this new officer has come up. He was in in there for a week. And by that end of that first week, he the officer that's assisting, uh, Brad Prdergast. Uh, he had 19 college visits scheduled within the first week of him being in that job helping Jason with this recruiting. And so, um, that leads to, you know, we're drumming up applications, get our name out, getting our name out there where Jason could only go to four or five recruiting events. We're we're all in on this uh of going to these recruiting events. Um, so we have uh currently, it was supposed to be Saturday, we have an openhouse hiring event. Uh we have 26 people signed up for this today um that are outside of the applicants that already have in the pipeline. We've put this off until February 7th and then also because of the weather. And then we've also opened up 10 additional slots in that. And so that way in hopes of getting that to uh 35 uh people that are going to attend that. And so what again what we hope is we're getting people in the door and and streamlining the first two or three steps of the process to get them further along so we can get them in the door. Um half of those openings are in my specialized units. So uh when I get to the slide here shortly about SRO's you my openings are there but half of my openings are on patrol and the other half are in I'm short investigators. I'm short traffic unit. And we're doing we're doing more with less right now. you can still see we're positively impacting crime rates and and traffic crashes and such. Um uh something that uh I spoke briefly with Miss Huffman yesterday and I don't know if she shared it with uh Anthony or

not, but uh had some very exciting news yesterday. Uh both both man both uh Anthony and Jackie both have really been pushing me to like think outside the box. What can we do to get people in here? What can we do to get people in the door? And so yesterday I went with uh with the recruiting sergeant to CPCC and they are going to be able to host a BL or rookie school specific for Huntersville police and so we can uh we're going to get this place full. Um, I I I uh I told Jackie I I I uh I I hope by the end of the year, but uh uh so what where we're at now with with rookie schools across the state is we're confined to their schedule. Somebody has to go to their school on their schedule to get certified to be a police officer and CP and and now to be a police officer is now six months. from the day they come in the door to rookie school to the time they graduate, it's six months and then they come to us to for field training. And so now you're looking at that CPCC is only having a class in April and October or November, December, whatever it is. And so we're sitting there with our hand sitting on our hands going, "Okay, what what can we do with these folks?" And so I went over there yesterday. We actually went to go check on our current we have six cadetses in CPCC right now. And I said to the director, I said, "Look, what what are the chances that I you guys host a a rookie school just for us? We don't have the ability to do this. We don't have the funding. We don't have the equipment. We don't have the instructors. It is a whole bunch of hoops to get through." And she said, "Absolutely." Um, and so as soon as we get 10 people committed to go to rookie school, Jason already has two on his list now. Um, as soon as we get a minimum of 10, they're willing to push forward. And so what I'm expecting is sometime Mayish that you'll start to see

some uh pushing and some public facing things of you know, hey, we're going to do an HPD police academy. It'll be uh it'll be marketed as just Huntersville police officers that'll be in there. When they come out of training there, they will be with their people that they've been in training with for those six months. We can also insert some of our field training into this rookie school and try to streamline some of their field training. So when they get back to the police department and go into a car, that officer is not having to teach them how to use a computer, they we can do that while they're sitting in a classroom and get that stuff knocked out. So knock on wood. Um this works out. I was very excited leaving there and I think that we'll uh I think this will be um this will be very important to us and I think this really this really will help us get to that point of of getting our staffing up uh where I can people want to be detectives and they want to be traffic officers and they want to be SRO's but patrol is the back backbone of our agency and that that those are the people that are on the front lines responding to things

trying to figure out which side you adding that to seem logical enough, I guess. I don't know. Uh yeah. Um secondly, again, this will come up, you know, as as budget comes around. Um and this is the piece where I said, "Hey, that was just step one and what we're doing and and trying to get in alignment with my competition." And so one of the things that happens right now is is uh right now we do two and a half% raise for people with an associates degree. And we do currently do a 5% raise for people that come in, uh, to get their, uh, bachelor's, uh, that have their bachelor's degree. And so, um, making this, uh, making this change is important, not just for recruiting, but internally because these these are folks that we want to invest in that are going to be the next generation of supervisors because we require some of this education in order to be supervisors in the department. And so, it's important for them to do that. And it also gives me the ability to really push from our side the tuition reimbursement that uh the town offers and trying to help people along that maybe they're just right there at the cusp of saying, "Hey, you know, go and do this and take care of yourself and when we take care of them, they're going to they're going to also take care of us." And so what I'm talking about is is not not trying to still I'm I'm not trying to be number one in the county. Yes, we're in the number one in the county with pay, but Pineville PD's on my toes right now. Pineville PD is at like 60,500 now. Um Charlotte Meckllinmberg Police Department, 5% for associates, 10% for bachelors. Um a handful of agencies are doing this already. And so I'm not talking about trying to be number one when it comes to pay, but I want to be at the top of at least the middle ground. You know, give me give me something that, you know, I can fight for people to come here, but also that our people know that that we value and that we're going to pay them and stay

here. uh helping with the retention piece of this. You know, I I I feel for certain as this goes along, you know, there are numbers associated with this that we can talk about what this costs and I don't have that stuff in front of me, but I think, you know, just again putting this on your plate to to marinate on as we move forward. And I hope by the time the budget is adopted that we'll also see a significant difference in our staffing um as this as this advances. I I'll tell you the one example. We had a Charlotte officer that was pretty far along in our process. um she was in the final steps and and at the last minute pulled out and we were off by I don't know under 10%. Um and and this may may not uh have made a difference in that person coming to us from Charlotte. Uh and so again you know these are these are my direct competition when it comes to uh employment. Are there any questions about recruiting or retention? I've got school resource coming up. I promise.

So my two asks for this coming year are um about accountability responsibilities and then also liability reduction. Um the the slides coming up. I'm asking for two additional supervisory roles. One is part of my command staff. It's a captain level. I currently have three captains in the police department with a variety of responsibilities. The second ask is an additional lieutenant in my investigations department. Again, both of these divisions have grown and while they don't have people in place, they will have people in place. Um, and so it's important to to get some of these responsibilities because you'll see on my first slide. Um, yes, it is super busy. I know it. I I had 27 colors a week ago. I had individual names listed on this thing a week ago. and just trying to streamline this uh as easily as you can as easily as you can do it with the organizational chart. So this is just a representation of one of my staff. I have three captains and this is just one of my three captains. And so you see at the top this is currently as of today this one captain is responsible for 46 employees and it's a variety of things. And you can look down through there. And what I ended up doing is taking off the names. And when you look down through there, I will step out. Anyhs,

Anthony can point for you.

Oh, you're good. I'll uh I'll give you an example here. So on uh this first this column here where it says community services. So you see that there's a community services lieutenant. There's one person. There's a community services sergeant. There's two. And then there's 12 SRO's and two community officers. And even if we talk about expanding uh expanding elementary SRO's at some point in coming years, um again, you're going to start adding more people to this. and you see 46 people under one command officer, it it we it's too much for that officer, for that command person to to keep a grasp of and stay on top of maybe the things they're coming in, the projects they're working on. The second piece of this is we have added many civilian or nonswarm professional staff over the last couple years that are falling under this captain's responsibility that weren't there two years ago. And so this leads into is there any question before I move to the next slide about a propose the proposal. Okay. So the next slide is I've actually split this captain role into two captains and I've put proposed here. So there's going to be a second slide. What I'm going to do is with this fourth captain I will split that captain's role apart. The captain that you're seeing now would then have 32 people underneath his responsibility or her responsibility. And you see everything that's listed under that person is all somebody that's going to be in a uniform. Those are your school resource officers, your traffic officers, the community officers, animal services. These are frontline uniform folks that are going out and interacting with the public. And then that's what this captain would be responsible for. The other captain would continue to serve in this professional role. Again, one captain is this responsibility.

One captain is this responsibility. And so the this professional services bureau is responsible for like making sure all of our officer certifications are up to date, making sure all the inservice training is done um in supervising this. So again, you see 36 and 12. uh th this is more high liability stuff that needs that specific uh provision. And so this breaks those pieces down. And as we continue to add, you know, as we add another, um maybe another training person in the coming years, as we continue to grow our staff, it's important to make sure we plan ahead for these command positions uh to be able to have the right responsibilities and us not have to figure out a couple years from now. Are there any questions about the what I view as the two responsibilities? So, right now, everything I just said falls under one guy. A bunch of uniforms and a bunch of support service. All right. And then the second lieutenant position. Again, this is another captain showing their responsibilities. This is two out of three captains. I do not have a patrol captain slide. I'm not asking for anything in that division. The investigations bureau captain has 28 people under them. Now, if you look currently, I have one lieutenant that is responsible for 21 people that report to that one lieutenant and there's a sergeant in between there that helps with supervision. But again, it's about that sphere of influence and spreading that responsibility and that supervisor responsibilities out. So, this is where that second lieutenant would come into play. Again, this would be the proposal, and you see I've marked it there in the middle. And so, what I would basically do is have a special investigations lieutenant that would have a sergeant, and those are all of our undercover

officers and people that serve on uh federal government task forces. That would be under special investigations. And you see the kind of anomaly sticking out of here that says property technician. That is a that's a responsibility I'm going to move where it is now. It doesn't matter where it is now, but this is where it's going to land. And then you see I then have a general lieutenant, a general investigations lieutenant that would have the advocates that are front-facing that are on the front lines continue to report to that investigations lieutenant and uh the detectives under those that space. So that would be the proposal for the two supervisory positions. I I want to reiterate as we move into school resource, patrol is my backbone. I'm filling patrol first. I know I have retirements coming this year. I know I've got people that I need to plan for. I have retirements coming that are in rank positions. And so I need these and I need them to continue to fill out our org chart and make everything even. But these are also going to fall in priority based on how much staffing we get in our patrol functions. Um, I just want to reiterate again, I got people that want to be detectives that I can't put over there right now. And I've got people that want to be traffic officers that can't go over there right now. And and patrol is the backbone of what we're doing. Are there any questions about those two spots? I know. I I wanted to like lob a grenade because I know I've got 28 openings and it's crazy to do this, but this is about planning for the future and not reacting three years from now and saying, "Oh crap, we need to do this." Because I'm planning to be full mid budget year, and I don't want to have to ask for this in the middle of the year next year.

My name is Barry Graham. All right. Uh, school resource officer update. Yes. Uh, that's that's the update is um until I get a little more staffing on hand on patrol, um, I have got to continue uh, staffing the patrol. I I just I want to be clear. The safety at the schools is very important to me, but if I don't have officers on the street that can even respond to the schools should there be an emergency, we're delaying response. And so we they yes, they are currently unfilled, but I've got six people graduating BL in three weeks. And so that will add to this staffing. And I've got these other folks starting in February. I doubt I'll have somebody in any of the elementary schools by the end of this school year, but based on this timeline, I certainly can have at least one of them in this position because retention also comes from do I see opportunity. And so I I I'm going to h I have to move somebody in there because they the officers also need to see that they have the opportunity to do this job that I know people want to do. Um, and so it it continues to be a priority to fill and I think that, you know, impacting response times and emergency response time in other parts of town will hurt us if we try to rush into this and put officers into this these positions. Uh, y'all can see I have the three would share schools. U, we talked about this briefly last year and and uh and for Heather and Scott like what my plan is is that each SRO the three SRO's each would be geographically be responsible for two elementary schools and share their time between the two and then as we work through this we would work into the school curriculum and get into some

of the you know anti- gang anti-drug some of that education piece of this u but I need to get this the coffers filled any questions at all this is is the cheapest part of my presentation um is space needs. Um I'm I'm I'm here to I had a couple slides and I don't need to beat uh didn't need to just continue beating a dead horse, but the the police department needs a new police department and there just no easy way to say it. Um, we've been in our current building for 14 years. And so, best case scenario, even if we started building today, the building will then be 17 or 18 years old at that point. Um, and so, uh, we are where we are. So, currently, our building is about 26,000 square feet. Um, and what you can see, what I've included there are pictures of spaces where I have four, six, eight, nine people sharing one office. And so that is working uh today. Um, but in a couple years that is not going to continue to work for us. In June or July of last year, we completed a space needs study. And so what that came back with is recommending a building about 55,000 square feet. So about double what our police department is now. And if you remember our recent opening of town hall, it is also bigger than that. Um and so what the anticipation is for that is for that's long-term that is like this is our endgame. This is what we need to be in and this will suffice for us until none of us in this room are uh in existence anymore. Um, and so it's not about like the comfort. It's not about me trying to get people cushy offices and trying to have empty space that I just that I don't need. It's about y'all have been seeing all these

plans and building and apartments and we are not going to stay at 120 officers. We're going to be at 130 140 150 officers in the coming five or six years. And so it's planning for that space where it goes, you know, that'll still be up in the air. that's for us to discuss at these meetings and talk through some of the positives and negatives about where we are now, where we could be. Um, this is really just getting this out into the universe and saying, "Hey, uh, this is where we are." Uh, the examples I have given there, like I have uh, six detectives are working in uh, it's like a uh, 20 by 20 room. I've got six detectives in cubicles in a 20 by 20 room. And then this uh one person was in this office. It was where we were going to put a magistrate. Um but I've run out of space. So I've got four people. Our four victims advocates are going to be sharing that office. Um and so they're having to call victims and talk to people and trying to do this over top of each other. It's just it's just not conducive. And we are using just please stop by. I'll give you a tour. Uh we're using every square inch of the building that we're in now. anything any questions? Sweet. So, uh, we, uh, Larry briefly talked about flock. The only reason why I included this, this is our license plate readers. The only reason why I included this slide is because I'm looking to continue to build that network. Um, we currently have 34 cameras in town. Um, 30 of them are on roadways and different rideaways and different ingress and egress points. um like from Burkedale Village and places like that. And we have four deployed at the entrances to some of our parks. And so what happens is is a car drives past this license

plate reader, it logs it into a system, it stays for 30 days and it goes away. If a plate goes is in the state system and the car stolen, it it is in that in this system and can alert an officer to say, "Hey, there's a stolen vehicle that drove past this camera. And so what this shows here is what our cameras have done in the last month of the hits. Now what it doesn't do is take away duplicates. Um what it doesn't do is somebody um gets their license plate read and their car stolen, they get their car back and then the it's never taken out of the system. Uh maybe a police department's not taking the car out of the system from being stolen. Um and so While I don't have the specifics on what this netted as far as arrests and things like that go because all this is is a tool to give an officer a lead that they are then responsible for going and doing follow up on. My police officers are taking no action off of this response from the flock cameras. They have to then take this action of being alerted to do their own leg work to make sure that the car is stolen and make sure the tag is stolen through the state systems. And so that way you're not running into police are just stopping people for the heck of it or or something is is not wrong. Um and so you can see the data that's listed there. Again, this is only one month worth of information. You can read across the bottom of your slide there. So I'm looking to add 10 more of these cameras to our system. uh as we continue to grow this um we have a bunch of attachment public private um agreements with uh local schools and businesses um because we can't put these in the state rightway. Uh North Carolina state will not allow DOT will not allow us to place license plate readers in the rightway. And so we

have these either on our own streets that we maintain or control or we've entered into an attachment agreement with the shopping center in order to place the cameras on their properties um in order to to scan the license plates. And Burkedale is an example of that. Um they are currently testing throughout the state uh in Ayardell County and Wils County license plate readers in the state rightway. Um, it makes no sense to me that we've got all these cars traveling up and down 77 and there's nothing there's nothing out there to aid in anything. And so they're testing it in county and in Wils County right now uh to decide if the state's going to allow it statewide. It could take forever. Um the la the other piece of this technology, I am not asking for any drones this year. We have a handful of drones now that we do utilize. We use them for when suspects run from police. We have them with, you know, lost kids. We we we use them now. We have them. I wanted to include this slide for was looking into the future and using drones as a force force multiplier in our uh technology and a first responder response. And so, for example, if I bought Flock drones, Flock makes drones. If a car drive p drives past one of those cameras and is stolen, if we have a drone, it will self-deploy and go to where that car is to help give us reconnaissance on what's happening and can we get there and can we do whatever. And it's unmanned. It goes on its own. It's autonomous. So, here's what here's where this comes in is why I want to slow roll this. I want to get it right. I don't want those nefarious tag reads to generate a drone taking off and going and following somebody that doesn't need to be followed. Um I want to make sure that that technology is correct. It's very

good now. Uh it is also very expensive. And then the last key to this is I need somebody to be able to dispatch the drones.

And so that is another hurdle is I I make the joke the acronym WWCMPD. What what would Mechmber police department do um and so they have drones. They've deployed some drones now. Um but I don't again I don't know how they're dispatching them. I don't know how that operation is working. I'm floating this out to the universe so you know a year from now or two years from now when I'm back up here talking about drones as first responders. This is what I'm talking about. Um we've had uh some testing come out show us, hey, this is how it works. Um they're telling us three to four would cover a whole town. Um they're probably a4 million dollars a piece uh per year. So it is costly. Um I also would try to look at grants and things like that to try to fund that. But they are expensive. You know, you're looking at putting one somewhere in downtown uh somewhere up at Burkedale somewhere out on the west side of town. That could cover most of what's there.

Did you say a quarter of a million per year? Per year. per unit. Okay. I just want to make sure I heard that. So these aren't the same ones that Door Dash are using. Yeah, that's probably that's probably why Door Dash is so expensive.

Yeah. No, these are You can see it there. That's That is actually Flock's version of it. You know, it's no bigger than your iPad. Um and they self-deploy. They come back to these docks and they charge themselves. But again, I would need somebody to dispatch. I would need somebody to push that button to to say go if we need that. So, I don't want to spend a lot of time on that. Um, lastly, uh, the Northmech Magistrate. Um, so for the last six months, uh, myself, the mayor, uh, the manager, we've been working with Cornelius and, uh, Davidson to try to go at the whole magistrate and staffing a magistrate thing as a unified front. back in uh back in December, uh myself and the chief of Davidson, Chief Cornelius, we all three worked together on a two-page, three-page letter um that we all s all the managers, all the mayors and all the chiefs signed and also sent along with a 12-page document about our need and why we would need a magistrate. Um we sent that to the chief district court judge uh back in December. Um I yeah, I I got nothing. Um, no response. No, like, "Hey, got your letter. We'll talk sometime. Go, go away. I don't want to talk to you. We can't do anything." Um, we've gotten no response. Um, I've got 25 years in the making, but that may actually get built. I mean, it's a

It's very political. It's we've even offered to fund it ourselves. You know, can't supposedly to um ask the legislator to fun. I mean, it's all sorts of what I'm going to say kinks. I'm sure the mayor jumped in, but it's you get to where you think you're making some progress with one of the chief district judges and he or she is gone, get another one. It is cluster and I won't even say the last word.

Yeah, I um I thought I you know we we were getting some good traction with Judge TR, the last chief district court judge. At least it had the perception that we were getting good traction on it. Um she came up and brought some of the magistrates up to our PD. We showed her the space that I now have to put four people in. We we budgeted to try to we said, "Hey, we're going to pay to upfit this building and make it ready for you so you can go on day one." Um and then it never happened. Judge Trosh is not uh the district chief district court judge anymore.

Um I've had the opportunity uh to speak twice with Representative Hrich and put this on her radar and I sent her the letter that we sent to District Court Judge Wiggins and then Chief uh Guyer with Davidson met with the attorney general chief's conference last week Jackson to say hey here's our plight. You know, we gave that to him also just try to maybe get some pressure on Judge Wiggins to even just say, "Hey, I got your we emailed it and then delivered at certified mail."

And we thought there was money put in the legislature. Intent was um the last can you keep up with that talking about this 20ome years. Um legislature set aside some funds so that county uh could get some more masters and uh intent I thought was written specifically. We have to go back and look at that. The intent behind that was um for North to get back. That has not happened. I don't know what else I can say. Mayor may have obviously may been in Raleigh before, so she may have some thoughts on it, but it is a painful process that I wish I could solve.

Yeah. I mean, I had hoped to I mean, sort of use the word ambush Judge Wiggins over the holiday season when all the holiday parties were going on because normally I would have seen him out and about and he wasn't even in attendance at any of those for me to see him. So, I didn't even get to corner him with a shrimp cocktail. I mean, we will find the space. We have space. So,

whether it's at police department, town hall, third floor, whatever we'll find space. So that will not be the issue. We'll make the space and find space. Um so North was willing to pay pay for not even that. So there should be no So there was no response at all. Zero. Zero. So would it be okay for citizens to email? Absolutely. kind of push that absolutely along. I think we're at the point now is uh call anybody in the world that you know they can put fresh on

and see if we can make it happen because I mean we've tried nice way laid everything on. I mean basic we'll pay for everything. Um so we're at a point now you can take the gloves off and do whatever you want. Would it be and blame it on me? I'll be good with that too. Okay. Um, for that letter to call again what I sent with the statistics and stuff. I just wondered if we could create maybe a a post. I don't know where it would come from the town or with the information like what has been presented and kind of the stand still where we are right now. And here's an email if you would

like to send something in. Hey Chief, just a quick one. You may have touched on it. Um the about a year ago we did the crash investigator. Oh yeah. Can where are we at? I think you might have briefly touched on it, but where are we at with the um so all we have four positions for that. Right. Right. Um the only reason why we didn't move faster on filling those is getting the trucks for them to drive. Yeah. So it was pointless to hire these investigators

that wouldn't have something to drive. And so we ordered them back in July. They trickled in in November, I think, and then we move forward with the process with that. And we have conditional offers out on all four of those positions. Um, and hopefully they all start before the end of February. Okay. Um, there's training they're going to have to do, field training they're going to have to do before they can be on their own. But exactly what I told the board last year is happening is that I either expected retired police officers or people that wanted to be police officers that we could help lead them to water. And two of mine are retired police officers and two of them are people that want to go to BL in like a year and a half when they're old enough.

Sweet. And so it's exactly the perfect. One guy's a retired trooper has like 26 years with the highway patrol. the other guys uh from Jersey or So when would we expect to see them on the road? They won't be in a car by themselves until summer. Summer. Yeah. Because they're going to have to do a couple weeks inhouse training and had to do like six weeks with an officer. So eight weeks from the end of February. I gota March, April. So I'm going to put you on the spot. Just one other if you want to punt. We we'd had a couple conversations around um cameras in school zones.

Oh yeah. Yeah. So, um, I did I finished reading that article I sent you. Um, you know, it it's so what Commissioner Walls is talking about is October of last year, the state brought back where you could do speed enforcement with electronic with cameras in school zones. Um, it comes with a it comes with a civil pen penalty. It doesn't count against a person's driver's license, but what's what has to happen is the board's got to adopt, you know, adopt this whole process into into our our ordinance. Um, an officer does have to go out and sit with it says in the statute that an officer has to sign off on every ticket that's issued by that system.

And so, you are still going to have to have manpower with that. And the money does go to the school system uh with the exception of the pieces that you pieces of the money that you would need as far far as running the program costs associated with running the program. Okay. We can keep that piece of the money. The rest of it has to go to CMS. Um and so uh the one hangup to it again is I'm just trying to think of I I I have traffic officers go out there now. Sure, somebody could go out there and they could issue twice as many tickets out there, but if I still have to put an officer there,

you know, eventually maybe we get get back to that point where we can do that. Um, our biggest area concerns, uh, Torrance Creek is pretty bad on Ranson Road. Um, as far as Speedo and then Barnett and Bradley out on, um, Bradley out on on Batty's Ford, you know, those are both areas of concern, but and there's other pieces. is I'm probably leaving some of the bullet points out of what would what would be required to like there's extra signage that has to go up. There has to be uh flashing beacons that say speed enforcement, camera enforcement ahead, but Okay. Yeah. Okay. Good. Thank you.

May I add some commentary before we transition about the police facility? So, remember last week when we were talking about opening town hall that we talked about we uh discussed that for seven years before we moved into the building. And so we recognize that there is a period that it's going to take to uh firm the decision about whether we expand where we are. Uh the space needs assessment would suggest that's probably not our best move. Uh so where is the land once you have the land where uh what is the point of design and then construction period? So, we recognize there is a multi-year process we're going to have to follow here. But we we need to get in your minds much like seven years ago. If we're going to end up someplace else, we're going to have to start working on that now to do so.

Yeah. And you'll you'll see in the CIP. I mean, this is a prime example where a project big project could move forward versus backwards. And you'll see in the CIP that the building's probably in a future year if I recall and the lands in a in the fivey year period. But um I don't know when we get land may get land next week, maybe a year from now. I don't know. So this is a good example of a huge project that can have major impacts on my budget one way or the other, but it is a need. Um but we've got to find land first and once we get the land then that's probably means we're going to shift the buildings will start to come forward and we'll have major impact on but it's something we got to do as chief said even if you had it today probably three years before we if we started today the process chief uh the Apologizp apologize for that part. I also told him I'd help mount Vaughn by the way wants a helicopter in a little room budget for a helicopter. I told you fire police union, but he does want a helicopter. So, we'll hit on a couple topics uh for the fire department. Obviously, uh some station response area, especially for the new commissioners and how how you get the closest fire truck to your home when the 911 call comes in. Uh we'll just go over the call volume from last year to this year. Uh we'll look at the CIP for fire apparatus. Uh you know, last year was the first board that bought two new fire apparatus and this is updated every year. You'll see this in your budget retreat because there's a

huge expense when it comes to buying fire trucks. Uh CIP for station one, two, and three. We'll look at that and uh see where we're at with that part and how how we're just moving along with the with the future fire stations that we need and the reason why. We'll go over the meta contract a little bit. uh management and commissioner Walsh has been we've been real heavy into the medic contract and I'm sure as we get closer with this we'll get Emily more involved with with that part because it will be a contracted service that they want to use our fire trucks to respond to for medical cost and then we'll look at the part-time to full-time positions. Uh we're taking baby steps to make this a 100% full-time fire department municipality. Uh we'll talk over what Laura ke in on about having you know 25 full-timers and a bunch of part- timerrs and how important the part-timers are but where where would we be you know in the future. So especially for the new commissioners uh we threw up the new fire station on here which is fire station number five which you'll see see in the future in Hayawasi road. Uh we even threw a couple the Cornelius and Davidson fire stations on here. Uh when we do respond to areas, uh it's all it's all outlaid. We look at speed bumps. We look at stop signs. We look at the red lights that we're putting in. We look at everything that's going on. This way when you dial 911, there's no guesswork. It's going to pick the closest fire station for you to respond to that area because our the whole thing is to respond as an emergency call and give you the best service. Uh we do respond to the Cornelius and Davidson. We do go to Concord. We do go to Charlotte and we do go to East Lincoln. So we're surrounded by other counties and other towns that we respond to. The greatest thing is that there's no money value exchanged. It doesn't cost it Cornelius Fire Department doesn't send Huntersville Fire Department a bill for coming to assist them and it's vice versa

throughout the whole throughout the whole county system and the surrounding counties. But uh you'll see on here that you know with fire station number five and pretty soon in its place right now currently fire station number one responds to that whole area. So you can think about how big that area is in yellow all the way out to the renaissance festival all the way out to highway 73 where they built the new Publix and Jersey Mike and all that you know that is responsive by fire station number one. It's about 11 minute drive out there. So we're doing the right thing. we're moving in the right path by uh definitely expanding and uh it's it's doing a great job and once that I'll be proud to say once it's built out there it's going to help definitely help the public having a quicker response time to their homes when we throw some in our uh GIS France has worked on this a lot with me. I just wanted to see what it looks like when you when you put geographically you know radius around each fire station. You know, by putting the fire station out in five number out there, we literally could touch every part of the Hearnsville ETJ in the town limits. Now, looking at this map, there's even o overlay and that's what we need. We need overlay because if one of the fire stations is out on a call, you want the second closest one to go out to that area. You'll even see on this map, you know, when uh Stephen was talking about, you know, the Verhoff drive extension, you know, roads are on here. You know, does that ever get built? You know, he's pushing for it and you got to make that decision. But right now, you think about it, there's no cut through. So, when fire station number one wants to go assist at Skybrook, they drive all the way to the bomb down by Walmart Eastfield Road. They drive all the way around. There's no cutthroughs besides if you don't build the future roadways.

So, you know, we even when we looked at Irvin Cook Road, I'll put it over here. Irvin Cook Road. Uh years ago, we thought that was going to be the greatest spot for a fire station. Irvin Cook Roads got connection to Burkdale. Future roads were coming in there, but you know, when you see what's what Stephen had, doesn't look like we might all be dead in this room. I don't know. I mean, it looks like a 30 40 year plan right now. And that's why we move forward, you know, with the current fire station that we bought land for uh in last year's uh last year's budget. So, we're making some improvements. We definitely are. And when we build fire stations, we look at the heat maps. You know, where's all the calls coming in? Uh, you know, to the left there, you can see how many calls that fire station number one runs. Uh, it's the busiest fire station. It's the heart of really the Arnesville Fire Department because it assists everybody all over. It assists fire station two, it's three, four, no matter where we go. And if I had a, you know, a giant sum of money and unlimited, you can see there's a big gap between here and fire station one and this corridor where this big red spot is. You know, that's your that's your statesville road veh uh not states road veh 73 corridor. There's a lot of calls that come in there. It's a very busy area. Uh the other heat maps that you can see, you know, there's some retirement homes in this in these areas that you see all red. This part here is about your Brighton center. So the calls come in and it as it populates more and more, you know, the redness comes in. It's just to tell you, hey, this is where you're spending a lot of your time. But with fire station number five coming, we're hoping that to take a lot of the load off of fire station number one and share some of that that calls out in that area. And again, it's all about the response time. questions on the couple maps.

So, look at the calls for service. Uh, you know, the calls for service can be breaking down more. See that we went to got the fires just alone 143 fires. In our computer systems, it breaks it down what kind of fires. It might be an outside fire. It might be a car fire. It might be, you know, food on the stove fire. But this is it puts it all into one category saying that hey you went to a fire you had to maybe put water on it you had to do those kind of tactics that we use at fires. So these are just very broad you know broad just topics. Uh as you can see we we went up in calls. Uh we do every year about 3 to 400 extra calls come in. The one thing I am worried about last year it took 6 minutes 35 seconds to get to your house. this year 8 minutes and 30 seconds. Any idea why? I'll give it to you. Roundabouts, traffic, stop lightss, and the worst thing that I can say with is going on is that when these fire trucks are dispatched to non-emergency medical calls, and I'm traveling 11 minutes to get to your home because it's a non-emergency medical call. We're kind of being, you know, we're under that gun of, hey, we'll get there when we get there, but we got to sit in traffic also. And we've been, you know, management and Mr. Walsh will give you a lot of credit for, you know, sticking behind us with the medic calls. We want to use our fire trucks for emergencies. We're an emergency service. You know, we carry EMTs on our trucks, emergency medical technicians. We're not non non-emergency technicians. So, you know, we have to really look at in the future as we're getting busier and busier and they want a contract with us to say, "Hey, you know, we really want your firemen on on our calls." Well, let's go on emergency calls. Let's not let's you handle your own non-emergencies. Chief Balm and his department handles

theirs. Electric cities will handle their non-emergencies. They're first responders in their whole program when power lines go down and so is the fire department. So we always, you know, without a when one of these fire trucks you take that lives in state station 2's area, if you live off like sample road, you take that truck and you put on a non-emergency call, there is nobody there in that to provide fire protection. Nobody. What's the next closest truck that's coming down from Sample Road? The next truck might be a Cornelius. It's in stage one. That's a long drive. So, we have to make sure when we go to assist somebody that wants a contract with the Hunsville Fire Department and the town of Hunsville that we're going on emergencies. This way, we could use our apparatus for when we're needed because nobody else could do our job. The police department doesn't carry water in the fire trucks. The medics don't carry SCBAs that we wear in our back when we go to rescue somebody. So, we have to make sure we're available for the public. Anything on the last slide before we go? Fire apparatus.

What's that?

Yeah. Kind of like V's uh uh welfare checks, things like that. Uh, we do get a lot of, you know, we, hey, third party call says, you know, there's someone walking on the side of 115 and they look like they're staggering in and out of, well, I said if maybe send an officer or maybe they do send an officer in a firetruck might be closer. Maybe the person's intoxicated. Well, we get there and hey, you okay? Yep, I'm fine. Okay. Do you want medical help? Nope. Do you need the police fire the police department? Nope. Okay. What do you code it as? We put it as a good intent call. We got dispatched. We got there. There's nothing to it. We don't see any any reason to call for the police department or if they're there first, they might just say, "Hey, we got this." They'll wave us off. We don't end up knowing what it was.

Like, they'll get out there and somebody marshmallows. You know, people drive by and see things and call and when they get out there's nothing to it. We got a lot, you know, since the phones have become more and more popular. Everybody's got one, right? And uh sometimes those, you know, it's it's the downfall of the emergency services because I mean, they call for the silliest things and it no one stops anymore. I mean, they just keep rolling around. They just call 911.

You commissioners, you're going about to get your uh little education on fire trucks. This, you know, members of the board sitting next to you both. Uh they ordered a firet truck or two firet trucks last year. Uh we came to them in obviously 2025 to buy fire trucks that will arrive in 2028. So it's a three-year time frame to build and complete a fire truck to get it in service. Uh so when you when we approach you for fire trucks, we try to plan out every year we add another year to this calendar just to so it doesn't uh shock you when we walk up here and we say, "Hey, we need $1.2 2 million to build a fire truck. This is about a 14-year plan and every truck that's that we ride on that's in the fire services on here. We took out the little SUVs and small vehicles because that, you know, nothing those costs millions of dollars. So, we want to just educate you on how we buy fire trucks. Uh there is a current firet truck being built. Uh it is should arrive in 2026 of March. Uh it arrived in 2026 means we ordered it about 2023 at the price of $960,000. The same fire truck that these commissioners helped buy last year are now 1.25. The same truck, same color, same scheme, same everything it is. So, fire trucks go up about, you know, $60,000 over the next couple years. So when we do approach you to buy fire trucks, if you drag your feet, if you say you don't think you need it, just realize nothing's going to change on that part because you're just going to spend more money the following year.

If we order two trucks like today, do you pay for them now and get them? We put down 60% of of the uh funds that they require. And then when the fire truck comes in, if you look right here, sir, that's what we owe on the day of delivery. And same thing with the the one that's coming in, I think it's an orange right here. I'll show the pointer hitting it again. 60% down and then we will cut a check for that. Chief, Bob, how many companies out there deal fire trucks?

All fire trucks, most of them are built in the Midwest. Uh they're all custom order. The three big ones are Crave, uh Smeal, and Pierce fine trucks. Uh there's a company out of uh Florida that's building them now. But the turnaround time, nothing's built. Uh you just can't go to Paul Chevrolet or Ford, you know, pick one off the wall. It's all custom built. It literally takes us probably a good six to eight months to sit down with the manufacturers, designers, and say, "Hey, this is what North Carolina law requires us to have on a fire truck." You know, that's what makes a fire truck. So much water, so much hose, so much everything else. And that's why when you look at fire truck, you might say, "I seen a smaller firet truck in Chicago." Chicago, Illinois is a little bit different than North Carolina's North Carolina fires. We have to require that, you know, so many things and so many items on that fire truck just for it to be qualified as a, you know, a fire apparatus and a class one fire apparatus. These fire trucks is what lowers our ISO rating, which is the insurance rating for the town. So, we're the only fire department of the town that gets an insurance adjuster comes to us and says, "Hey, I want to see how many fire trucks you have. I want to see the ladder trucks. I want to see the equipment on the trucks. I want to see how many fires you went to." And they this is how the town gets their insurance rate. Uh, proud to say over the last couple years, at one time we were a six. Now we're down to a three. And that's you investing in the fire department, you saying yes to we need more fire trucks, more staffing, uh building more fire stations. That's what lowers the the grading down. It also has to do with Charlotte water. Uh that we work Anthony Jackie work with the water department probably, you know, multiple times a year and they say, "Hey, what's your needs?" You're trying to get down to a one, which is the best. Greenville, uh Raleigh, Charlotte's a one. Uh the only reason we cannot be a one is because the town have water from one end

to the other and you could if you live out there towards Hayawasi Road and that area there hasn't been hydrants put in yet. So one day one day you'll be there. In fact I think when they come back uh this coming next year or two I think we'll we've done enough training we've done enough putting on full-timers. I think we'll start to see maybe even a two which will really help out business. Business looks at that kind of number because that's their how much money they pay for insurance when it comes to fire. chief on fire truck. I know the answer, but uh um you know, people always talk like, well gosh, you know, if you build a 10story building, you know, you got to get a bigger ladder and New York City's got, you know, 100 story buildings, etc.

Fire trucks, the same ones that have. Yes, sir. Yes. Good. So, right here at the very bottom, it says tower one. We built this can't um 2019 I believe it is. We try to keep that fire truck for about 20 years. Uh tower one that rides out of station one is the same fire truck uh that you'll see in the city of Charlotte, it's the same fire truck you'll see in New York City.

All the fire trucks built from the same manufacturer. Whether you got the Empire State Building and it's 100 floors or you go down to to uh you know Brighton Town Center that you're building sixtory apartments, the same type of fire truck is used. Uh it's no different. They might pay a little bit cheaper because they order so many in qual at a time, but that's the same fire truck. There's nothing in the United States that goes up to 110 feet high. That's about the ladder truck that sits that you have a fire station one and four. Uh so whether you're on the sixth or seventh floor and you you love to take a vacation, just realize that that fire truck, no matter if you're in New York City or Huntersville, the ladder will only hit about the sixth or seventh floor. So it doesn't matter where else you are in this country. So if you stay past that, you're on your own. Know where the nearest fire exit is and don't use the elevator. But great point, Anthony. Thank you for bringing that up. Question on the the cost of fire trucks. I made this gra I made this probably about for Larry Irvin probably a good 15 years ago and this when we started presenting this to the board, you know, and we just keep really just finding out from the manufacturer where we're at, how long does it take because that's important and what the cost is because we don't want the sticker shock. I mean, I wouldn't want I wouldn't walk up to you at the at this board meeting and say, "Hey, by the way, I just put in into the budget for $1.2 million or I need a helicopter.

I wouldn't do that." And so, we plan we try to really plan for the future here. Moving on to fire stations.

Uh there's your oldest fire station. If anybody knows on the base forward road, if you live out there by sample road, Duke Power area, Duke Energy, Energy United, all that kind of area, Meguire Nuclear Plant, the lake that they take care of all that that area. It was built in 1963. Uh it is on a septic tank, so it has definitely served its purpose. It doesn't serve the purpose of, you know, what we were planning for the future, uh, of having, you know, full-time people there is made for the me and Larry showed up as volunteers here and we got in our, you know, came with our trucks and we jumped in a fire truck and took it out the door. So, and that's why, you know, fire station number two has been a priority of Anony's defined laying. Uh, and he succeeded and this board succeeded in that purchase last year. Uh, again, number one, great fire station. You know, it's downtown. It's in the heart of everything. Again, was built for the volunteer fire service. Doesn't have the locker room space. Doesn't have the female facilities that it needs to have. Uh, doesn't even have an elevator, you know, if if you want to, you know, someone in a wheelchair wanted to come upstairs 101. So, you know, the future is, you know, is to replace both of these. Obviously, uh, you know, we we're looking for land all the time for fire station number one, but we need to keep it in an area that we feel is the heart of our town that it could help our other fire stations. And of course on there's, you know, just a lot of the stuff that doesn't have that future fire stations like three and four that we're building have. Uh when we worked with town management in finding station two, you know, we figured out Irvin Cook Road was not the place best location. Uh we worked with planning on this map and I hope it not sure if you can see it as good, but there's a red there's red lines all around what we felt was the heart of fire station number two. Uh one of the

biggest problems with fire station number two when you start to move it, it has to be within five miles of the nuclear power plant. Not many people say they could they provide coverage to a nuclear power plant, but that isn't just the front entrance. When they measure road miles of and the North Carolina looks at this, they'll measure from the very rear of Duke Power and come down all the way to the Highway 73, which is probably a good mile long, and then I could go to the left or right. Uh if I went to the right, obviously it would take me into Lincoln County, which we don't want that. We don't need our fire station in Lincoln County. So, we we were able to find a spot right here on Highway 73. Uh a very good pot plot of land, nine acres. Uh it's there for the future. It's going to be, you know, able to serve Burkedale community, the power plant. Uh everybody along Betty's Ford Road. Uh it's going to be a you know, and of course, we run a lot of calls on the lake. So, that fire station does have a boat. So, when you go to build this fire station in a couple years, uh we have a plan that will show you. We just got to remember, you know, it's got to suit the size of what's going on now. It's got to be able to have provide protection to the lake. It's got to have protection that to the Burkedale area. And I would not doubt in my mind that when next time we're insurance rated, they'll probably ask us to really look at another ladder truck for that area. There's a lot of They look at threetory buildings or more, three to 100 stories. It don't matter. But they feel that you should have a ladder truck that serves an area if they got three stories or more. And you know what we're putting out there towards that Burkdale area. It's it's constantly growing. Uh again, fire station number five. Perfect piece of property. It's going to be beautiful. We're we're really uh we're going to make this fit into the

community. We're not going to build, you know, some commercial looking building. It's got to suit the needs of the fire department, but we want to fit the community. Uh I think it's going to be great with the having the park, you know, at our for our neighbors. Uh I see a lot of, you know, families, you know, just come to come to that park and come to visit this fire station. But we we are working very hard right now to to come up with ideas and and uh my team and the management's team will will do our best to make sure this happens so it makes it look good. Jackie, when is when are you picking the the winner to start the process? First week of February. Jackie,

uh we have interviewed two firms. Those are the uh we had eight responses, seven that we thought were uh six submitted timely.

Uh we reviewed a a committee of firefighters, Jackie and Trisha Foster, our uh uh purchasing and contracting manager reviewed uh the submittals. We chose two firms to speak to those uh interviews have been completed. We have not uh submitted and turned into Trisha our scoring matrix. Uh but but we there's a firm that we think clearly was a better firm among the two. And so it our RFQ process would suggest that we would announce in February who that firm is and begin to negotiate a contract with that firm.

Little timeline on on the on the what I call the the next project followed by the the next two. Uh obviously Jackie gave you a really good idea of where we're at with station five. Uh you know, we we plan on sitting with the architect obviously in 2026. Everybody that we talked to within those last two interviews say our timeline to build a fire station and get it up and running will be 2028. So when we sit here in 2027 together, you'll see staffing needs for the 2028. Again, right after that, we'll look at fire station number two. Uh the we bought the land in 2025 already a check mark on there. you know, once we plan the architect in 2026, I'm sure a year later, we'll be looking at at architect for for station two and then again looking for an opening, you know, the following year, year and a half, depend on how fast they'll build fire stations. And number three, you know, we're we're trying to secure land. That's our me and town management's biggest goal right now is to find you a piece of land that'll, you know, fit into the heart of this town. Uh, everybody really enjoys a downtown fire station. No different. I think Ver would love to have a downtown you know, department. Uh, it just fits that area. You know, it's your hub. It's you're surrounded by everything else that goes on. And, uh, you know, we set a timeline for ourselves. Is the timeline adjustable? Sure is. But we just, we try to set ourselves some goals together. Any questions on timeline or last couple stations? Medic contract. Uh so 2020 2024 the board canceled the contract. Uh the contract was signed by me back in 2017 when I was an incorporated fire chief. Uh moving forward we felt that you know the town should now have the contract not the incorporation because we're no longer around. So we canceled the

contract. you know, there is there is some verbiage in the current contract that doesn't suit the town of Hzel, doesn't suit my needs. Uh, and I would hope that we don't sign that contract and Emily wasn't involved in that contract. So, you know, having a legal look at the new contract when it comes around is going to be very important. But me and Jackie have been attending meetings with with medic. Uh, we tried to negotiate a couple things here and there. Uh, Anthony Roberts has asked for even some uh ambulance response times and we got nothing.

We you know not only Anthony but I should say the whole county uh from the city of Charlotte and following our cancellation prior to us was the city of Charlotte they canceled their contract and now Cornelius fire department has canceled their fire their contract. So we're all waiting now. Uh medic has hired a uh what do you want to call it? consultant the consultant there's a healthare strategies their business practices

healthcare strategies is a uh is basically just going to look over the whole system as a whole uh they're going to look over you know the the types of responses that medic goes on to the types of responses that they're sending the fire service on they're trying they're dig deep to see what kind of numbers you know they really looking at when it comes to how long does it take to get a fire truck there and how long does it take to get a medic truck there you know are they using fire truck apparatus numbers and saying they're there in six there within six minutes or is it really taking 30 to 40 minutes and the type of calls that we go on. You know, I don't think I should be sending a fire truck on someone that's constipated or has broken their fingernail or an assault. I mean, those are the kind of things that we when that firet truck goes out of service because it's attending them or or sitting with that patient now waiting for a medic truck and something big happens in your home. You know, I'm obligated to to to act. The duty to act is upon me because I've been dispatched and I have to go take care of that patient. But there's just some types of calls that we don't need to be on. And that's the part that we're trying to negotiate our hardest on and make them understand. You know, Nobody would want to add a milk truck to the thousands of fire alarms, but a fire alarm is considered a structure fire until we get there and say, "No, it's not a structure fire. It's food on the stove or you said off by smoking." Now, if I added thousands of calls to the medic organization, they would say, "Oh, no, we don't want to go on that." Well, there's other calls I don't want to go on. So, do you see that? you know, you know, you take if you do your job, I'll do my job and police department will do their job and everybody will get along when we need to get along together and do our jobs together because we work when we're out there working together. We do a fabulous job. It's just that, you know, it's just making sure that we're we're available for you when you do 9 call 911.

I have some trigger words and and I just can't I'm a trained seal. I can't hold myself out of jumping through that. Hope Medic is one of them and So, one of the people that you Anthony has tasked to uh discuss with medic our current situation is me. Uh I will always I can't turn it off. I will discuss with you specifics. Please don't let me attempt to negotiate something that is in congruent with what you want. U this fiscal year we have budgeted. We expect to receive about $106,000 of our 67 million in the general fund uh of annual revenues from Medic. Medic is paying us about $100,000 to go on some calls. They don't pay us to go on every call, but they pay us to go on some calls. I'd like to give you two examples of calls that I refer to as low acuity calls or first responder only calls. We use several different pieces of terminology. The chief shares with me uh that our the county has an exclusive contract with medic to transport. We do not have transport capacity in our fire department to take a an individual to the hospital in a firet truck. We don't have the assets. We don't have the ambulances and we don't have the right to do that. The county has an exclusive right with medic to do that. Two calls that I'm aware of that uh they have dispatched fire departments on uh our fire department was dispatched on a uh constipation call. Uh a patient called in. They're constipated. Our million-doll fire truck with our personnel responded on that call.

I don't mean to talk ill of a patient. I'm not trying to cross a hippo line here. What I'm saying is I don't dispute that this person needed to be transported to the hospital. I dispute that our fire truck was going to be able to help them. So, our position is medic should have sent an ambulance and our fire truck should never have been dispatched. 100% of the truth is the next one I'm going to describe to you, uh, the chief was on a call dispatched by the city of Charlotte. our fire department did not go. But you helped me discuss or rationalize what a million-dollar fire truck was going to do for these people. And so a Charlotte uh fire truck got dispatch dispatched. Uh the call was a somebody called in and said, "I took a pregnancy test yesterday." Fourth pregnancy test, two pregnancy tests yesterday, and they were both positive. I started spotting this morning and I took a pregnancy test and it was negative and I need to go to the hospital. Okay. So, it I don't dispute this person needs medical care, emergency medical care maybe, but a Charlotte fire truck was dispatched on this call. And so, once the Charlotte firet truck arrives there, the patient can describe this to the Charlotte Fire Department again and there are three Charlotte firefighters standing outside waiting in the house until medic arrives to transport them. Medic is only receives payment if they transport. Medic I think don't mind going on that call. What was the Charlotte Fire Department? What how what aid can they give to this person? And so our current contract with medic says that we will respond and that we are dispatched whenever and wherever they dispatch us. And so until you tell me something different, I'm assuming that your position is we don't want to be

dispatched whenever and wherever. We are committed community partners. We believe we should respond uh in an emergency situ situation pinned in on the interstate. Please send our fire department. That's exactly who should go. We should help and medic has a part to play in that as well. We believe on uh our emergency calls, there's no doubt we should go. That $106,000 that we're receiving in the budget. I've said these words. If this is not your intent, please correct me publicly now. Keep your $106,000. We don't need that $106,000 to balance our budget. If we're not sending our truck with our gas and our personnel and the maintenance on our trucks, if we're not sending our people to see it for whatever period of time it takes medic to get there and see to it that nothing goes any worse with that patient before medic is able to respond. If I don't have to go on those low acuity clock calls, I really believe that there is a cost savings in our fire department budget. Um part of our research uh would suggest that medic did not add a single ambulance, not one, uh to uh respond to calls between 2018 until this year's budget. Uh I my position is that I believe when the municipalities began to complain, I believe what they're doing is sending our fire department on calls when they don't have the staff or the vehicles to do it. And so as the municipalities begin to complain about going on the low acuity calls uh for the first time in years rather than just replacing ambulances, they have an added budget this year of 10 to their fleet. So they had 72 ambulances that were able to respond on a regular basis. In 2018 through 2025, they had added nine.

They're adding 10 to their fleet this year. Isn't that great? That's awesome. Uh is that the right amount? I don't know. So hopefully the study will tell them that if they don't have the personnel to put on those ambulances, I'm not sure that helps either. Their position is they've added a lot of positions uh this year. Help me, Chief. Charlotte gave notice to cancel their contract in August of 23. You took action in December of 23. Uh at the end of the current fiscal year, uh we will have no contract. And so the words that I have said to the medic director is we need some relief for in the new contract from the obligation to respond to every call wherever and whenever and if you feel differently please communicate that to me and the chief so we can uh have different discussions with them. We negotiated a contract literally on July 4th last year uh when the contract was set to expire at midnight on the night of July 7th. I have asked them this year, can we please not wait till the last minute this year? We have a meeting, I think it's later in February, could be March for us to begin to negotiate that contract. They don't want to negotiate it last minute anymore than we do. It was inconvenient for everybody. We're committed community partners. There are calls we believe we should go on, frankly, without being compensated for them. Uh there are calls we believe we're being dispatched on that we should not go to. If you feel ly, please communicate that with us so we can negotiate differently with medic.

You know, if this was all about money, uh me and Chief Barbie and Fire Chief of Charlotte, we sat down and figured out like, hey, what what is the cost, you know, for to send fire trucks with an EMT and you know, if if half of our calls are, you know, what would be half of the fuel, right? If I'm going half if half my calls are are uh are are medical related and I'm spending $20,000 on fuel, well that means 10,000 of it is for medical. And so we put this cost estimate together, the three of us, and we did throughout the whole county and hunters came back at $1.6 million. Wow. $1.6 million. And that was just putting one EMT on a fire truck

every day. Guess how many we had? We had 18. We we were the only guy saying, "Hey, we're only charged you for one, you know, because that's what you would get when it am." So we we even we even try to, you know, recoup all the money or name. In fact, like I said, we did half of the maintenance. We had half of the fuel, but you know, $1.6 million is really what the cost is for these fire trucks that are going on these calls. And like Jackie said, $106,000 comes back. We would save that probably in the first month that we didn't go on these low calls.

We should be there for the high. We should be there for the true emergencies, the CPRs, the difficulty breathing, the asthma attacks, the going to the schools where there's young children that are having, you know, allergic reactions. When they flip on those lights, those red lights, we should flip on those. Thank you. Uh part-time to full-time staff, you know, you took the big step of obviously bringing on the municipal fire department. Uh it was 100% part-time and we in the first round of uh employee hiring we did our 18 18 uh yeah 18 uh full-time firefighters. U out of the six fire trucks that means that there's two that are fully staffed with full-timers. This is the next step. We want to do one more fire apparatus. We want to make three fire apps that will have full-time full-time firefighters. Uh and I'll give you the last which I thought was a bullet or a leaf. You know, this was uh Commissioner Walsh when he was our liaison. You know, when you put full-time firefighters on these fire trucks, they're yours. You know, no different than the the police department has members. When they're part- timerrs, they're somebody else's. And if that part-timer, you know, is called back for the city of Charlotte, they say, "Hey, we're we're getting ready to have some snow Saturday. I need you to work." Well, they're no longer available for us to put on a fire truck. But when we put them on the fire truck and they're making them full time, then we people on these fire trucks and uh that was your big step that you took when you took on the fire department. Uh and now we're just gradually taking steps to grow every year. You know, as the town grows, just just make sure you you let us grow with it. Uh and the 18, like I said, you know, we'll add another fire apparatus. Uh add the six fire apparatus that that run around town all day long going to fires and rescues and everything else that happens. You know, half of them half of that staff would be parttime and half of the staff would be full time.

I got one on this one, too. To me, your full-time employer compels a schedule. Anthony is my full-time employer. Jackie, I need you to spend two nights at Gralin. Here I go. Uh uh Jackie, I need you to show up at 7:30 to give a tour of New Town Hall. There I go. Your full-time employer compels a schedule. We have benefited wildly for years. Chief, 90% of your part-time staff are a full-time employee of a different fire department. Uh, and so when a full-time employer compels a schedule and when they're willing to pay you time and a half for overtime, which is 5075 bucks an hour, when your part-time employer's willing to pay you 22 bucks an hour, the way he puts his part-time to schedule now is he knows when his he's a full-time employer. He knows when his full-time employees are going to show up for work. He prepares the part-time schedule. Here's all the shifts that I have available. So, if he doesn't have part-time staff agree to come in and work those shifts, then he's not putting that truck on the road the way we are providing him budget to put that truck on the road. And so, if on a regular basis, he's saying, "I'm not having enough people choose to work these part-time shifts." That's why he's asking you to convert some of those part-time dollars to full-time dollars so he can compel a schedule so somebody shows up to

warrant being on that truck so that they'll be on that truck. You know what we're looking for is three captains. That's when you need more ship. Three engineers. And then we will backfield by hiring have another hiring process for firefighters. What this does though, you got to realize, you know, when you're a smaller department and you've been a full-time firefighter and now you have an opportunity become an engineer or or captain, now you go up to the next pay level. You know, there's a process to get to that process level from interviews. scenario based, but it shows growth and it nothing's better than, you know, someone be able to move up. You know, it comes with obviously a better salary and everything else that you get here, but and and that's what's important, too. I mean, growth is very important. Uh when we do hire the six firefighters that we'll need, we'll go outside the department, put out like we always done for job listings, working with HR. Last time we did this, uh I kept it open for one week. That's all I needed. I had applications that wanted to be a hunters or fireman for six positions. I cut it off after a week. If I couldn't find six people for you out of 62, I would have been ashamed. And that's how quick, you know, when people see on social media that the hundreds of fire departments hiring. We're fortunate that people do want to do this job. You know, it might be uh I'm not going to say my leadership, but it might be the the stations that we're building. It might be the fire apparatus that you help us buy. Something has got to draw and it's a lot of the it now is the you know the town benefits, the medical benefits that you provide. So they're leaving other departments to come here to work for hers. I have I have uh firefighters that come all the way from Hickory, you know, to be to be here. So proud proud to say that they are coming to Huntersville because they want to work. They want to work for the standard.

So just to go over the the budget items real fast. Uh again is to promote three captains to three engineers. So we'll need a little salary increase there. We will we'll back fill with the six firefighters and we'll go outside the department with that if there's any part-timers that would do work for us. You know we'll obviously you know be interested in them. Also uh we do have obviously extensive background checks that'll have a cost to it. Uh again when you buy when you promote firefighters or you take on new firefighters. There's always a a gear in increase. Every time we buy those the gear for the firefighters, it's about $5,000 a person. So, it's very expensive. It only lasts 10 years. Uh but that is part of it. Uh we do have a part-time EMS coordinator. Uh just yesterday alone, the part-time EMS coordinator and myself, we train 20 people from park and wreck uh how to do CPR, first aid, and infant CPR. So, they're all certified. Uh, I think a week before that did they go down to the police station. They worked with the police department uh getting them their certifications, you know, squared away, but we're working our way through other departments. And this is great. I mean, eventually, you know, it might be yourselves that want to take a CPR class or come sit in on that class, you know, and it's great that to know that kind of stuff. So, as we make our way around to the other departments, I mean, we feel this is really great. Uh the MS coordinator also takes care of uh all our inservice training that we need. Uh they take care of a lot of the the reports for EMS and the doctors that we practice, the doctor we practice under. Uh as we add more firefighters to the to the uh to the organization, there's always insurance uh premiums that go up. The more you risk your life in this job and add people to it, your insurance changes. It's a high-risisk job. They're not going to say, "Hey, you know, I noticed

you only worked 10 three days a month and now you go to work 10 days a month. You just took a higher risk on your life." So the town's insurance pre go up. So we have to cover the cost of that. And the last part is uh the department administrative announced. So, basically, I'm looking for somebody. Uh, right now, uh, finance does a lot with our, uh, carry looks at uh, paying the bills for the fire department. Uh, we're looking for someone that just be part of the fire department that could take care of that. Uh, that could help out Laura and HR when it comes to the hiring and the processes and everything. Maybe it'll take some some uh, that kind of jobs, you know, part of just just fire only. Uh, we never had one yet. I've never when I was with the incorporation. So, this is, you know, I think a future position here is going to be very very well used. Uh I don't see it uh going away. In fact, I think one of these days you might have your whole staff for fire department. No different than what the police department has.

That's all I have for you. Thank you. Thank you. Any questions? Are we How are we doing our retention of our current firefighters? Are we are we have the same issue like police were before? No, I mean we're fortunate enough that people do want to be in the firefighters.

The good thing is like I guess like I said when we put on the social media apps and everything people are willing to lo, you know, as long as they're certified and trained right now, that's what we look for because we want to get them in the door. They already have the certification. PCC is building a a fire training academy. I'm not sure if you know this on Beerh Hall Drive center. Uh when that happens, you know, people that want to go to college to get that certification just like BL go into their fire academy, they will come out with that certification and we can say, "Hey, you know, next year we're six people apply. You have the certification. You have everything you need." And this is how you get the young firefighters, you know, into your door because that's what you're looking for. You know, you're for that 20 year old, 22, 18 year old that, you know, took these college, maybe they got the associates degree and the next thing you want to know, you know, we put them right to work in our and go through some the basics that we want to teach you, but you have that certification that we need to put you on the roster.

Okay, thank you. It's break time. Break time. Five extra minutes.

All right, we're gonna We finished our break. George is here for HFA. Well, Zach is here. Um, floor is yours. Awesome. Thanks for being here.

Absolutely. Well, I appreciate everybody being here and thank you uh having us uh present what our current status status is and where we see HFA going to be going on in the future. Going to start off with talking about facility impact and uh community relations. HFA continues to see uh facility attendance in our largecale historical events uh with the swimming and diving events. We do continue to see an increased use and also the visitor uh participants that are in those events. Uh we're averaging anywhere from a little over 25,000 visitors right now, which is an increase of about 3,000 uh visitors for those large scale events for swimming and diving. Those those increases uh have every year continued to grow based off of the program that we are currently doing and and adding throughout the year. The exclusive partnerships with our nationally ranked um swimming and diving teams that operate out of the facility, Swim Mat Carolina, Carolina Dive Academy, they continually produce nationally ranked athletes and they are all preparing for either continuing their swimming and diving careers with if it's in the college and and scholarship opportunities and or more importantly got 28 Olympics coming up uh summer Olympics in LA. So they're all preparing and training for that. And so within those events, we have seen certainly a large increase uh from uh the again the visitor side as well as uh the overall attendance from u the athletes. We continue to be a destination for those competitive aquatics uh events in the region and that reputation is is bringing more and more uh events and requests to the facility itself. Looking ahead, FY26, our expectations are that the visi the

visitors that will be coming in for those events overall will continue to grow uh based on the the partnerships that we have with those uh individuals and also our regional high school programs that we uh participate in uh working with. Also going to be planning on expanding our uh our actual race series. Right now we're hosting uh annually the Huntersville Sprint. Uh but happy to report we'll be continuing and expanding on the race series itself and focusing on expanding to more of a a quarterly race series. So in the near future, you'll start seeing publications coming out and uh registrations available for our uh 5K that we're going to be hosting in May. So keep an eye out for that. Looking ahead uh excuse me, looking ahead to uh the summer and Uh talking about our holiday camp participation numbers, uh that also continues to grow at about a 5% rate year after year. Uh as you can imagine, families are looking at HFA to um have their children come to our programs to be uh participants and to continue um supporting our overall community and our goals. While this is a good thing as far as the increase in participation and enrollment, uh we do have some challenges as far as space limitations. facility space is is reaching its max capacity during our peak times and uh looking to really work on our dynamic excuse me our dynamic scheduling u changes so that way we can flex the spaces as much as possible between children's services and our fitness department. Uh so we do use uh the facility as best as we can with uh converting those spaces over for again either children's services andor f this and uh making sure that we're able to accommodate where we can with the growth that we're going to be expecting.

Constantly working to optimize how we use every every square foot like I said. And so it's going to be important for us to continually look at that schedule and be able to expand for uh the children and families that are a part of uh our programs. As far as community partnerships are concerned, we do again continually work with the dynamic scheduling so that way we can flex for if it's going to be a a one-time use or regular reoccurring type of program. Uh some of our current current partners that we work with, US Coast Guard Academy, uh Scout Scouting America, uh Girl Scouts of USA, regional schools, and of course the youth uh sports programs within these programs. Uh they're also looking for either the community room space that we have for trainings andor again the the specific swimming and diving uh portions of the facility itself. This really provides us the ability to impact the greater community and uh support our initiatives when making HFA a destination for everyone to utilize. We're touching so many aspects of community life from military to education to a youth development. It's amazing how much we can really do at that facility and not just from a uh a fitness and aquatic uh perspective. In addition, we have continued to expand the partnerships with local nonprofits and uh which go beyond obviously the the use of our space. For instance, our partnership with Angels and Sparrows is multifaceted. We're engaged in you offering youth fitness classes uh and a series specifically for their families and uh and children involved with Angels and Sparrows at no cost uh to them. We've also opened up our summer camp enrollment with offering 25 scholarship uh positions and spots for summer camp.

But it goes much further than that. And those of you that are members, you have always seen our donation tables and our supply um drives that we have done and certainly Angels and Sparrows and a few others that are highlighted on the on the uh slide here, Hope House and Cool Kids Clubhouse, which are mainly our long-standing partners. Uh but certainly we are open to uh working with other nonprofits in the area in order to serve their missions for the community itself. But each one of those drives, which are typically paired up with our membership uh in membership uh promos that we uh will run for for each month, um those drives have been tremendous tremendous impacts for uh the the nonprofits in the area. Uh with our giving tree that we had this past Christmas, uh we impacted, I believe it was about 25 children, uh about 70 families overall. Uh and certainly that goes from either providing you know toys and and and children's items uh that they would be looking for but also from your out household items as well cleaning products and and basic necessities overall. Uh hope hope house as well uh is one of those nonprofits that again we have a long-standing relationship with. uh again working with those donation opportunities and those supply drives uh they have truly felt an impact from our community overall and it pretty much brings us to the point of again thinking about where HFA stands in the community and how much we are doing for the community. It's not just the the fitness and aquatic center overall. Cool kids clubhouse provides support for children diagnosed with cancer. Uh this partnership is an opportunity for us to be an inclusive environment for those individuals and uh those those families that uh might might just need a little bit of a break. And so that partnership is going to be uh um certainly a focal

point for us as we move forward for the summer. Uh they typically are looking for uh opportunities to use our splash pad during the summer and give the kids a little bit of time over there. Uh so that will continue to uh expand as we move forward. Again, while these are the the three that are highlighted on the slide are our most uh our most recent and long-standing, we're certainly open to working with all of the nonprofits in the in the Huntersville area in order to uh support their missions. We've also partnered with uh local animal shelters. Uh most most recently was Cornelius Animal Shelter. Uh as far as the drives were concerned with support and donations, uh we did help uh support them um so that way they can uh certainly uh support the animal that they are um they are holding and waiting for for their forever homes. Uh the pre the first slide that I had up uh was a picture of that uh one of those donation uh opportunities and then we were able to do a great drive for u the shelter itself. We've also developed regional sponsor opportunities and community engagement partnerships with large players in the growing area. Uh we've all already partnered with some of the groups again listed on the bullet point but are beginning some new and uh expanded partnerships with groups such as um man homes are harder excuse me ardent at huntersville py uh for Bryant and uh the new new development that's coming online merit communities uh certainly we're also working with the local realtors manufacturing companies and uh new business coming to the region to strengthen our partnerships within uh those those areas. These partnerships obviously are multi-purpose, right? Uh they they connect to the community members. They get the engagement from the organizations themselves uh to to give back to the community. Uh but it also provides an opportunity for our members to give back as well and support

all of those uh organizations that we do partner with. and HFA is certainly a central hub uh to you know the continued growth and development that we're seeing here at uh in Huntersville. When it comes to memberships, this is the direct impact of all of the uh community partnerships that we are uh working with and and uh a part of. We're continuing to see a a a successful drive in the net memberships year-over-year membership growth rate of about 14% in a competitive market. That is uh a pretty outstanding number. Uh and it demonstrates obviously what we are doing, HFA is doing and the team members in order to continue driving the value that we provide at the facility itself. Uh while we have that 14% growth rate, the overall increase in our revenue is 2.5%. We continue to see the discounted rate memberships that we offer, excuse me, being the largest growth rates uh in in our uh populations. While we continue to see those growth rates in our standard rate operations and standard rate member classes, they certainly don't grow as quickly as the discounted rates themselves. Uh as we're evaluating and we're looking at the the local areas, we are continually reviewing the industry and the local competition uh to make sure that HFA remains not only competitive in our pricing model, but also within our offerings that we uh we are we currently have and looking to add to in the future. um with it at this time. We're confident that HFA is well positioned to remain competitive in this space and we continue to look at uh the overall uh offerings to make sure again we're providing the members what they're looking for. As far as the insurance programs are concerned, you

might recall HFA partners with multiple insurance providers uh for to be a top location for seniors in the local area. uh some of those opportunities are going to be truly subsidized andor free memberships for the member for the uh for the community uh based on the insurance providers. Uh unfortunately, we've seen a uh recently we were recently impacted uh by the changes implemented by one of the medical insurance subsidized programs. uh Blue Cross Blue Shield is no longer participating in fit on and with that uh it was a major impact for us in order to uh attract new members with the Blue Cross Blue Shield uh insurance itself. While these programs are covered um with the ability to either again sub subsidize or provide a no cost to the member itself, we do have other programs that we do work with uh fit on renew active and uh silver and fit. We're continuing to have conversations with additional insurance subsidized programs and uh more to come with that as we are looking to uh expand those opportunities uh within the uh the area. for the members going to move on to excuse me let me go back on the bottom uh talking about market expansion I talked about earlier as far as our our reach uh outside of the the four walls of the facility or 20 walls in the facility um we're looking to certainly uh continue our reach with the current partners that we have see where we can expand with them as well as the new opportunities that are in the area. Uh overall, increasing the market exposure through our community partnerships and overall facility provides us the ability to showcase uh facility discounted rates. Uh some of our most notable discounts are going to

be specifically for the active and veteran uh military uh certainly public uh safety as well as school employees and their families. A lot of the facilities in the area do not provide um a discounted membership for veterans. Uh so we have obviously uh pivoted to that uh ability and we're proud to be uh one of the only ones in the area that do provide uh the discounted memberships for not only active but also our veteran community. We're also expanding the facility scholarship opportunities for u the the location. All of these uh scholarship opportunities would be for the specific memberships that we offer andor for summer camp. So, as I mentioned before, uh we have 20 25 current spots available for uh Angels and Sparrows. We believe that the financial barriers of course uh should not impact uh the community and those that are looking to be a part of fitness and and wellness activities. So, we're certainly looking to uh make sure that we are um breaking down those barriers and be able to uh help out anybody that's looking to be a part of HFA. Moving on to capital and operational expenditures. Uh I want to shift to some of the items that we are currently in progress with and then we'll talk about some of the completed. Uh but the first one that you see there on the list for uh in progress is the detectron 3. Detron 3 uh as you as you know from a previous uh approval and I appreciate everybody's support on that. Uh we will be looking to uh replace and we are going to be replacing the HVAC system that does uh operate and um that does support the small 25 yard therapy pool that is a warmer climate overall versus our competitive large

pool and uh that system is going to be uh coming online uh in the May June time frame as far as the install of that new piece of equipment. Uh it'll be a two-phase stru uh two-phase project. The second phase will be the duck work uh which will happen in August. And so that will happen during our our general annual shutdown that we do for each pool. And so we'll align that properly so that way the users and the members are not impacted during that time frame with that installation itself. Uh the HVAC for the pools are certainly unique uh where they do mitigate the humidity and uh obviously provide the comfort level that the the user groups are looking for. Um, and as well as uh reducing the chloromines that our athletes andor members uh might experience in in an aquatic center. If you've been to a any of the indoor pools, um it's always been a challenge uh for any aquatic indoor facility and certainly we're no different. Um that unit will be uh again an exciting addition and an improvement to the overall infrastructure of the of the facility. our landscaping. Uh, as you have probably have seen and seen the emails that are coming out, uh, we're in the middle of our landscaping project for the the front of the building and our our west parking lot. Uh, that is ongoing. Uh, that is going to be a fantastic enhancement to the facility itself. Although it is cosmetic, uh, it's also going to be infrastructure improvement as well. So when you talk about drainage and uh you talk about overall support of the building, uh those are going to be important um an important and uh much needed improvement overall with the landscaping project. Uh we're going to be installing uh 43 trees uh plus

irrigation uh building and the the west parking lot itself. And uh we will also be uh looking to in the near future also adding to uh the landscaping with your perennials and annuals and all of that. So it will be a multi-stage approach. Uh but the the initial phase right now is going to be uh those those trees and they're all breaking those down now and and removing the existing in order to get everything prepared for uh the new planting that's going to occur overall. Uh so there will be some impact uh for the the membership uh parking lots. Uh but we've already communicated that out and we will continue to keep all of our user groups and members um u you know up to date as far as how that progress goes. Of course, this is going to be weather permitting. Um and we have we have a storm coming in this weekend. So, you know, we'll see what those delays uh or potential delays might be as we as we move forward. Uh third is going to be for our 50 meter pool and our equipment that serves all of our competitions. Uh so the competition pool, we do have uh a full timing system and scoreboard uh as well as a additional computer support. Uh so all of that is something that we are continually looking to uh to to either repair and or replace uh with all of the large events that we are hosting again every uh every year. This is going to be one of those demands that the user groups that we currently have, but also new user groups that are looking to use our facility, they're going to want to see all the modern equipment that is out there. Um, so that way, you know, we can continue to re remain competitive. We had started that process last year with the addition of the new HVAC systems in the large pool as well as the replastering and and lighting already uh that we added for the renovations. So now the next step is to continue uh improving those uh operational enhancements. Some of the completed projects that are

highlighted uh we did and I'm proud to to say that uh these went off knock wood without a hitch. Uh with the 50 meter pool, we did uh two different uh pro two different repairs in that area. We had one of the filtration pumps and motors uh that we did have to replace. We have we have two basic uh sand filtration uh pits in the backyard of of of the facility and outdoor filtration room area. One of those motors and pumps was replaced as well as the uh the filter media for that uh same uh pit that we have. The sand filter media is the is the actual um substance that helps uh filtrate the system and uh maintain the quality water that everybody's looking for. The laterals that were replaced for the facility actually help with the flow of the water within the system. And so all of that had been done pretty much in conjunction with each other. Once we had changed out the motor and the pump, uh we needed to also go ahead and and do the sand filter change in that area as well. Uh so we will be looking to in the future uh doing the second pit that that is uh on site for that facility. You think about a million gallons of water in that 50 meter pool uh you need a you need a a strong and and reliable filtration system in order to maintain uh that facility as as needed. Certainly with a a facility uh as big as ours is and the age of the facility the infrastructure is going to be always important for us. And so unfortunately we did have an emergency repair uh that had to happen this year as well uh with the hot water supply to the HVAC system for the uh the 50 uh with an aging building. Again, uh there is no surprise that this would occur as far as the emergencies are concerned. We're just trying to uh mitigate and be uh proactive in those approaches, but inevitably something's going to happen.

some ongoing projects and uh things we're looking at for uh for the future. Uh we continually are looking at uh the roof and looking at any type of review and or repairs that might need to be done. Uh making parking lot improvements and and repairs as needed. We're also already thinking about the summertime and getting ready for our splash pad. I know it's uh pretty cold outside right now, but we're already in planning mode for that. Uh so with uh with the summer uh you can imagine the amount of excitement uh for that splash pad and all the features that are there. And so uh we are looking at uh making some renovations and repairs to the pool deck and and the pump room improvements so that way uh we're ready to go for um the overall for the overall user experience. We're also looking at implementing some energy uh conservation uh measures and thank you to Bobby for uh connecting us with train uh they will be here u in fact they were just here for their initial uh review on the facility and uh probably in about uh 30 to 60 days they'll have a report on us uh for us in order to review it and see uh where we can possibly do some energy cost savings overall. So uh thank you Bobby for that. As you can imagine, overall again with the the facility being 20 plus years old, the infrastructure is going to be the most important for us and a lot of these major systems uh you know the the protection for them are going to be the most important overall. Uh and you know being able to provide uh preventative maintenance schedules for those uh for those for those uh pieces of equipment uh are going to be the most important overall. rather be as proactive as as possible and trying to mitigate uh any type of short-lived or or shortened lifespan uh that we might have seen in the past. We're trying to avoid that. Uh

we're also addressing the bleachers uh that are in the large pool space for all of our spectators. If you've been to the facility over the weekends when we're hosting one of those large events, uh you know, you're going to see anywhere from 1,200 to 1500 uh either participants and athletes uh and and visitors overall. So, uh the bleachers do get uh the the use and uh certainly we're going to try to mitigate as much as we can for those uh repairs andor uh renovations as as we uh look forward to uh the future. Uh as far as fitness equipment is concerned, same thing. Just talking to chief vaugh about preventative maintenance schedules for equipment and uh our fitness equipment is just over about four years old and so we are starting to see uh some of those repairs kick in uh and um andor potential replacements whether it's peacemeal or uh we'll you know take a look and see if we need to do a couple multiple pieces of equipment at a time. Uh but certainly, you know, the heavy usage that we're seeing uh is going to be a major impact there. As far as future capital planning and uh for uh capital projects, don't get scared. Uh this is just a a list. Uh this is not a request. So, myself, Zach, and uh and town staff will certainly get together and uh provide you guys uh some guidance as far as what we are looking at overall as far as uh the the needs of the facility itself. The list here is is is basically uh set up in matter of importance based on the the protecting the building and uh also the the successful programs that we currently are running and or looking to run uh in the future. So with the bulkhead, the 50 meter bulkhead that's listed up there, uh that is the movable wall that helps us uh create that dynamic scheduling for the large pool itself. And with that movable wall, we're able to reconfigure

the pool for competitions or practices or uh just recreational u you know programming. And so uh right now it's essential that we maintain that flexibility in order to meet the demand that that is there from all of our user groups. And uh with that it the current situation is that it is getting increasingly more difficult to be moving that bulkhead to where we need it to be basically about halfway down the pool. Um it typically lives on one end of the pool and we have to we have to move it manually to the middle of the pool. So that is going to be one uh that is uh going to be coming down uh the main locker room hot water storage tanks and uh that whole hot water systems for the main locker rooms. uh that is in need of a redesign and as one and as I just said one of the the the vessels uh needs to be replaced based off of uh state inspection and certification. Uh there is a crack in that storage vessel. The state is aware of it and they are working with us on the timeline for that replacement itself due to the size and the location of the tanks. Uh basically the the room was built around the tanks. So, the large vessels that we have about 525 gallons per vessel. Both of those uh would have to be broken down and uh removed because they won't fit through a standard doorway. And so, we'll have to look at how to uh how to do that. Plus, in that same mechanical room, we do have our main uh transform electrical transformer and some other large uh pieces of equipment in there. So, uh that is going to be a uh a redesign. I have the original I have the uh the redesign plans just waiting for the uh the quotes to come in for the actual work itself. Um talking about the summer again as we as we approach the summer and hope everybody praying for warmer weather. Uh splash pad is obviously going to be uh the most important and uh we want to be able to support that

facility as best as we can. So we have a couple of areas that we're looking at uh for the for repairs andor replacement. Um you're going to be looking at uh up here as far as the uh features are concerned the rehabilitation of the existing uh features that we have. Uh and also uh a little bit further down on the on the uh slide is going to be the uh replacement of the actual water slide that we have. Um so you can see those both up there. As far as the 25 yard pool is concerned, uh we talked about the the detectron already being replaced, the HVAC uh systems. Uh but also we're going to be looking at uh replacing the heater that supports that pool. Um as you know that water therapy uh pool it that water temperature is higher than our competition pool. Uh so we keep that pool around 87 degrees overall on average. Uh and that heater is uh struggling to maintain consistent water temperatures. U not saying that there's an issue right now, but it's a it's going to be a a concern if we don't uh that in the future. Also with the 25 uh is going to be a replplastering of that facility just like we did for the 50 meter pool uh last year. This plastering is going to have to occur uh in order to maintain the air the water quality and the overall experience for uh the users in in that space. It's showing uh increased signs of wear and tear uh but it's not a uh a priority at this moment. As far as a west locker room boiler replacement, uh that is probably one of our our oldest pieces of equipment in the facility. Um we were trying to look back at the dating on that. Uh it's certainly going to be about 12 uh maybe even 15 years old. Uh so that is aging out uh on the lifespan of that um that unit itself. Certainly it's working right now. Uh but it just again being

trying to be as proactive as possible. Couple other items. the 50 meter infrared heating uh stations. This is going to be uh specific to the diving programs that we uh that we support. Again, if you think about uh that if you think about the 50 meter pool being a destination for national and regional competitions, uh we need to provide a comfort level for the divers that are going to be a part of that facility. Those infrared stations are going to be primarily on the on the back side of the the pool by the diving boards and the platforms uh just to help uh the comfort level that for the divers themselves. Uh so that is an opportunity where we can help uh support those programs. The 50 meter pool uh scoreboard replacement is another area that we uh want to take a look at uh again to remain competitive within the area for uh these large scale events and uh getting uh our facility to be u you know set up to the the modern-day standards. Uh the scoreboard that we currently have is um you know we're seeing its uh fair share of repairs and mitigations on that. So uh we will be looking at a uh looking do a replacement on that scoreboard. And then finally, studio A. Studio A for our group classes uh right now is again all of our facility itself is a um a fantastic facility for anybody looking to use uh and be a part of our group exercise classes. Um we offer we average 85 classes per week. Uh so there is a heavy usage and heavy uh flow for those studios and uh studio A is one of those areas that we pinpointed for a renovation that uh certainly needs to happen uh in the future for uh again bringing it up to modern day um state-of-the-art facility. As I mentioned uh these are not uh uh

full requests at this moment. Uh this is just a list and a a a roadmap to what we're looking to do over the next couple of years. Uh we try to be as strategic as possible in order to make sure that these are being uh uh addressed and before they um you know pro provide us an opportunity for potentially a shutdown or a closure for a particular facility. Um obviously we don't want that. The members don't want that and uh we want to stay ahead of it. So this list is is uh all-encompassing on that basic uh roadmap itself. Are any of these um like need to be done this year. Is there more is there some we need to push up

the uh the hot water um hot water design for the the locker rooms I would say is probably going to be one of the top priorities. Main hot locker room. I'm sorry. It's the main locker room for the lock. The main lock room. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. What we'll probably do is get Joey Zack to prioritize these and see if we can knock some out sooner rather than later. So, yeah, like I said, we haven't had that quite discussion yet, but I'm sure we will have that and be able to bring some back. Yeah. Which one?

Just for clarity, the list as you see it today is generally in that priority list. Okay.

That's why that main lock one is so high. Uh it's just a question of what can we potentially push off versus we think absolutely has to happen. Again, knock on wood, everything working as it is. Um with the newest news from the state, we probably would be looking to to shift one and two. Um but in regards to what we can discuss through the budgeting process, you know, certainly our hope would be to get more than just that done this year if possible. Uh certainly because bulkhead repairs. We don't want to reach a stalemate where all of a sudden we can't uh perform the functions for our year- round roofs or outside groups coming in.

So, that right now is generally in order of what we think is important for the facility, but we can certainly discuss other items if we want to move those. Okay. We may come back and do them all. So, let's do it. So, we who knows, you never know. and some of the big ticket items in the front parts. We're hoping that'll save the maintenance so that we're not throwing good money at bad.

I have a couple things. Uh on the second and third slide, we're talking about community relationships and membership. Um I noticed on some of the community partners that we have, they have some of their partners listed on their websites, but not HFA. I was wondering if we can go to uh for example Hope House for example to see if they would add HFA on their website as a partner because you never know who's watching that website or may want to contribute or become a a member. Another is um you talked about the uh discounts for active duty and veterans. We just opened up that veteran service office. I think it's going to be a hot spot hot time now where you go meet with her and just put something as simple as the water aerobics for for senior veterans. Sure.

Um but if you could put some HFA stuff just in her office, it could give us more exposure. And lastly, when we talk about the trees, have you thought about bering with some of the Huntersville, the larger Huntersville landscape companies such as Shepherd's Landscaping, Metro Landscaping or Site One? We probably could b with them and put some of their advertisement inside of the facility. for some of the trees, right, for sharper, right? Yeah, we we've had discussions with those vendors and we're working with them through that. Yeah. So, absolutely. And and to your point about the the marketing and and getting some collateral to those. Yeah, we'll certainly work with you on that. Excellent. Thanks. Any other questions?

Perfect. I appreciate everybody and certainly a shout out to to Bobby, finance team, planning, everybody that has supported public works and and parks and wreck uh during the uh during our time. Appreciate all of your support and uh thank you. Thank you for all that information. All right. Any other questions of uh the HFA team before we maybe try to knock out one more item? I mean that way maybe get you home earlier tomorrow so you can get some bread and milk or whatever you need or alcohol which I think we're going to try

maybe Bobby you want to try let's try it while Bobb's getting prepped and I think he's going to tell you what what kind of what kind of dent you're making in the tain obviously we're not doing thousands But uh you know we move from zero and making progress with partnerships but he's going to talk about about that and what we're trying to do etc. what we you all of us are trying to do and maybe get some feedback.

Yeah. Thanks Anthony. Um so I thought I'd start um uh looking back at the goals that had we had a number of items related to attainable housing. Um one of those was to implement recommendations from the mayor's task force. Um that conversation really sparked that we just simply need to be asking for affordable units, something we have not been doing. Um so this slide is kind of a shout out to previous boards. Um the most recent board and I think maybe even the first action that you guys took, you got some um affordable units out of Station South. And just asking that question over the last couple of years, you know, it's over 60 affordable units um been created or added to what's going to be coming to Hunterville future development. Um just by asking or putting it in as part of the uh reasonzoning process. So kind of wanted to give a nod and a shout out. Uh that's a pretty good number in the last couple years. Um I've got some more depressing information data at the end that shows just the math of how it all comes together. and it really makes the 63 units seem like a lot. Um, uh, so one of the other, uh, aspects coming out of the mayor's task force, um, we were sort of the the third of the three Lake Norman towns to go through that process. We have never really done a proper housing needs assessment. Um, and y'all forgive me. I apologize. I'm a little nasly, so uh, and I talk a little fast, so if it doesn't all come out, just raise your hand. I'll slow down. Um, not the not the the words, not the nasal. Um, coming out. Um there's my joke for the day. Um but wanted to pull out a couple of takeaways. Did the uh DFI, the development finance initiative at the school of government, they conducted the housing needs assessment for us. Um these are some of the takeaways and and you really see how much conditions in Huntersville and and really all of Meckllinburg County and the country changed after COVID. you you'll see just how the numbers um over the last kind of the 5year period between call it pre2020

and and 2023 24 um change. Huntersville's median household income is about 120,000 compared to uh roughly 84,000 for Methmber County. Uh the town has a 72% home ownership rate. um the the stats stay crunched. Uh which this is is something that I I heard a lot uh from Mayor Wash when he would talk about Cornelius's perspective on affordable housing and that our workers can't they're not living here. All the the traffic we complain about all the time. It's because no one that's working here can afford to live here. Uh and the data showed that 89% of workers in Huntersville live outside the town with 46% of those commuting workers earning less than 40,000 a year. Um, and the the stats they pulled were from late 24 showed that Hunterville had the highest median rents and the second highest median home sales price among neighboring communities, which is Cornelius, Davidson, and Morsville. Uh, with prices continuing to rise. Uh, over 2,000 low to moderate income renters have a housing need. Um, over 2,300 low to moderate income homeowners may be struggling to afford their homes. and based on the price of housing in Huntersville, um you need to be making 165,000 or more basically to be able to afford to buy a home in Huntersville these days. Um th those were pretty telling stats they they shared with us. Uh and then you heard everybody talk about the increase in costs. Um cost to build a home in Meckllinburgg County was 242,000 in 2018 had risen to almost 387,000 in 2024. Even when we talk to Habitat, it's costing close to 300,000 for them to build a house these days. Um, that cost is has really grown a lot. Um, and so the the DFI staff, they they did meet with community stakeholders while they were here with us. Um, and that feedback uh was housing for extremely low-income households, i.e. restaurant, retail

workers, um, is needed as well as housing for moderate income households. uh a preference to see a blend of home ownership and multif family options uh but in a smaller fashion uh and then interest in seeing properties in a in a concentrated area as opposed to kind of scattered all over town. Um so those were the kind of the key takeaways from that. The second part of the attainable housing um or the uh housing assessment they did for us and one of the goals that you had for last year was to look at town owned properties. So, we asked the DFI, we said, "Hey, here's our list of town owned properties." Um, and if you see those two on the left, uh, those are publicly owned. We we own this site in Rosedale. The site at Long Creek is owned by the the um school system, but the Historic Landmarks Commission has a hand in that, too, because they're trying to preserve the A building and the history in the front of that parcel. And then the other two, Norman Park and Arlington Circle. Those are areas we've had our eye on. We've owned lots and worked with Habitat and Hope House in the past in Norman Park. Uh, and we've had our eyes on these because these subdivisions were approved by the county back in the 50s. They're platted, but the the streets have never been built. And because the streets have never been built, you can't build a house if it doesn't front on a public street in Huntersville. So, the land value before CO was very cheap. You could buy lots for 10 $15,000. And the hope was uh we we were fortunate enough to get a federal grant for $2 million uh for the purposes of acquiring lots for affordable housing. The thought was we could try to go into some of these areas without the infrastructure uh and maybe buy up a whole street so that it makes sense to go in and put the road in because we could facilitate the affordable housing. Um but with COVID, a lot of these lots got speculated. People from out of town bought them. uh they bought them sighted on scene and now they're trying to sell and unload them for 2575 all over the map. Um so I don't

know how and where those go but we asked the uh the DFI to look at these as well um because ultimately in our stock of of properties we didn't have a lot that really rose to the top for consideration. Um we have no opportunities in Huntersville that would qualify for a 9% low-income housing tax credit. Um, these here would qualify for a 4% low-income housing tax credit. Uh, and they were trying to look for roughly, you know, areas you could get 40 to 60 multif family units or about 30 town homes. Um, and so just the math is, uh, it's a little telling. Um, this is something we've never done before. I'm not certain that this is a path we want to go. U, but seeing that we've got two new commissioners, this continues to be a topic of interest. Just kind of wanted to throw this out there. The DFI has given us a scope of services to uh consider if we wanted to continue working with them looking at this path looking at these sites. Um they would they would be willing to help development feasibility even recruiting a developer to the table. Um but even then that doesn't guarantee that you're going to get affordable housing at the end of the day. um you'll see the kind of the projected and I think I don't know planning might argue that they're they're probably not going to get all the units that are shown in the scenarios maybe a little bit overly simplified what could be on the land um but you see that financial gap uh and the gap per unit we have access to Meckllinburgg County home funds that's not going to pay down all that gap um and so I got one other slide here that just kind of shows how that math comes together um call a a $25 million price tag for 100 units. Uh 30% would be a bank loan. The equity from the low-inccome housing tax credit would cover 33%. Developer might defer his fee to the end, his or her fee to the end. That's 2%. Still got a gap of 34%. That's still 9 to10 million. Uh I'm not sure how we

get to that. And that's kind of why I started with the slide I did of kudos for getting 63 units over the last couple years because you didn't have to pay anything for that and and you're getting it from the private sector who's seeing the value in workforce housing as part of their developments. And they're also providing 80 to 120% of median income housing in some cases which we can only serve 80% and below. Um and and that 80 to 120 is sort of the missing middle that gets talked about with your workforce. Um and anything much below 60% I don't know that it makes sense up here because we just don't have services that folks might also need at those lower income levels. Um so I don't really have an answer. I kind of wanted just to give a a snapshot. This is you know working with DFI thus far is how we've used some of the 150,000 the board has set aside. We've uh used some of those funds to do some I'll call it opportunity cost to do some environmental analysis and environmental review which we have to do to be able to spend those grant dollars uh for potential sites in certain parts of town uh where we might be able to use those dollars. Um you know we continue to look for way most sense the most bang for the buck uh for that $2 million. Um we continue to partner with Habitat. We continue to support CDBG applications for rehab and repair. Um I know Becca's meeting regularly with the Lake Norman CDC. Um we just got an email. I don't know if y'all got the email from them showing off um some of the work they did with Habitat for some Rehab and Repair in town to try to preserve the existing housing that we do have. Um so I'd say we're doing a lot of little things. You know, this is this is kind of a big thing and and um I know some of you heard heard the presentation from DFI, Scott and Heather, if y'all, you know, want want to hear that. be more than happy to come and give a presentation of all the data that they collected and and um answer questions, talk through the sites. Um the one in Rosedale, which was

sort of the site for them that rose to the top because you've got access to all kinds of services, amenities, grocery store, greenway, uh transit. Um I don't know, that's that's one of those we got a handful of sites all over town. Some of us are not always sure how and why the town ever came to own them, but there's a lot of rock that would need to be blasted over there uh before you could ever build anything. And that's seems pretty disruptive to an existing community. So, um don't have much else. I just kind of wanted to give you this snapshot to really say kudos for um you know, using your process to get um to get affordable lots. I think we're getting as much out of this as we might get trying to jump through all the hoops like you heard from Stephen. When you get somebody else's money or federal or state money, you're jumping through lots of hoops. It adds time, it adds money. Um, and it's not always easy. U, we we do hear from developers who are looking for opportunities in town. Um, and we kind of encourage them like, hey, knows the answer if you don't ask. Um, but but some sites probably make more sense than others. Um, and certainly we have uh signed off on letters of support for folks pursuing tax credits for things in Huntersville. Uh, I think that one site on Batty's Ford Road and that senior uh option. I think it's on its third attempt at a tax credit deal. You know, these things are just it's not a it's not a straight line. Unfortunately,

Brian says it's getting ready to go. So, third time's the charm. I think what's important here is that you know this started I think uh actually the task force maybe Melinda Bale was mayor at that time they set the task force up the new board came in um mayor from new board came in that time and actually took that and started putting into action and doing some of these studies and then started to basically push back and development say hey you need to give us these units I think what I'd take from this is you know it's a good way I mean we're making good progress but when these new multi projects come forward, I would push for more units. This is the best way. This is what I'd say easiest way to get them. But if we're going to approve multif family uh that's coming before us, I would push back and try to get more units. That's the way we get, you know, these numbers up higher. We still got to figure out what to do with the $2 million that we have. I mean, we got time. Um, as Bobby said, we're trying all different approaches and, you know, looking at land. We've done these studies. Um you know we have um u given may not be the right word but we have you know I'll use my words given you know some of the properties that we had attained you know to the habitats to um hope house different organizations to you know provide various needs out there. We'll continue to do that. We continue to work with even CDBG funds and different things and um rehab and houses. We'll continue to do that, but um we still have that 2 million. It's probably available to what 231

2031 to try to figure that out. And truth be told, we kind of squirreled it away in our pocket hoping whatever we could do with that to try to get the uh abandoned Caldwell station and we dangle that out there to somebody to help pay down whatever to help them move it along.

And maybe there's a partnership there if someone comes forth and buys that. And we could maybe outside the bikes. Maybe there's a building or unit that we could put money towards and say, "Hey, we want to force that to be." I don't know how all that works and how we should structure through that, but that's been a thought, you know, to try to revive that and that may be a good location for. But, um, like I said, great great progress. It's really more said, hey, doing a great job. Let's continue to push these multif family developers. They want to come and they're asking for reasonzoning. Perfect time. You don't have to reszone it. So if you want to resone it, I would push that hard if that's the goal that you want to continue to try to achieve. That's where I'd be pushing hard. You do not have to reload. We have 63 units there. Is there a program and we talk about attainable housing for our first responders and teachers? Do we have a program in place for our first responders? and should we push this to our new CMS rep for our district to let her know, okay, here are some units that you can push uh within CMS for our district for our tannable housing.

I'm going to look to Emily for the nuance of that. I think you can promote itbody, but you can't it's probably not set it aside probably not set aside just for those I mean as far getting the word or as far as markers probably first come first serve unless they have some criteria. I do know that um Dream Key, they used to partner with CMS and first responders um for their home buying program. Yeah. And then CMS is now they're probably dreamy to do their own housing

push like they have all these programs to help people get qualified and they're doing their kind of own internal thing. So definitely happening. um within this I can't remember in this study did we get like a an idea of like the magic I like goal number of attainable housing units we should be shooting for in the 50-year future or is that a I need to double check if that's in there I I don't know I feel like that number is going to be forever unattended yeah I mean it's kind of a magical number that you would never reach but

um but I was like looking at this I was about it. So, you know, we did 63 in the 20, we'll say the 24 25 term, but then if we on that other slide where it had like a Rosedale site and it had like we pretend we could get a 100 units there, like maybe we set I'm putting this out there to the board for the you know 26 27 term that we aim for like a 100 units in that term get approved or get people to agree to and then So then that like creates like we're fulfilling that Rosedale philosophy by pushing it out to people who want to build.

Yeah. I'll I'll go back through the data. I'll find that number. I I think they gave us a number, but I mean it's like a magical unicorn number. But as long as it's clear it's a unicorn number. I'll find it.

Yeah. Well, I mean it's like if I mean we have all these projects coming forward and we sort of have a they kind of set up a goal for us right there saying hey you have this pro property you could you know theoretically build 100 units well there's a goal for us why don't we say all right here's our goal for this term like let's let's try to make 100 units come to fruition in this term however that comes it might be through developers it might be through CDC it might be through other ways But it doesn't have to be 100. It else could be 90. It could be 80. It be whatever.

Well, we got project, you know, it's coming for you now. And of course, I see one of that a couple of that says 10 units. And I don't know what the new project proposing, but uh they need to be pushing 20. They need to be pushing numbers.

So something to think about. That's all this was. It's really more for information, let you know, doing a good job, but we got to keep pushing. Yeah, we remain open to ideas, questions. Um, Brian and his staff and Becca, um, she's really starting to dig into this more for us. So, um, just let us know. Bobby, did we ever get any um feedback from I know there was a meeting with True Homes and they had that uh partnership with the church in Huntersville where they were doing attainable housing on that property. Did we ever hear anything back from them? Yeah, we had a conceptual meeting with them next week after

Stump Town near the mayor. I I know they're conceptually looking at it. I don't know if anything more formal than that has has come through. I don't think we've gotten an official submitt yet. Um is that that metal link? Is that okay? They have that huge we had a sit down meeting a lot of entertain interaction gave a lot of feedback to their plan. We'll see what they come back. Yeah. I mean they huge lot that's just sitting there. It's been like that for years. So, and Bobby, can you send this out to the pool? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

And I'll make sure that you guys have the the full study that they did, too. I'll send that again as well. Yeah. And that that was one of the um one of the sessions in the mayor's task force was we had a couple of faith-based representatives come um because there more fewer people are going to church fewer people putting in the plate. Churches are looking to to do what they can to diversify their revenues uh and they've got land. So, a number of churches, you mentioned Sump Town, you know, I know they've looked at it that that church once upon a time did um but churches are looking at that and I know there are examples in Charlotte where they're using some of their properties to turn into housing for support to us too. Okay.

So, I think I think that's a great opportunity. That's it. Um I I don't think we have time to tackle any other ones, but uh plus we got to eat dinner one at 6. Yep. We're supposed to be there at 6. So, wow. Wait, no. More like 5:30. Yeah. So, you can mingle for force family fun. You know, I love to do that. Um in the what's it called? Maritime room. Marine room. Atlantis. Atlantis room. I'll get there. That's the pool room. I guess that's the pool room with the mermaid on the wall. Y.

So, we're gonna um adjourn the first day. We'll turn off the feed and the