City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, Garden City. Like to call to order our uh city council budget meeting for Monday, March 2nd, 2026 at 6 PM. Our first order of business is the pledge of allegiance. Please rise. I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Uh, [clears throat] Mr. Smith, if you take roll call, please. Mayor Jacobs, here. Mayor Prom Dold here. Council member Hughes, here. Council member Wit, here. Council member King, here. Council member Dold

here. Council member Kerapotus here. You have a quorum of seven. Okay. Thank you. Uh item four is our approval of the agenda. Mayor, council member Wit like to make a motion to approve the city council budget meeting for Monday, March 2nd at support. [snorts] Support from council member Kerapotus. Discussion from table from the public. All in favor?

I opposed. Motion passes. 70. Okay, we're into our items for consideration, our budget department presentations. Introduction of Mr. Gibbons. Thank you, Mayor and Councel. Um, tonight begins the budget uh pro part of the budget process where we um have each department present um essentially uh where they're at this year, where they want to go next year, and what they've done with your money um over the past year. And um some of the uh some of the some of it will be some details and some will be more broad strokes, but um ultimately it's this part of the process that helps us build a budget essentially department by department. Um before you tonight, you'll see the police, the fire, uh city administration, personnel, uh general government services, and the court. Contained in all those budgets is essentially just the first draft. These are department requests. Um, as our uh budget gets pieces together, we build and then we make determinations and prioritize ultimately uh ending with me presenting you a budget before April 1st of this year so that we can uh begin the process of making those considerations on where we're going to spend our money and how we're going to prioritize the tax dollars and the money we take in. Um the first part will be my introduction. I believe it's important um when we have a budget discussion. Some of this will be repetitive from last year, but we are in definitely a different um place than we [clears throat] were at last year through some hard work and uh great effort by our employees. Um but I still think it's important to always set the table on what what it looks like to be a a Michigan municipality um subject to the to the type of taxation and the revenue sharing and Prop A and Hedley. Um so to understand um you know where we get our funding from how that's constrained in some respects how it's not in others and um what I want to add this year too is just in terms of legacy cost what we're looking at over the next 10 to 15 years as far as that's

concerned. Um we've done some research lately that can provide some information and kind of give us what our job I think should be over the next 10 years or so as to how to run the city financially. Um but first 202526 budget we are in the middle of we're currently operating about 3% below. I stated this at the last meeting under by about a million. Um which is is pretty good considering we have some projects going on such as uh continuing the fire station rehabilitation that isn't necessarily the expected cost. We're kind of uh dealing with some of the issues there that weren't uh necessarily expected and we're finding them out as we go. Um so to be operating at this point of the year still below budget um at a steady pace is good. Uh I I you know you never want to be budget is a guess at the ultimately you're guessing that you know history will guide you and your uh your revenues will come in as they're supposed to. Each year we always in Garden City do like I say a lot more with less and this year is no different. Um but if you recall last year our use of fund balance was over 2 and a half million. Uh this year the projected is 374,000 but we're not even heading at that pace. We're we're operating under. So that's good. I just always again set the table. I like to you know start with a budget philosophy. You know I I believe we create a long-term financial [clears throat] plan to create service and financial stability by doing the following. Return to and build those on those uh financial decisions made during the great recession. We dedicate funds to maintain and improve services lower longterm costs. We size our operations based on what we can afford. maintain that high fund balance and seek opportunities to get value to our citizens. And I think we do that well and we'll continue to do that next year. And I that's the standard to which I hold our department heads is to do just that. How much value can you produce um for the revenues or for the uh for the amount of money you're given? 2526 budget we reduced and eliminated our overall reliance in the general fund. So now we can prioritize

increasing fund balance according to our fund balance policy. we can uh plan for future revenues and see if we can dedicate those towards reducing legacy costs. Though I have two, I think, pretty informative slides on that tonight that'll kind of guide those decisions and identify and correct any areas where last year's budget cuts impacted long-term essential service delivery. I'm asking all department heads to address staffing in [clears throat] their presentations. You know, what they need, what you know, there's there's always um you know, what you can get by with and and what's ideal. You know, we always strive for the ideal, but with municipal financing, we live with what we can do, but we at least have to do um the same consistent level of service garden city always provides. We continue to evaluate all capital projects based on whether they reduce operational costs versus increase them. We prioritize capital spending that reduces and grant fund and spending that reduces operational costs, not increase. From a base level, how are we funded? The city receives about $11 million in general operating tax revenue and approximately $2 million from public safety millage. Um to put that into context, uh the police and fire department alone combined to over $13 million in expenses. [snorts] So [clears throat] um we rely heavily on the remainder of operations to be funded by state revenue sharing assessments and each department's ability to generate its own revenue. Some departments do, some don't, but um there are other sources of funding that come to support them. water department, roads, those things have outside sources that um can help us get by. So, what's municipal financing look like in Michigan? I always refer back to this chart to understand our history here in Garden City and what we've gotten through. Um if you could see in 2008 2009 our the city's state equalized value which is what the state values each home at which is about half of what each home is worth um stood at 885 million and we were able to tax about 726 million of it. I mean that's close to 90% could be taxed because of Prop A and Headley over the course of time and the Great Recession

reducing property values. the line between the blue and the red were pretty in line until we got to um started to recover from the Great Recession, which means property values rose exponentially, but our ability to tax them can only increase at a rate consistent with inflation. So, uh the blue is never going to catch up to the red unless there's a great dip again, and we don't want that. um meaning back in 2008 2009 we were able to operate with a lot more funds considering the value of the dollar in 2008 2009 than we can now and I I created this chart just to get the perspective really in today's dollars our taxable value is more like 1.2 billion and our ability to tax it would have been almost a billion of that those dollars these days we have about a$1.2 2 billion dollar state equalized value, but we're only able to tax uh 793 million worth of that roughly. So, um this isn't a speech advocating for higher taxes or more things. But the reality is there's less money coming in that um than there used to be. So, we have to do more with less and we have. Same thing that this reflects when you say, okay, what are you able to tax? What does that translate to? Um we were able to tax $1 million in 2006. We're able to tax $11 million in 2026. That's 20 years later, 20 years of inflation. We're dealing with the exactly the same amount of money with a lot less buying power. You if you do that uh and you consider it inflation, it was like in 2006 we had 18 bill 18 million worth of revenue coming in and now we have 11. If you just look at that in terms of dollars as they were in 2006, the value of a dollar and the value of the dollar is today. Same thing with state shared revenue. Um if the the state when Prop A and Headley passed which limited our ability to uh keep our taxable value equal to our state equal equalized value um they

promised state revenue sharing um and it's been given but reduced over time and ultimately the value of what they used to give us in ' 06 is about worth 4.7 million. Today it's worth about 3.8 million. Um so um you know again doing a little more with less. So how does this translate in 20 in 2000 I look back at the 200 uh a 2012 budget I had it listed in there our staffing levels in one of the charts 20201 in that budget year we had 174 full-time employees 203 full-time equivalent employees meaning if you add the part-time plus the full-time 203 essentially 40hour employees. Fast forward 25 years later, we got 114 full-time employees, 143 full-time equivalent employees. So, you add our part-time, we're still far, far below where we were in 2000. Not saying we need those levels exactly, but just to understand the job is getting done in 25 years later with 30 to 35% less people. And our population was 30,000 in 2000. It's 27,000 in 2025. So our population went down by 10% but the people servicing those same amount of people nearly same amount of people is reduced by a third upcoming this year. You'll notice in our budget um those staff members uh through mostly union contracts are entitled to a 3% contract raise negotiated um pretty consistent with average raises throughout uh Michigan. Uh these are the charts I really want to talk about and I think it sets the table for planning for the next 10 years. I I've spoken to council a number of times about developing a financial plan that's realistic and acknowledges um the challenges we face but also you know working towards a bright future. And some decisions were made prior to my

time. Um some of them made in 2015 and some of them made in 2009 during the course and the and the sort of the hangover of the great recession to get us to a better place in the middle of 2030. And if you look at this chart, this is uh from MS. Um I asked them to do a study to tell me what would happen uh how much would we have to spend to get our funding levels raised and how much would it uh how much could we get to a place where our funding levels start to drop. Um, fortunately in 2015 there was a decision made that already kind of put this on its path and maybe it was mandated by MS, maybe it was just from our uh, administration at the time, but that blue line represents what we're u projected to pay towards the pension fund in order to keep it solvent. You see it rising till mid to end of 2030s and then it drops precipitously as we start to reach the 100% funded. What happens then is we start not having to contribute millions of dollars to our pension system and we start having that money for city services. Um we can make how much it's appropriate to tax at those times. Um and it gets us out of the out of where we're at these days which is you know doing more with less and might put us in a time where when these when these costs start to fall to really starting to grow some extra services. That said, it isn't say when I when I show you these charts, I'm not showing you that we won't do great things now, but it does put everything in context and sort of sets the table about what can be done. But I what I was really encouraged when I saw these charts is essentially even if we do everything, if we don't contribute extra money, we're on a great path towards a a significant reduction in uh contributions over the next 10 years. There is there is light at the end of the tunnel. The hard work will pay off. Um and we're moving in the right direction. The same thing goes with uh other employee benefits such as you know retirey healthcare and those things. Um a decision was made in 2009 to stop offering retirey healthcare to any employees hired after 2009. Immediately that is doesn't amount to an

immediate financial impact but long term it does reduce cost drastically. So if you assume that this year whatever amount we're paying it will continue to rise till 2034 up to about 25% of what the cost is today. So 25% over eight years, but then you'll notice as the blue goes down, we like when it goes down, it'll go down um to a point where we're actually paying less in a number of years in the future than we do now. So, as a city manager, what I see my goal is right now is is to work with council to develop a plan that maintains strong, stable services that improve each year, but also um maintain the ability to get to this this point where we don't have to do any uh drastic reductions or anything um extreme in order to get to 2034, 2035 when we can start to really look at the back end of um recovering from the cost. We we are on a plan and I wanted a 10-year plan and it was actually nice to see based on some actuary reports that we are on a 10-year plan and as long as we stay the course and continue to operate in a fiscally responsible manner, don't take on any new grand expenses, but just slowly build back that I think we'll be in a really good place. Um, you know, that I think that's more than a lot of municipalities can say um that we're able to maintain the levels of service we have throughout this entire time. So it's a it's a it's a testament to our previous administrations um who negotiated those contracts in 09 10 12 13 14 15 um through the real dark days of postrecession they've given us a plan that we can now see light at the end of the tunnel and these are actuarial almost you know when the actuary gives you numbers it's usually in the worst case scenarios so I anticipate that uh you know we'll move towards these expeditiously uh those those good times where our where our retire retirement healthcare benefit contributions are lower. Our our pension uh contributions are lower. Um

in fact, um I saw a our our our retirey healthcare liability was 121 million in 2020. Um it's now 65 millionish. So we've seen drastic reductions um on on those costs. So I anticipate that we're moving in a direction that's consistent with those charts, if not better. Um, again, it's about doing more with less, and we've demonstrated that over time. We're we're we are, when I look back at our our staffing history, we're um down lower than we were for the previous six years, but we're higher than we were over the decade prior. And uh, you know, we'll continue to seek extra grant funding. will continue to seek extra revenues um from outside sources to deliver those services and uh find the most efficient way to produce values for our citizens. Um the next would be the police in your order, but I think because I'm up here and because the PowerPoint's up here, I'm going to cover general services, general government services, um mayor and council fund, boards of commission fund, and my uh administration and personnel funds. So, um you'll have those before you. What you'll notice in the packet you were given that says [snorts] 202627 budget presentations. You'll see all those departments. You'll also see attached to those that have personnel attached to them that there's a personnel report with the uh um individuals in that division with uh their compensation and just to get a rough idea of what each department looks like. So I like to build a budget uh piece by piece um and we will do that tonight. Uh we'll start to do that tonight. First though, the general government services fund. Um, this is the catch-all. It provides uh an a fund number for collecting tax revenue. Um, paying out costs that relate to all the departments. Um, auditing costs, those things where every department has a service being performed by it. General government services will cover that. Um,

and also on the revenue side, collect all those revenues that need to be dispersed to the individual departments. Um, but start from a broad sense. When I point out some of these general government service fund account numbers, um, just to give you some perspective. There's a few that always stick out to me that don't necessarily have an explanation, I like to make sure we understand them. The first is rent. In the general government service fund, the rent for uh, Maplewood is recognized, not the rent. You'll see the other rents that are at the Radcliffe Center tied directly to the Radcliffe Center. Um, we moved the Maplewood wood out into the general services fund. Um, as we near the end of the budget, I may actually uh separate Maplewood completely from general government services, both the electrical, the water, the um the rent side, put in its own revenue and expense account so you can have a good look at just the costs of Maplewood Center based on its revenues and expenditures. Um, but for now, it's in the general government services fund, but as we move towards the end of the month, um, I want to see what that looks like if it's pulled out separately. I like to be able to evaluate each se service we provide in a manner that tells us, you know, how much does this truly cost the city and uh it's it it makes for easier evaluations as the year goes on. Um next is the auditing. Like I said, there there's auditing at that's the account to pay for yearly audit by Plant Moran. And then self- insurance hospitalization. It's an account that plays for contractually obligated health insurance costs and others beyond insurance coverages that's sort of spread across the departments. Uh the next is the mayor and council fund and boards of commissions fund. These are pretty static funds. Um they provide um the compensation for mayor and council that provides um legal services. So our city attorney is paid out of this fund. Um the city attorney works for Garden City Council. It is their uh attorney and it is paid from there. So uh when you might be looking at this like well why why do why does council need a legal services fund? Well, you're you're paying it for the

entire city. And then, um, this was discussed last year, and I made sure I added this one as recognitions. It's an account to pay for the public recognition of groups, businesses, citizens, and volunteers throughout the year who improve Garden City without compensation. Um, there was there's been a drastic decrease. This was $23,000 in 2023. Um, it was reduced to 6,000 last year. I don't even know if we'll hit that this year. Um, but we have used some of it to recognize. Um it was also used to pay for volunteer dinner and things like that. Um you know but given what we were facing last year and really what we continue to face um it's not an account that I want to see a major increase into. Um I want to prioritize that those funds in to another uh part of the city. That's not to say we don't want to recognize um our citizens and our volunteers throughout the year. We we get a tremendous value from them. It's just what can we afford to do to recognize them? I think it's less than $23,000. And [clears throat] last on my list, u mine are pretty simple. Uh there's the city manager um account fund and the human resources fund. U mine are pretty straightforward, mostly related to my compensation and um office supplies and such like that. Um and then the next is human resources who is really a department that provides a service to every single department like the human resources is the HR for police, fire, all those. They don't have their own individuals. So, human resources provides the human resources uh services for all of Garden City. That counts, I like to point out there is the arbitration cases. Um, you might say, "Wow, we're spending a lot in arbitration. I didn't know we had one." Well, it's not just the arbitration cases that get paid out of that. It's our employment attorney. Um, hopefully one who helps us avoid arbitration cases. Um, but he's paid out of that. And then, uh, the other to point out is physical examinations. That's for um pre-employment physicals and psychological testing for departments that require it and any current employee testing uh physical or psychological as necessary.

So um those are essentially the ones I I control. Um and uh in one of the last meetings it was requested that we discuss some of the training and I'm actually that was a really good it was it's a good question to have to answer because it's nice to answer questions when you really like the answer you get to give. Um I've asked that of all our departments uh to talk about their training. the police one, I'm going to be particularly impressed with just the amount of hours of training going to our law enforcement. But um as far as myself, I I you know, I did some training at with the uh our pension system uh to learn about legacy cost uh administration and planning um this year. Uh our HR director, I I actually started to run out of room um earn sick deck leave deck training. There's a lot of things in the HR. It's constantly changing and you need to stay a breast of the laws and the rules and the policies and the best practices and she does an excellent job. Um she's member of a local HR professional uh group that meets she meets with them regularly. She's done uh this year she went to Merse pension training. She went to AI in the workplace. Uh employee behavior and performance evaluation training, performance documentation, HR 101, payroll and recordkeeping, employee onboarding, employee retention, dealing with difficult people in work, and employee onboarding uh for filling out W9s and W4s and those changes that come through there. So, she's done a tremendous amount of training um that I I'm impressed to see when I asked for the list. Uh so, I wanted to put it on here even though it barely fit. Um and I think there's some more she mentioned, but I said I'm out of room. Um but um it's very important that we develop professionally our especially our department heads and those responsible for overseeing our uh our funds and uh we're doing so uh definitely on the administrative side and I'm excited that when the police get to talk about that. That is my overview. That is my um introduction sort of setting the table for the next departments that come up. And as we move forward and uh before I move on to invite the police up, I welcome any uh any questions from council.

Council have any questions? I do. Council member Kerapotus.

Um just so everybody knows exactly what you're talking about when you're talking about why won't we be funding the pension in 2036. So once a pension reaches 100% funded, the best part about it is uh the money it makes by being in the market pays for your pension system. So one of the reasons I I asked MS like, "Hey, how do I get there?" Is because I know what happens when you do. Um all of a sudden, you're going to free up a lot of money we have to pay into the system just to make ends meet and to prepare for the future. The system begins to take care of itself. 100% funded pension system. Um, which we've had uh over 30 years ago here. Um, you don't contri have to contribute as a city because the fund makes money for itself and that's what we're working towards. Um, and and it was really exciting to see those numbers come in and see, you know, there is an end there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We are moving that direction. Do would I still want to advocate for adding uh more funds to get there faster? Yes. because the sooner we're there, the more that money is making money for us, the less our citizens tax dollars have to go towards that and more it can go towards other city services. But kudos to those who are here in 2008, 2009, 2010 who put both the uh the OPED, which was a hard decision, not an easy thing to do, the the retirey healthcare and the pension system stuff in motion over those years. Um because, you know, we can see it now and it's and and we're headed there. Just got to be disciplined until we get there.

Okay, couple more. um no retire no retirement health care for employees hired after 2009. Right. Correct. So um at some point there's not going to be those employees that need that healthcare and that's why that's going to stop. Correct. Correct. So what happens when they um need healthcare after they turn is it 62 that they go on Medicare or Currently our retirees do not have any retirement healthcare benefit. Um I do foresee as you see the chart go down. I would hope um the city considers at some point especially those uh who work in positions who you know uh the the nature of the work wears on their bodies like the police and fire like the police and fire or DPS who you know are at 3 in the morning in a uh ditch in a hole right

in a hole. So um you know I if I trust me as uh you know as Tim G is a police chief and garden city citizen person who work for I I want them to have that benefit at least some form of that benefit back someday. um we are probably not in a financial position to immediately do so. But I do think when you look at that kind of chart and you look at the average population of our our um our employees which is rather young given there was so much turnover the last few years with retirements and new people coming in that there is an avenue in the next 5 to 10 years to start to consider that pretty heavily. Um, okay. So, then one more question. Everyone always asked me this. So, our state equalized value, the numbers that you show from like 200 before 2008 before the crash and all that.

Yes. So, we have the same amount of houses. We have just about the same amount of people. So, why are the why is this the amount that we can tax going down? Um, that's because of or not going up more. Um, because proposition A and Headley owned it. Um so the thing with prop if if it would have continued without a major crash in the real estate market we probably would have it probably would have been okay because um you know uh there would have been no big drop to have to catch back up to the the problem is state equalized value can can run the race really fast and we're the tortoise on our taxable value being drugged by Prop A and Headedley because we can't go faster than 5% right

even if inflation's 7% we can't go up past five based on the law. Um, so it's just sort of a system that's that that was set up one to to de absolutely you have to keep property taxes within your community reasonable, but it also set up a system where where there's a giant real estate crash, you're never really going to catch back up. That blue can't catch up to the red as unless the red dips back down again, and we don't want that. We don't want that. So, and one more question about that. Um, obviously our our property taxes have increased. Everybody knows, you know, that you have a $120,000 brick ranch, three bedrooms with a basement. Our taxes are way different than they were even 10 years ago. So, I mean, I've always talked about our goal is to increase our population. Absolutely.

So that we get more federal and state funding, but also by ways of getting that, it's getting more housing. And in my opinion, more housing equals higher taxable than getting apartments. Is that about right? I I I would say it's a little more complicated because um let's say and uh this is no direction. This isn't a speaking on planning or anything like that, but let's say a major development comes in and it develops on pieces of land that are currently undeveloped or new. The the property tax and the uh our ability to tax it becomes uncapped, right? But for any any build

for any build. Yes. And um so you know I guess I can't make the a one for one comparison because you know uh if we're talking about a major apartment complex on a smaller piece of land that goes way up in the air is that going to produce a higher taxable value? Yeah. Um but does that have other effects to the community that may be harmful to the rest of the property value? Maybe. You know I'm just comparing like a a 10-unit apartment complex to two houses. The two houses actually is uncapped brand new selling at 300,000. It's seems to be pretty comparable for better results.

Yeah. I at the end of the day, it just comes back to the value of the thing you build on that piece of property. And uh so I you know, but at the same time, I I always go back to a decision that was made a long time ago in the city of Garden City before any of us were around was to not move Wonderland Mall to Ford Middle. And it was because we wanted a smallbedroom community. And that was a philosophy that has done us very well over a long period of time. as commercial districts come and go, um, small residential homes provide a level of stability for taxation that's that's quite impressive and it's stood the test of time. So, I think it's always about balancing. You know, you want to develop pieces of land um that fit within your community plan that maximize the value of that community. Thank you.

No problem. Okay, further questions uh from table? Okay, do you need a minute? Uh, Zack, take a minute to uh get ready for the next uh department head.

All set. Also, okay, at this time, uh, bring up uh, our police chief, Mr. Bob Aronowski. [sighs] Well, I follow the chief once again, our retired Chief Gibbons. Thank you for the introduction there with the segue on training. I'll get started right away. So, I'm here to present the police department for 2025 2026. What do we do and where do we want to go?

All right. So, as everybody's aware, I think we cover this quite a bit at the police department. We really practice the quality of life. We think that the quality of life that we can help bring to the city is very important and something that we do well. Uh where we do that is through the crime safety. We've created the different crime resource officers to address these individually and as a whole with patrol. We also have strengthened our code enforcement with the rental and vacant property people as well as an extra officer to handle the nuisance and abatement stuff like sales issues. I put this slide up here though because the other week when council was up here talking about the budget, they talked about quality of life for the employees. And I thought it was nice to hear that not only do we preach quality of life for the people in the city, but it was nice to get that back from council and that it was more than just we're employees, but that you also felt a need to express that you also appreciate our quality of life that we have at the police station, fire department, and everywhere else. So, I want to start with that and say thank you for recognizing that. Um, one thing I did find when I was doing some research is community policing's really always been around with the police department and in the 1970s I found a blurb that the police unions were sponsoring different elementary schools to attend the Shrine Circus and in 1970 they bought 150 students and 25 parents tickets to go to the Shrine Circus along with the police officers. I'm not making any assumptions that anybody went there or anything like that, but I just thought that was really cool to hear way back in the day that they were still had quality interactions like that. Um, so I wanted to just highlight that 1970s. I'm not sure why I'm on the 1970s, but we shall see some more. Um, so 254 25 we did uh reduce crime a little bit. Not too much, but enough it went down. So 2024,

2023, you could kind of see where they plateaued. 2025, we were able to knock it down. I think that had something to do with we just had a lot more visibility in our patrols. We had brought back the traffic officers, so we were out there more. They saw police sirens, police lights, and that that may have drove that down a little bit. We will wait and see some more. Um and also I checked and I will say that crime nationwide has been reduced to so we are following a trend across the nation and reduction in crime. Uh this is just a quick overview of how we're organized there. We have the chief of police. Then we have the patrol division division. I'll play on words there because we have the patrol operations and the community resource underneath that division. And then the investigation and code enforcement division are over on the other side of the house um and work out of there. To expand on that a little bit for you, we have the patrol department which operates with the community resource officers. We have the investigations which is responsible for the detective bureau and our task force officers when we have them. We currently don't have any, but we are still receiving forefeiter monies from when they were in the office working. Um, so those will continue to trickle in as they get through their process for us. So there is a little legacy I guess you could call it there with them and hopefully we'll get back to where we can put people back and continue that flow. Uh, talk to that about a little bit later. And then we have records and code enforcement which is our unsworn uh employees of the department and they work there. They do the code enforcement records, training and certification tracking, stuff like that. So, that's a quick overview of that. Uh, currently we're budgeted at 33 sworn police officers and we'll probably stay there for the next budget year two. Um, that equals about 1.27 per thousand residents, which isn't too bad looking at the national average. We're still within the bounds there. Uh we have five

full-time civilian employees, the records clerk, three code enforcement officers, and one executive administrative assistant. Underneath code enforcement, you have uh one code enforcement officer, the animal control officer is underneath that, too. And then the rental and vacant property officers underneath that house, too. We have one part-time code enforcement clerk, officer. Um that person answers the phones and is the person you probably talk to when you call the ordinance department. They're very good at their job. Would be nice to give him a few more hours, but we shall see. Um, traditionally, the road patrol work supplemented by the community resource officers who address quality of life issues such as traffic issues enforcement, community engagement and communication, school leaison, juvenile issues, court leaison, jail management, mental health, and crisis intervention. So the importance of our community involvement is it builds trust and when you build trust it creates a better platform to share information and to actually get communication going with people. And I use it, it's probably not the best um analogy, but I use it like going to a restaurant and you get a waiter or waitress that serves you and you go back and you start to develop a relationship and you go back because you like you talk to them and you think that they're nice people and you enjoy yourself and as you talk more, you share more information about things and so on and so forth. It's the same thing. That's what we're trying to do at the police department is build that trust so that we can share information back and forth both ways and and if we just have to break it down through more interactions and once you get to that point then we can work on solving the problem because we have that trust issue going on and if we get that working we increase safety for everybody in the community for ourselves and everybody else. So it's a process but we work on that every single day. One of the places where that I think shows the

fastest is through traffic enforcement. Um, our community engagement and education allows us to increase our patrols where there's an issue. If we have the people trust us to tell us, hey, we have speeders here, we have speeders there, people are running red lights, we can respond to that and try to solve that problem by increasing our patrol coverage. Uh, we can also do education through our social media with we did that through operation safe, stop the bus. uh [clears throat] excuse me, the bus stop program that we've done for the last two years where we let people know, hey, you see a bus, the red lights come out, you got to stop. We're going to have officers out there. We're going to enforce this. Uh we also use the data driven policing to check for hotspots in the areas and then increase our patrols there. One thing with the traffic officer that we put in in probably about August of last year, I didn't realize that the west side of the city has the most speeding problems or the most violations anyways because that's where we're focused right now is over Farmington Venoi and it just seems like every hour I'm hearing them calling out traffic over there. Had we not done a survey and had a traffic car out there, we probably would overlook it because nobody's calling us to say, "Hey, there's speeders going on or there's somebody running the stop sign or the red light of the Marquette." So, it was an interesting thing that came out of this fact of having the traffic officer and finding out where spots are. We know middle belt block because we see it. We don't necessarily see things further away and we found that out. So, I look at it as a positive. We're over there enforcing it in case anybody wants to know. So, community resources, this was another area I wanted to talk about is we [clears throat] know because we talk about all the time. We have community resource office and we have community resource officers, but we also have programs and we just started I think December, January, we had a few officers come up and talk about programs that they're in charge of. And I'd like to continue that throughout the year. But

just to give a quick overview, we have the the RAD training which we're sponsoring the class next month I think was April starts. Um which is for women and it's a self-defense and empowerment type training. The citizens academy, everybody's familiar with that. But we also offer Alice training which may get lost in the mix, but that's for schools and government buildings and we have trained officers that will come in and and instruct lecture on how to protect yourself if there's an active violence situation that shows up. Um, we also over the last year have started to train with the churches underneath the craft training. Um, which I thought was really important and it's nice to see that our officers are now interacting with some of the churches in the community and establishing that relationship. [clears throat] Two things that are coming up this year, fingers crossed, is we will have two certified crime prevention specialists. And what that is is that's a certification for [clears throat] a police officer that's trained to proactively reduce crime through community engagement, environmental design, and risk assessment. So in easier terms, they're basically going to class to learn how to come out and do a survey for a business, a church, a school, a residence on how you can make your environment safer. Um, I think that'll be a great program once we get them certified and they go out there and do it. We've done a couple test runs with some businesses in the city, offered some advice on some breaking and enterings and stuff like that. When this gets running, we should be able to do a lot more and make the city a little bit safer. Uh the second thing is a salvage vehicle inspector, which I didn't know was even offered to local police officers. I always thought it was an MSP thing, but they're offering it this year. And we have a couple officers that are interested in it. And this one is basically our officers would be trained to be salvage vehicle inspectors. And what they would do is they would go out to some of these body shops that rebuild

vehicles or formally wrecked vehicles. And they're the ones that inspect it to make sure that they've complied with all the laws and everything else on how to rebuild it and that it's roadw worthy and has legitimate parts on it. So, the nice thing about that is we're allowed to charge a fee for that service and they need to have it done. So, it should work out good for us and the city um if this comes to fruition. We have to see there's a lot of steps involved, but it looks like a good program for us to get into. Now, how do we pay for some of these things? We use grant funding a lot. Um, our community resource officers have a lot of grant funding that offset their salaries. The judicial resource officer uh has an MIDC grant which funds about 65%. I'm not good with numbers, but last year we looked to recoup about $118,000 for that officer's um use. And the state runs October to October. The good thing is it's October to October. The bad thing is is ours is July to July and summer December December and keeping track of when and when. [clears throat] In this case for the next year, we did get the grant approved. Uh there was some hangup because the state of Michigan was being a little hesitant to give out and they wanted to reevaluate everything. But we do have funding again for another year of the judicial judicial resource officer. the uh school resource officers, those are funded by the Garden City Schools. They pay us approximately $150,000 for two um and that usually comes in around June or July for that payment. So those are funded partially. The um task force officers that we have, we don't have anybody filling it right now. Those also were had some grant funding. For instance, the Southeast Michigan Motor Crimes Association officer would be 80%

funded when we put somebody in them. currently is vacant. The uh DEA task force officers, their overtime was funded. That's also currently vacant. The state of Michigan, I think I mentioned it before, you may or may not know, created grants so that we can send police academy recruits and the state of Michigan will offset their salary cost for us. We get $20,000 per recruit. Um last year we sent two recruits. The first recruit, easy peasy, there was money. They got the $20,000. The second recruit was at the end of the year in the later academy. There was no money left. We didn't think we were going to get any, but then they came through for us and said, "Hey, here's your money for this recruit, too." So, it worked out good. I did a [snorts] little more further research and it sounds like even though monies may get used, people drop out ofmies. Fortunately, that money goes back into the pool, which allowed us to be able to pay for that one officer. Uh, currently we have three officers in the school craft academy. They all qualify for the grant, and we should be getting the money when they graduate to reimburse us for their costs. We've also always had a bulletproof vest grant that pays 50% of the vest for each officer. Currently, there's a $1,900 in it. Um, we've applied for reimbursement for eight more vests. So, we've applied for this year's budget bulletproof vest grant. You know, we try because we have the grant and everything. We try to replace everybody's vest every five years. That's when the warranty runs out on the vest. So, every five years, we're flipping vests out for the officers. And so, this is just a continuing, it just goes on and on. We get the grants, we use the grant up, we get the grant, we apply for more. So, the uh Axon grant for the body cams, the car cameras, we've got one year left on that

grant. There's a balance of $32,000 to offset this year's cost. Um, we've been checking on it. The Department of Justice apparently is holding up all of the grants for these this matter. Um, so we just keep checking and checking, waiting for it to show up. I don't have a ruling why or anything. They're re-evaluating it. They've just holding on to the money for now. So, we were checking because we wanted to reapply for another grant, but they're like, "Well, you can't reapply yet because you don't know where this grant is." So, sometimes it's a headache. The um [clears throat] newest one is the state funding for the continuing professional education of police officers. This came in three years ago. They finally [clears throat] decided to give us some money to be able to tell us what we had to train our officers on. The first year was $500. The second year was $1,000. And this year it was $1,000. The the good bad is I'm very grateful that they give us $1,000 to train our officers. It's just the timing of when they count our officers that matters. So we received $32,000 this year because at the time they counted, we had 32 officers on the books. So it's just a matter of making sure that we don't have 25 or 26 when we really have 33. So that was nice to see that comes in. We have to use that for their education. Um, we apply throughout the year for Merrmma grants to offset some different things. Lately, we've been using, well, not lately, we've always been using it, but lately it seems like we're doing more leadership classes, which Merma puts out um grants for, and some other trainings that are coming up. We also were able to get grants for. It's not a huge offset, but it's about a 75% offset. So, we'll get back two grand to 2500 for the trainings, which isn't bad. Um and then currently we have some outstanding grants. We were trying to get a office of highway safety.

Anyways, the office of highway safety grant uh we submitted for two. They're basically if we can get them they're for distracted and hazardous driving details. They would pay for the officers overtime for us to put officers on the street on overtime. Uh we would get reimbursed for it that way. One is directly through us that we put in for the other one is a countywide type grant program. So we would be running it through the county who runs it through the state. It comes to us just different steps you take. Uh there also is another one that we're working on which is going to be like a county grant too. It's called a critical mapping um grant and basically that would be a $25,000 grant to map the schools, the churches and government buildings. We've already done it once in 2023. They came in and mapped all the buildings. This would be to update to the next latest thing just to make sure that our maps stay up to date. So those are what we're working on for grants and those are the grants that we have. Uh want to talk a little bit about federal asset for fitcher otherwise known as equitable sharing program through department of justice and the treasury. Um so what is it? The federal program is allowing state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies to receive a share of proceeds from assets seized or forfeit forfeited in federal cases such as drug trafficking, money laundering, or fraud. We had the two um federal task force officers. They worked out of DEA, so most of their cases were the drug trafficking. I do believe they might have one money laundering, but the majority were drug trafficking. Um the it's administered by the Department of Justice, the assets forefeiter fund and the treasury forefeiter fund. The the reason there's two is the Department of Justice has certain like the DEA, FBI um groups that fall underneath them and the Treasury Department has different

groups like the IRS and Secret Service which fall under them. So our officers again we stick them into the DEA task force. So we fall under the DOJ. Uh the reason that they do it is they want to punish or deter crime by depriving criminals of proceeds and tools, disrupt criminal enterprises, enhance cooperation between federal, state, local, and tribal agencies. Um they put in here a few times, it's a supplement. It's not to replace agency budgets with shared funds. How the sharing works is the agencies participating in joint investigations can request up to 80% of net proceeds based on contribution level. Payments are typically typically in cash, not directly property transfer since 2023 policy change. So our task force officers will go out, they work, they're good workers. They would get onto a case. the case may would obviously involve some sort of drug nexus. They wind up seizing funds, house, cars, whatever it may be. As part of that investigation, they can then turn in paperwork to request um a percentage of the proceeds after all the court process is done. They put down 80% on their paperwork. I have yet to see one come in over 20% um of part of the proceeds. Our usual is about 10% of whatever is seized. So if we see $1,600, we get $160, something like that. That's the easy math. Um, so the requirements for permissible uses, law enforcement purposes only, equipment, training, technology, task force, community programs, optional safety, must supplement, not replace existing budgets, requirements, and oversight agency must register via e-share portal, which is what we use to communicate with them. Maintain SAM government registration, which we already do. Um the annual equitable sharing agreement certification is required. They make you watch a video. Um we're subject to

audits by them because they consider it as f federal financial assistance and they can end it at any time too. So it's always on them. Um and then in 2025 I found interesting fact that there was $62 million shared throughout the nation with state and local agencies from the DOJ data. So there's that. And then moving back to the continuing professional education um which I think is a great thing and it's really important. However, prior to them deciding that we had to do this, we were already kind of um big on training. So, as you'll see, what the program is is they give us $1,000 to use for the officer's expense. [clears throat] And in return, they tell us what 24 hours of their yearly training has to be. It's mandated. Uh they pick a topic and you have to do eight hours of mandatory training on that. and then we can pick 16 hours of elected training as long as it's a course approved by MCOs's to use CPE funds on. So once you get through the 24 hours, you're good to go. Uh Lieutenant Hall was here earlier. I was going to confirm with him, but in January, we already took care of the eight hour mandatory training for our department. We have like two officers that we still have to do because they missed it, but we already kicked that off the books. Um, for the year the budget year last year, GPC GCPD officers had 18,236 hours of training. That's not anybody that was in the academy. That's just the hours of training that the officers took. And that's about 600 hours per officer. Um, so as you can see, we take training pretty serious at the police department. And having such a young department, I think it's just so important that they get so much different training and so many different people to see and network with and talk to. Um the courses range from leadership schools, instructor schools, certification, reertification courses, in-house training, you know, we do deescalation in house, we get our legal updates in house, tasers, firearms, duty to intervene, defensive

tactics. Those are all yearly trainings that we do inhouse. [snorts]

Um the K9 officer in addition to all the training he does for us, he also winds up training 32 to 40 hours a month strictly with his K9 at the K9 Academy. Um and then he reertifies him and the dog reertify every two years and Officer Stanley Blue just reertified in January 2026. He's another one that I'd like to have come in here and talk to you a little bit about at a council meeting on what's required to reertify. I think you'll find it interesting. So we'll keep that in mind. And then we also have officers that are on the Western Mobile Field Force. Uh they train quarterly. So four times a year they get together with the team and they train. I believe as they move up the levels and become um more supervisors within that program. They meet more often and do more uh table talking and training and planning and stuff like that. But currently where our officers are at, they go once a quarter. Then we also have a western wing crisis negotiation team member and they meet once a month and do their training. So that pretty much covers the training at the PD. There's other trainings I'm sure I missed but that's the majority of them. So then what did we accomplish in 2025 26? So we placed two officers through the regional policemies. We were reimbursed for their [clears throat] salaries, $20,000 each officer. We sent three command officers to different leadership schools. Those were grant funded. We received 75% of their funds back. Um we sent one lieutenant. He went to the staff and command school and now all the lieutenants have got that have attended the staff and command schools. So all three lieutenants are there. We have the sergeant currently attending shield leadership course which is a frontline

firstline supervisor course. Um they meet two times a month for 10 months. I don't know how many hours that works out to be but so it's a very extensive program. Uh [clears throat] and then we have one that still needs to go and after that all of our sergeants will have attended a leadership course also. So everybody in command will have had at least one leadership course under their belt and as they move up to lieutenant we would want to get them into the staff in command. We're fortunate that one of our sergeants already have staff already has staff in command. Um, so he's ahead of the game. Then we continue to update the HVAC system at GCPD. The only reason I put that in here is because we noticed that there's been quite a decline in our cost per usage since the new system came online. So, it's worth noting that updating this equipment is saving the city a lot of money. It's a big expenditure, but we're getting paid back on it. Um then of course the old we police department answered 119,815 calls for service works out to 54 per day and it was 803 more than last year and we did it with less is more staffing. So we also had in the ordinance department 2729 ordinance enforcement actions. Um, just as an interesting fact, 166 of them were trashgarbage related and there was 511 animal complaints. One thing that I'm proud of is we acquired newer tasers for no monetary cost. One of our lieutenants was able to use networking to find out that another department was getting new tasers and what were they going to do with their old tasers? So, he was able to work out a deal where we got them for no cost. Uh, we were able to out the entire department with new tasers, more updated, more new technology, even though it's old. It's better than the ones we had. Um, and [clears throat] then I think I may have sent said something, but the first week that they were out there, God bless, we had an

incident where the officer had to use his taser. The first darting missed, but because the new taser is half two, which our old ones didn't, he was able to deploy the second darts, which took effect and neutralized the suspect who had a knife and was charging at him. So, it was like, "Thank heavens we got it, but somebody was looking out for us to get us that stuff." Um then drone wise we finally were able to receive our certificate of waiver authorization which is called a COA. What that allows us to do is prior to that we were always sending officers out to FFA FAA part 107 training to become pilots so that they could fly the drone. This now allows us to do it inhouse and make everybody authorized to fly the drone. We also received our beyond visual line of sight waiver. So prior to that, we used to have to have a pilot in the station to launch the drone to fly the drone and then somebody watching the drone fly. Now the pilot can just fly the drone. This is huge for the drone as first responder program because it'll just let us accelerate how much use we get out of it. So we're glad to get that. Uh we also assigned a traffic resource officer to the police department's community resource office. We hired an animal patrol officer. I didn't put in here, but we also updated our K9 patrol vehicle because again, one of our um the K9 officer was able to network through the K9 Academy with a department that was getting rid of a cage that wouldn't fit their new car, but it would fit our older car. So, again, no money put out, but we were able to get a newer cage. We had to buy a few parts for it or whatever, but it saved us a big cost of money to use this networking and to find places to get these things for free. So, we also updated that, which was nice because that car that he was driving, we had to down. Uh, [sighs] in 2025, the police department responded to 809 crashes, taking 635 crash reports. 558 crash reports were taken in

2024. So, we did have a 14% increase, which I'm a little disappointed in overall, as I was hoping to make that number drop. Um, we'll keep working on it. Where I do am excited and proud of is the fact that we reduced our injury accidents from 40 in 2024 to 28 in this current year. So we did a 30% reduction in injury accidents. Uh 89 total crash calls equals 2.2 crashes per day. What I will tell you about the 809, I put it in there because that's how it showed up. But that encompasses all of our border streets. That may or may not have been our accidents. So if it happened at Cherry Hill and Ingster, it may have been Dearborn Heights or Instster, but it goes into our run as our accident. Or if we went into Westland for a little bit, it could show up that way, too. Um, which I'm thinking is may have been what skewed it. Also with our traffic resource officer, he's part of the Western Wayne crash team. So [clears throat] they respond to serious accidents and so he would be called out say there was a fatal accident in another city. He would respond to their scene and work the scene as part of the western wing crash team for the city that had the problem. So that may also be where we're getting some of the numbers jump up. Uh but overall we had 3700ish violations written which is an increase from 2024 which was 2426 in 2024. Uh, I only put that out there because we did start the traffic car and we could see where we're increasing our production and hopefully since we got in the last half of the year, having them out there a full year, we hopefully we'll see a reduction in the accidents next year with the enforcement that we're taking today. Uh, we have 33 sworn police officers with one traffic resource officer. What I will say is we have the 33, there's three currently in the academy. Uh we got them in in January. So prior to that we were at 30 and then in 25 26 excuse me [clears throat] we had two

officers on extended medical. We had four officers retire or resign. So you know we had 33 scheduled on the books. We probably spent the year running anywhere from 25 to 30 officers out there. And you can see the amount of work that they did with that 19 19,000 calls for service. Um, future considerations, I would like to maintain the body cameras, the in-car cameras, and the tasers. As it is, we're already about halfway through our body cameras and incar cameras. So, we know that that's going to be coming up shortly that we may have to replace a few uh tasers. Again, we just got new used for us. So, I'd still like to see us considered getting tasers in the near future just to update and make sure that we don't have the same problem where everything seems to be coming to this technical end of life thing and then we get stuck right at the end of life and we have no so uh I'd like to expand the drone as first responder program. Technology has grown. We were one of the first departments to get the dock and the drone and start the DFR here and it's the greatest thing. But now I'm I'm being told by the city manager that, you know, now you just push a button, the drone flies itself to where it's got to go and you don't need the pilots and everything we've been doing for the last six, seven years. So, I'd really like if the possibility to upgrade to that um so that we can really expand on our drone as first responder and enjoy the benefits of it for the city. So, the uh creation of the administrative hearing board or the blight court, uh, if that comes true, I would really like to hire some more part-time code enforcement officers to take advantage of the court. It sounds maybe strange, but the fact that the court's going to be new and not have a big docket like the current court has, we should be able to get more officers and more cases in there. I just need more officers to get the cases. So, I'd like to get a couple more part-time officers so that we can run a lot more high grass weeds and blight issues through there. Uh, we will continue to

train officers. We'll focus on the officer's goals, continue to provide legal updates, leadership training, new technology, operations, new techniques, new ways of thinking. Uh, I would also like to purchase new police patrol vehicles. 2024, we were able to have 14 patrol vehicles, including the K9 car. And if you remember, 2023 is when we had the issue and we pretty much ran out of patrol cars. I think I had five working patrol cars at one point. We came before council. We asked for more cars. Council was generous and gave us four cars to buy at that point. So that brought our fleet up. Um thankfully, so we got up to the 14 in 2025. I took out of service the 2013 and a 2015 Ford Tauruses. One of those was a K9 car. Our K9 officer transports the K9 which is an asset to the city and a resource along with the personnel. I couldn't I can't have him driving that car and it's not trustworthy enough to stop start and leaves him stranded somewhere because he's one of the few officers that will be leaving the city on his own time to go assist another city. And if he can't get there or if he gets halfway there and his car breaks down, I have him and the dog stranded. And the car was getting to that point where it was in the shop more than it was on the street. And so we just downed it and we were able to work out the deal with the other city to get the new cage and put the car in. But if we hadn't done that, I'm not sure what we would have done except come to council and ask for money to buy a car because that's where we were getting with that car. Um, we don't have a backup for the K9. So it's something we have to look at, too. And then the 2015 Taurus was a similar incident. It was the school car. So the school resource officer who drive that car. I guess if you want to get rid of a car, have the chief drive your car for a day because I took it to one of the events and like I couldn't get in the car because I couldn't get my key to unlock the door. I had to fidget with it for

five minutes and just hit the right spot and then it was slow to start and stuff like that. And again, I can't have a car like that out there where we need to immediately be able to go if there's a reason to go. We can't be screwed around with trying to get the door unlocked. Um it's little stuff, but it's stuff like that. So, we took them out of service. That then currently leaves us with 12 including the K9 car. Um, in the fleet I have a 2018 Ford with like it's 119,000 miles on it and a 2019 Ford that's got 93,000 miles on it. Uh, we keep putting money in and fixing them because it's what we have. So, the 2018 Ford SUV has developed the electrical Gremlins, but we just keep trying to fix it. And so, we get a couple days out of it. The Gremlin comes back. go somewhere else to try to get it fixed. The gremlin comes back. The uh Ford truck, which is the pickup truck, you know, we just bought a new computer for it because again, we're just trying to keep it running. We needed a computer. I don't have a spare. I can't take it out of service. So, it forces me to spend money to get it out there on the road. So, what I'm looking at is basically at any one time I could have nine officers that need a car on dayshift. I have two SRO's. I'd like to do two traffic officers. I currently have one, but if I get up to two, I need cars for them. The JRO needs a car and then the three patrolmen that are going to come respond to your door and the supervisors. So, that's my total potential need is nine at one time. I have 12, but that doesn't guarantee me 12 brand new spanking cars at everybody works, right? I have 12, and I'm lucky if two or three aren't in the shop every week getting something fixed on them. So, I would like to get some new patrol cars uh just to be able to get to that 14 number again and feel more comfortable that we can make it through the season without running out of cars. It's not a comfortable feeling to run out of a car.

So, I'm going to conclude now. Uh basically, in conclusion, I would say that effective traffic enforcement enhances safety within the community. The use of technology improves the efficiency and then the community itself, their involvement is key to everything that we do. Without the community involvement, we have nowhere to go and we will continually monitor and improve and adapt as needed. And you can see it's just a circle. We just So, thank you very much. Thank Thank you, Chief. Council, do you have questions for police chief? I have a question.

Council Council member Dol. So there were several times in the presentations where you mentioned doing more with less. How did that equate to overtime this past year? Doing more with less. Doing more with less. So you had 803 additional calls from the year prior. So what are we looking at? We have fewer officers, but they're doing more work.

Yeah. I mean, there's no other way around it. We have the same officers like you see every single day. It's just we filled it as needed. We came up with the traffic resource officer position which is a need. It did reduce some of our overtime just the way that we staffed the shift or staff staff staffing. Uh knocked it down a little bit, but we can't plan for the people that go off on being injured and create another hole. So that just seemed to cause some overtime. We had a lot of people working overtime. It's all you can do. I'm not sure if I'm following your question because

I I think what she was asking is our overtime's probably way up there because we're doing more with less people. So, our overtime costs are probably exaggerated immensely. I I believe that's what you're getting at, right? Basically. Yeah. And you know, is it putting I I I have to worry a little bit about the additional stress that it's putting on our officers. Oh, that's justified. I mean, we try to do as much as we can to rotate them off, but there's a contract that says this is how you fill the overtime and we have to respond when people call. So,

okay. Just wondering how it how it equated to that because yeah, you are doing a lot more work. Um, can you tell us what the CRA is an acronym for? C. I wish I could, but Okay. I didn't write that one down. Okay, I'll look it up. But but ultimately it's just for preparing our community churches for a active shooter or a violent event. Oh, so it's Alice Alice, but it's directed specifically for religious organizations, church gatherings and stuff because yeah, really Alice has traditionally been one that's sort of built around schools. Actually, my chief head chief here

runs it. So maybe he knows the acronym for the Yes, it's civilian response is focusing on churches. We love our acronyms in law enforcement. Yeah. [clears throat] Okay. And last, I'm just curious. How much does the academy cost? So we're getting reimbured 20,000 per officer, but how how much are we paying out? The 20,000 is for their salaries. The academy itself cost us about $6,100. And that 20,000 doesn't reimburse the 6,100 tuition fee. It just reimburses the time of the officer figure of the costs. Okay. So their salaries is what it covers [clears throat] and are they required to stay with us a certain amount of time or for return?

They've changed they've changed the agreement. It's not agreement with us. It's agreement with the state and they have something in there some sort of clause in there with the state that if they do something they have to pay the money back. Mayor Council Member Kapotus I have a lot of questions. Um, one major thing that I noticed when you were talking the whole time is that we uh have vacancies in the task force. Why is that? Uh, it's just staffing right now. We have the three officers in the academy which will put us at 33 and then we should have enough to distribute people in the task force and bureaus. Okay. But currently it's just the staffing. Okay. So we have 33 total but three of them are in the academy. When are they coming out of the academy?

The academy graduation is May. Okay. Okay. They will then hit the field training program which is another four months and then they would start their solo patrol after that. So May you're looking at September they all may become full solo patrol officers. Okay. So and right now out of that 30, how many are patrol officers? I would say you asked trick questions. Um there's all 30 of them are patrol officers. We have one officer still on FDO. We have two officers on FDO. Okay. So, so but I'll make it a little bit simpler then. How many patrol officers are on every shift? How many patrol officers are on each shift?

Uh, we have three patrol on days A, we have three patrol on days B, and then we have four patrol on mids A, and we have three patrol on mids B. And then if needed, there's officers, lieutenants, and sergeants, stuff that are inside that can come out during that shift. How many is that during a shift? Uh on dayshift you would have all of your staff is there. So you have two lieutenants and a sergeant. And then on midnights you have a sergeant. Midnight you have a sergeant. So on midnights is when we're a little we have one sergeant. Okay. Do you think as a department we're topheavy or patrol heavy? I think we're pretty balanced right now.

There's no more need for officers or more patrol or vice versa? No, I don't. Obviously, you always want more and more and more, but sure. I think it's a pretty good balance right now. Okay. Um, Councilwoman Dol's asking about the overtime. It's not um more cost-effective to hire another officer at a regular rate than paying out this much in overtime. So if we pay No, I mean this question has been around since I began my career and the way it's always been explained to me is your overtime is always less than what would cost you for a full-time employee

and I can double a little further to answer that question. Um so you know having worked here uh start starting out when there was 47 48 officers all the way till now uh and ebd flowed to where we had less than 30 for I think between 2010 and 200 uh probably early 20 we operated with 30 budgeted which really when you budget 30 you live at about 27 28 29 um overtime was always uh a consistent part of a garden state law enforcement officers life. Um mostly because yes, the cost of hiring that new officer um compared to the pay the paying of the overtime um one you you know when you hire an officer as happened to the police department this year I think it was uh three four officers off on significant long-term medical you know on or off duty counts injuries that created a staffing problem. So, um, we always joke that even I think even during my time when we were up to 36 officers, um, over the last few years, budgeted and and paid for, we were still seeing significant overtime because a lot goes into um getting that officer to show up, training, uh, staffing level, um, injuries, u vacations, time off. There's just it's all [clears throat] built in the system. these officers do have to have time to decompress and there's a system of uh overtime filling that the cont that's built into the contract that divides it as equally as you possibly can amongst the officers. Um, so it really uh, you know, when I started here was it was just shy of 50 in O2. And

I I guess I'm just looking at it the cost it's around $200,000 in overtime, but it wouldn't translate to um those are that what's with overtime is hours worked doing patrol divided by it's a direct cost of an officer working at that time, right?

Um, but when you employ an officer, you've got benefits, you've got pay, you've got retirement, you've got um training, you've got them being there. So, you know, even though you're paying someone 2080, you know, 280 hours, it doesn't translate to directly them being on the road, that works time we need. Overtime is sort of just built into the system if we're not if we're not operating 37, 38, 39 officers, which we're just not able to get to right now. Um, but what is nice is um that we're, as the chief just, we're hired up to 33. Um, I referred to light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to retirement benefits and things like that. Those paying down. Well, there's a light at the tunnel for staffing um when those officers get out of the academy and get trained and um are with us though there is an is the issue of uh law enforcement officers this day and age are a little more nomadic. Um it used to be when you hired on you're there 25 years that was it. Um they move more frequently. Uh our younger officers jump from uh the better contracts. you know, uh, as we've, as council knows, because you've approved some contracts over the last number of years, the cost of, uh, paying public safety, both fire and police, it's a much more competitive market. Um, you know, the city of Detroit in one year, I think, upped [clears throat] their compensation or their salary for officers $10,000 just like that. Um, that immediately changed the market for everybody. So, now everybody's moving for the best contracts. I think we'll get back to a time where everyone's settled in and and working where where they're going to be for a while. But during those kind of times as we're going through right now, um you hire one, you lose one sometimes. Um but uh but I think keeping 33 on the books, trying to hire to that 33, maybe even uh if we know someone's leaving in the near future, trying to get to 34 while we know someone's leaving is is the best way to operate. It keeps you the most as you possibly can. Unfortunately, trying to budget for a reduction in overtime, which I've tried, um your best, you know, the the best your best laid plans will be upended by a uh an officer, you

know, twisting his knee and being out for six months. So, it's too it's very hard to budget. Yeah, if I hire an officer, then my overtime should go down by X. It just I've I've tried we've tried to do the math. It is a little bit more of calculus than arithmetic. Okay. Not that I expect this answer this moment, but if we say on average we have $200,000 in overtime, I would like kind of a breakdown like what it is when we hire a new officer, like what their what their yearly salary is verse their compensation verse their insurance verse all those things to see where it is. I'm very curious about that. I I can pretty much a brand new officer is going to be about 120 $130,000 um with training and all those things.

And if you had Yeah, I'm sorry. if you had training on it that's not reimbured and things like and during the course of the FDO period where they're not actually working to help you with that overtime um I'd say then you it's an eight-month essentially process to get them through once they come out of the academy. [snorts] So we're really looking at 130,000 and then add half of their salary for the time that they're just in training. So really you're almost at 200,000 right there to hire the one officer um while the other officers are working the overtime waiting for that officer to get done. Sure. So, but when he's done, he takes away some of the overtime because you have that extra guy that's not making everybody else super tired unless someone else goes to a different department for a better. [laughter] It's the life we've lived lately. So,

and any idea how much money that we've gotten from the task force previously when we get sharing uh revenue sharing? We we've got we've received over a million dollars in the last few years. It just takes a very long time to show up. But our officers who were assigned to those task forces in 2020 2021 that money 3 four years later starts to roll in in droves and start to come in. So another source of revenue when we get where we need to be. Absolutely. Okay. I have a couple more. Um so you talked about how often they should replace their vests. How often should they replace their tasers? Tasers? Yeah. I mean we got some from Rhymulus and I understand that but we got somebody else's old stuff. So I'm just curious

how often we should replace them because It's that's an apples and orange comparison. Our tasers we had were X26PS or something. We got those back in 2011. Those were also super old. Yeah. And they were also prior to that being issued as new. So like they were the greatest thing. They became end of life in three years ago. We maintained continued with them. So I would just go with when the manufacturer is letting us know that these are coming to the end of the life, we should look at transferring out. Absolutely. With the current ones that we have, which we now have the taser twos, basically they've already jumped two generations to taser tens.

So we need more tasers, right? I don't think we these seem to be effective right now for us. If we're doing wish list stuff, sure. We always want the newest, greatest stuff and everything else. If they break down, are we able to repair them? Yes, they're still repairable. And these are operable devices. I get it. I just want to make sure our guys are safe. That's all. Okay. And then a question about the mapping that you talked about in the grants for that for the if there's active shooters for the government and schools. Any idea how much that costs? Like is that something we should build in our budget just in case we don't get that grant that that's something that we should do and keep up to date?

The grant's $25,000. I don't know what the actual cost that the company's charging. It's It's just going to be a wash of hands for us with the money. I realize that, but I'm Okay. So, do you think it's about 25,000? Yeah. I don't think that they're doing it for a loss and there's nobody else supplementing them other than the grant. Okay. Um I don't have my laptop to look at it. I looked it's just the blueprints that they then enhance with different points like where the Knox boxes are, where's this, where's this, where's that. Okay.

So, they're going back through now and updating them. Um 2023 is when Garden City Schools did it. It's now 2026. I don't know if every three years they go back through and do it uh through the program or not. So, it's something to keep in mind that needs to be done. But currently, we have the pro the um maps for all the schools. This is just to go back through and update and make sure that they're Yeah, I remember when you guys did that in 23. Yeah. So, and I don't know how much change there's going to be. It may be they're little. Right. Yeah. Okay. And then my last thing I think is about uh the drone. I know we were all excited when we got that drone and now we're not that far along and it's there's already way better stuff out there.

Yeah. So maybe before we buy the next drone, I don't know if some of our tech people who are in the audience right now um can come up with some kind of um analyzing like how much it's going to change. like if we go and spend another $25,000, is it going to be far below what it should be in in two years from now? Like are they going to invent something else? So, and the current drone is is serviceable for sure. It's what we just run into is it's there's new or greater stuff. This drone will still last. The problem that we have is the manufacturer doesn't want to support it anymore.

That's what I'm saying. Technology moves so fast it's hard to keep up with it. So before we spend a lot more money, maybe it's we hang on to this one for another two years when they have something else that's brand new and even better than what is available right now. And uh I was curious on one of your first slides and it talked about ordinance it said climate and pollution. What's that about? [snorts] About climate pollution. It said climate and pollution. I would take that out. Well, I mean whatever ordinance officers doing. I mean it said about you know visual people call and complain about something looks junky. What are they com? What? Yeah, that was the the nuisance and all that stuff is what that stuff was for. It was just talking about different qualities of life and pollution. Okay. Okay. That's all I got.

It also talks about the physical and mental part of it. It talks about parks and everything like that, too. That's not the police department. We try to make them safe. So, we're more focused on the safety aspect of it, the light aspect. Okay. I have one more thing. I'm sorry. I just noticed it. Uh, you talked about this salvage thing and you said this is the first time you found out that it was available to the PD. My personal two cents, um, I want our policemen to be able to do police stuff and if there's somebody else in our city that we could have doing that instead of one of our policemen that could be better served for, uh, I [snorts] just fighting crime or something. Police officers are already uh, required to do uh, by their own VIN inspections. Um, yeah, I understand. So, um,

but I'm just saying if we're getting a grant for that or we're getting something for that, maybe instead of having one of our guys that could be doing traffic control and or and and bringing in more revenue, we could have someone from the building department or somebody from ordinance do that salvage thing. That's all [snorts] or the thing that was appealing to this was the fact that the proceeds are used to work on stolen cars and finding stolen vehicles and stuff like that. So having the officer do it while he's inspecting the car to make sure it's roadw worthy, he's also checking to make sure there's no stolen parts on it and that's not a stolen car and law enforcement nexus. That's the appeal. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Further questions from the uh table. Uh Mayor,

Council Member King, u just a clarification on the overtime piece we were just talking about. Looks like the roughly average total comp for an officer is about 150k a year. Yeah. So are basically saying only a fraction of that would bring the overtime down. So like 50,000. It would bring the overtime down by 50 grand, but you're still paying another 100.

Yeah. The the cost of filling enough to be able to weather all of the um staffing issues you encountered throughout the year don't translate to anywhere near a onetoone. Like yeah, I pay a buck 50,000 for an officer, he'll reduce my overtime. um you have to multiply that by a number to get to, you know, if you're going to get to it, you need at least two or three probably to get rid of the 150. So, you've got to pay 350 to get rid of 150 or 450 to get rid of 150. You know, and that's just off the top of my head, but it's an issue I've investigated a ton because, you know, the reality is for both our police and our fire, overtime does have a negative effect on you if you don't want it. Um but but it is a reality of our of of the profession. um it is taken into account and um you know at what I'll say is we've have a demonstrated history since 2009 2010 of being able to operate with actually even less budgeted um but we should do everything we can to where there's opportunities [clears throat] to reduce the overtime and increase our staffing um to do so. And that is where some of the ideas for the um the task force come from and a traffic officer and things like that because they provide a certain offset to um more revenue

the cost to to offset the cost of that officer that allows for more officers. You know, that's how we got up to 36 a number of years ago. Um there's two things headwinds working against us. Of course, it's always finances, but I think we can get there. It's literally just being able to hire the officers, train them in a in a fast enough period and and recruit them because it's it's a strong it's a it's a tough market out there. When I applied to be a police officer in 2002, I competed with 300 people. Nowadays, the average uh test you're competing with is around 10. So, if you want a law enforcement job, now is the time to apply. Um because agencies are all constantly looking. Um I don't think if you can go on Facebook and you don't see these municipalities saying um we're hiring, uh that's that's a very fortunate agent who's not agency who's not. So, all right. Thanks.

I have something to add to that

about what Dom just said. Uh, so the question wasn't about trying to get our overtime down. It's trying to get our guys so that they aren't getting more out working overtime. So, that was my that was my main point about that. And then the other thing is you did mention about um, you know, we we're trying to do more with less. And I don't think when it comes to the police and fire that that that should apply to them. Even even DPS. There's other areas that we can do more with less, but doing that with our police and fire and our DPS is worrisome to me. Um, and then [sighs] I want to say one other thing about that. Oh, and we talk about how um difficult it is to get police officers because we have everybody just going everywhere with Detroit raising their everybody wants to go there and then go to Southfield. I get that. Um, so let's figure something out that we can attract quality officers to come here. I think we can start that by improving our police station. [snorts]

Go ahead. Yeah, a couple more questions. Um, so regarding the CIP, there was a couple items on the list for the next fiscal year. Um, had the cell block restoration, PD report, um, room restoration, uh, prep radios, and the vehicle replacement. Mhm. Kind of looking through your presentation, I'm assuming, but want to give verification that the vehicle vehicle replacement plan and probably the radios are the top out of those four knowing that we probably won't have money to do all four things. Would you say those would be the top priorities for CIP? Radios definitely, the cars, definitely. We need to be able to get to the roads. We need to be able to get to the people. Okay.

So, and it'd be nice to get the building cleaned up, but I agree. Agree. But if in an event there's not enough money for all four, just I think the radios are federally mandated by like October of this year, aren't they? Yeah. Right. That's why I figured that would be one of the higher priorities. And then what you just explained regarding the K9 vehicle and the other school resource vehicle. Yeah.

Um, another question I have and it's more just out of curiosity looking at the budget line item. There's a line item um called electric police. It's actually a decrease from what we we had budgeted 2526 40,000. It's only,300. But what's uh what's that line item used for? Do you know? My understanding is that's the HVAC reduction, the electrical bill. Okay. That's how I interpreted it. So,

okay. Our our older HVAC system was really draining a lot of electricity as one of the impetuses behind replacing that system. It has and it's resulted resulted in a 69% reduction of our electricity bill. It's fantastic. We're budgeting 30 to $40,000. We're probably going to budget 12 to 13 next year. So that's where you know in my original slides I talk about capital investments that reduce operational costs and an HVAC system for a agent building. Fantastic. And now it's nice to actually see those numbers start to play out. So agreed. And that's all I have. Okay. Thank you. Further comments from the table. Mayor, Council Member Caros,

I just have one more comment. You talk about savings for updates. I did see uh a lot of residents have mentioned to me their new street lights are going in. So, that's great because newer street lights mean less electric bills. Yes. Okay. Uh I think that's it. Chief, thank you very much for your presentation. Give Zach a minute to get set up for uh fire department.

Yes, we have. Yeah, fire's in the packet. That was an updated one we had to just Thank you, Zach. Hey, all set. All right. At this time, uh, we'll bring up Fire Chief Randy Keane. Sir,

good evening, Mayor and Council. Um, to follow along the police department here and kind of go through some some things with the the department. Um, we'll start out with our incident count. As you can see here, this is historically over the last 10 years. Uh, we saw a steady incline, uh, with the exception of 2020, which was COVID, which a lot of people didn't want to go to the hospital for. um peaking in 2023 at 4200, you saw a jump of 450 runs there. We've come down a little bit on that. Uh but we're still above where we were in 2022. Um so we saw that flattening a little bit, but the trend is still up obviously since 2016 to the tune of about uh 20%. So you'll see that. Um so this is obviously from the fire suppression side, the fire and EMS. I'll break it down a little bit here on the next slide. So here's the breakdown of last year's calls. Now I realize the budget runs from July to June. We pull our numbers for the year. So this is actually January through December. So it's a little bit different obviously than than the budget year. Uh but as you'll see uh here's the breakdown of those uh 3,848 runs. Um around 2600 of them were EMS runs. Um and then you'll see the other ones that are delineated below. Um each one has a code there which you'll see the 400, 500, 600. Um part of that is when we enter those into the system, they're uploaded to the federal government uh for tracking, for um mapping, things like that. So we can determine what kind of runs we have and how many we have. So um as you can see that um obviously the largest majority is the rescue runs. Um and then above that you see the percentages. 68% is EMS and then um some of the other things fall in there with smaller percentages. Some of the stuff like service calls maybe like lift assists assisting residents with with other items like getting their house or things of that nature in and out of their vehicles. Uh

the ha the 400 hazards are wires down or gas leaks, things of those natures. Um obviously we know what the fires are in the 100. Um the 600s, good intent calls. Um those can be 600, 700s can be um alarms. Um some of them are false alarms or we're dispatched. When we get there, there's no run. Um so those are where those come in. Um and then obviously, like I said, the percentage breakdowns. So this is a fire suppression side of it. Um then we have our our fire marshal, John Smith. What is his job? He does annual fire inspections for businesses. We do every business every year. he does. It's compliance for the community is what we're looking for. Um it's not meant to be punitive. It's meant to be cause a safe environment for both the residents and the businesses. Um and then at the bottom there you see what we're working on currently introducing the multifamily residential inspections. I know we're in talks with that and that's coming here in the future. Part of his job also is ordinance. So it's plan reviews and CO inspections to verify that these businesses are safe from a design aspect as well as prior to them opening up the business. And then the other part which he he's in charge of is public education going to schools, going to community groups to um social clubs, things like that. And he presents um educational material or advice or u one of the big things I know he does is the smoke detectors. So that's a huge huge thing for us. that's state funded. He goes into these homes and puts smoke detectors in um based upon need. So, kind of what he's done this year or this past year. So, 434 business inspections. Now, that is just the primary inspection. If there's violations or or anything that needs to be followed up on, there's also follow-up inspections to those. So, um that's that's every business in the city with a few exceptions. So there are

assemblies some assemblies which we do not have jurisdiction over the state does hospitals schools daycarees those those sort of businesses we can get into them but we don't have the jurisdiction over them the state does they're very usually they're very compliant and they want to make it as safe as they can but we can't we couldn't force them I guess uh but we we do go out there just to make sure it's safe. The other part of that is with those inspections is we do a pre-plan. So the fire marshall creates a document with the the building itself so we know where the gas shut off is, electrical, any knockboxes, any access problems. We put that into our program. So when we're dispatched, it's readily available for our guys when they get there. It's just a document they click on it opens up and shows them all this information. So that's another benefit to it. And then you can see as we go down, he does a CO inspection 78 plan reviews. Then the smoke alarms installed. It's 396 he did last year. So, um, we have that that es and flows number one. Number two, it also depends on what's available from the state. There's a million dollars available annually from the state. So, whenever they purchase whatever they can for that, when they run out, then the supply ends until the next year. Happy to say that that was renewed for this for the upcoming budget. So, that program will continue. Um, going in a little bit of the finances for the fire department. Uh, you can see the his historical finances for the expenditures that we have here. There has been some increases over the last four years. Uh and then you can see for this year that's our projected is 4.817. Um that's project projected based on where we're at right now. Um with some exclusion there. I know that the there's some money for the CIP for the station. That's it's in there right now. That's we'll muddy that water a little bit. We can discuss that a little bit further down here. So um where do we get our funding from? So our funding comes from the public safety mill which was discussed with the police department as well. Uh the tax revenue

and then any revenues generated from EMS and fire prevention. Uh I'll go through those a little bit break down where we get some of that revenue. Uh beyond the the millillage and the tax revenue. Uh the the public safety millage equates to approximately 20% of our budget. So here is the EMS revenue. Um as you can see this has steadily increased uh over the years. one through run volume, two through training our guys with the documentation and working well with our billing company. So, um, our rates are up. We're we're in the collection rate of about 95% right now. Uh, we were two years ago about 85%. So, there's some trainings and stuff that come out. We, like I said, we train the guys along with working with them. Some of that is has to do with the Medicare requirements and the insurance requirements as well. Um you'll see a little bit of a large spike there in 2425 after a dip in 23. Uh we had some software issues in 23 that cause a couple months of the bills weren't being automatically sent in. So they we had a little bit of a lag on the collection part of that. Number one. Uh number two, this does eb and flows as well. Um just because your build at a certain time doesn't mean the money comes in at that month. It might come in a few months later. So the expected budget for this year is about 700,000 and it should be around there next year or just above that. Uh fire prevention revenues. Um this is something that we've obviously increased over the last couple years u by making sure that we do every business um for safety number one in compliance but also you can see the revenue um the big jump from 23 to 24. In 2425, we made a concerted effort to make sure that every business was done in that year. Um, now we use a system that it's automatically generated to schedule, send out notifications to schedule it, not to schedule itself. We still do that, but the notifications automatically go out to the businesses and alert them that

they're due for their inspection. Um, and then if they don't do it by the time that they're required, they get a a letter saying, "Hey, you're you're past due. Please contact." If not, we will go with those and we will schedule those or contact those businesses. So, you can see the where the revenue is at right now. It's expected to be about the same as it was the year before. Uh plan reviews. Uh obviously, it's a much smaller uh revenue. Um this one we we really don't have a lot of control over to be honest with you. Uh this depends on how many businesses come into the city and what's required for their plans. So we do have a pretty good average of that but it's based upon th those those requirements and then the CFO inspections is along the same lines. So um those we have we have the ability to capture that but necessarily we don't have the ability to control the volume of them. All right we'll get into our staffing levels. You can see here uh the history of our staffing since 2013. Uh we were suppression we're at 14 with which is after the great recession. We obviously did some things that uh created vacancies through attrition through retirements. Um one thing we were able to do in that year is we got a safer grant for four people and that's why you'll see it go to 18 the next year. Uh the benefit is we were able to maintain those after that because we obviously were in a better financial place. And then in 2018 you'll see that go from there to 20. Uh we also received a safer grant to go from 18 to 21. These grants usually run three years. The first one we got an extension for one year on one of the guys. Uh the second one we got was three years and they're cost sharing in those in those uh grants as well. Um and then you'll see the peak of 21 in 2020 and then through attrition we've kind of got down to where we're at at 18. Um and then you'll see the in administration it's 2 and a half. Um which I'll detail a little bit here in a second.

So, out of the 21 personnel we have, it's the chief, myself, obviously, our fire marshal, we have a part-time administrative assistant, and then 18 firefighters and suppression. All right. So, for our budget, um, beyond these items, um, everything is pretty much staying status quo. Um, and I'll kind of go through each one of these a little bit for little, um, reasoning why. Our vehicle maintenance, this is something that's it's very hard to predict. Uh obviously I can predict some preventive maintenance but some of the things that may break down that it's very difficult to predict that. Um we have been budgeted at 20,000 but I do know that we have a purchase of some tires for our ladder truck coming up which equates to about $4,500 to $5,000. So that's why that's added in there. Um but historically we've been like or the last four years it's been or three years 23,000 28 and then last year was 42,000. So I think this is kind of a happy medium for us. um building maintenance. This one's a little bit different. So, because we've been under construction for the last few years, um this number was 10,000 before that or right around there. Um we've been able to absorb some of those repairs and things through the the renovation process. So, it's down at 3500. But, I know like for example, we had a door problem this year that we had to repair. It was $3,800 for one repair. So, we are over that at one door. So, that's that's why that ask is there. Um, protective gear. Um, this was up around $10,000 previously. Um, I know we received a gear grant a year and a half ago. Um, but we have brought in some new people and number one, number two, that was for two sets and just like the police with their equipment, ours also ages out with time. So, it has a life cycle. So, we want to make sure we can replace gear uh on a regular cycle and not get too far behind and require a large purchase. Each set of our protective gear is about $4,200.

So that would equate to two sets of gear along with maybe some helmets, gloves, um or boots if they need to be replaced. Uh medical supplies. This is another one that we've seen increases in costs just due to the nature of the economy at this point. Um we are actually on pace right now to hit about $30,000 this year. So we're over budget. Uh we have a couple guys who work great trying to shop these items around to get the cheapest cost. Um but once again it's something that it's difficult to control. Uh but we also do use some replacement systems through the hospital for some of our equipment. So the the equipment that we can replace through them or exchange we do. So this is just the um disposable equipment that we use. Oxygen, some um wear and tear on some of the uh equipment like the monitors for cables, things of that nature. Uh membership and dues. This isn't a large increase, but it's a small one. This we see the increase just because there's an increase in the cost for Western mutual western way mutual aid system. Number one. And number two, we're also charged for um the state charges for some of the EMS runs. So we get quarterly billing, which is equates to about $6,000 a year. So that that's where that's at. Um the other uh proposal here that hopefully will come around this year, which I know I've spoke to you previously about, is the Michigan GMT, which can create about 150 to $180,000 in additional revenue. This has been approved by the state, uh, but the funding mechanism hasn't been determined yet. How you submit for it, when you'll get it, things of those nature. So, that's still in the works. So, um, I know it's been going for a little bit here. Hopefully, it makes some headway this year and we can we can capture some more of that revenue for our EMS EMS uh, funding grants. So, these are a few grants, the safer grant and the radio grant we applied for. Uh

we did not receive either one of those. The safer was for three additional people that I applied to. Uh it wasn't funded for this past year. Um there's a lot of criteria that go into that. It's history of them need um and it's also you're being competitive with other other communities. So they base it upon those things. So we weren't we weren't uh given that the radio grant uh we did submit for that. we were were un unsuccessful which I know would have been a a great uh funding mechanism because of the cost of radios these days and the requirement um we do have some requirements for radio up upgrades not like the police department does but we do have some radios that are out of out of service they're called legacy radios so after January of this year as long as they're operational they're great they just won't they won't repair them is essentially what it is you can go to thirdparty vendors but the manufacturers won't repair them anymore. Um, those are not all our radios, but probably about half of them. Um, the third one is a vehicle preeemption grant, which I know I've discussed a little bit here. Uh, that's still in motion. For um, those of you who may not remember or unfamiliar with it, what this is is this goes onto each uh, intersection of the light and then each police and fire vehicle will have a module in there when you're running lights and sirens. It'll cycle the lights so they turn to make it safe for passing through each each intersection. The benefit for this is it's covering pretty much all of western Wayne County. So, this was a six just over $6 million grant. Um, and it was a 20% cost share that they're working on getting Wayne County to cover the the majority of that. So if if not if there was no coverage at all, which Wayne County has agreed to do some, just unsure how it's going to go, be about $60,000 for the entire city to equip that and our vehicles, but we've been assured that that that funding is coming from them. Um some of the other ones and I'll cover the fire

station grant which we all know uh the AFG grants which is equipment um the safer grants for for people AFG grants they're due to open in early 2026 says February but I think with the the issues with some of the government shutdown and things have affected this so they haven't opened up yet. So this gives us an opportunity to be able to write for vehicles which is a huge expense. So these generally are a 10% match. So, this will be a good opportunity for us to present that whenever that opens. The fire station grant, and I'll have this on the next page here. Fire station grant. So, we've had two grants. We were initially given a $400,000 grant through the MEDC. Um, that was $200,000 prior to construction and then after we started, it submitted and we received the other $200,000. So, that grant is expended. Um, the other grant was an $800,000 one through the LEO. Um, that one has been extended through March of this year. Uh, it expired last September. I put in an extension for 6 months. They asked how long it would take us to expend all those funds. Um, so we have to the end of March. So at this time we've drawn 725,000 or just above that. So we have a balance of about 70 just under 75,000 remaining in the grant.

[clears throat]

So, here you can see the station renovations, kind of how they're going now. Um, at least they are moving forward. Um, I know you guys can see some progress. I hope it looks much much different. Um, hopefully with the warmer weather here, we should be moving a little bit faster. It's supposed to warm up a little bit here. Um, as you can see there in the top left, that was um our old locker room and the lounge area. It's going to be a a gym, a small gym. um on the bottom there on the left where you see all the insulation. That's the kitchen area. Um much larger, much different. Um and that's the right bottom right. That's the door you see. It's replaced that uh entry door that we had there, the household rental or residential door that was on there forever. That's more uh commercial grade and a little more durable for us. So, that'll be well. And then in the middle on the top right there, you see those doors will be moving. And what they're doing is they're just shoring it up. Those the pillar in the middle and the and across the top are going to be coming out. So that'll be opened up when they move those doors. So they're just shoring up some of that stuff there. So what have we kind of done in the last year here? Um I know we're working on the multif family inspections um which will be coming up this coming week. Um so we're working on moving towards that. Um CPR, we have a few people that have been trained in CPR. We're getting some classes going. We've done some things with some of the um the social organizations. Number one, I know uh parks and wreck and we have a schedule coming that will allow for uh public access to that so we can put on classes. Um I know that's uh sought after by by many communities and just like ours, we have an opportunity to help some of our citizens be trained and and hopefully not have to use it, but if it they do, it's there. um car seat installations. We have one person currently in that can do this. Um this kind [clears throat] of es and flows. It's weird. We get some referrals for that. Uh but they'll they'll be able to assist to install car

seats and vehicles. We don't install them. We teach them how to do it. So this is not just us coming to do it and then two weeks later they come back. We instruct them and show them how to do it. We make them do it. We do it. We show them and then they can do it on their own from there. Um then along the [clears throat] lines like police with the training professional development um NFA is National Fire Academy. I know you guys were involved in a project that one of our gentlemen had for his uh executive fire officer class. Um that's a huge huge undertaking. Uh not a lot of graduates throughout the country for that. So obviously that's a a big deal. Um some of the [clears throat] other things are fire instructor. So the new curriculum which the state has um came out in the last few years is prior to being able to train as a fire officer, you have to become a fire instructor. So um we have a fairly young department as far as years on the job. Um you have to get a minimum of three years in the fire service before you can start these courses. So we have 10 of the 18 in suppression that have four years or less. So we're kind of hitting that sweet spot to where all these guys can start getting a lot of this training. Um, so we had three members go through it last year. We've already had a few prior to that. And then the same thing with the fire officer courses. Um, these are things that we require for them to take those upgraded positions. So we'd make sure that they're trained and they're available and they have the knowledge and the resources to be able to make those decisions for us. Um, the flashover training, that's something that um, these guys get to do when they come on. We get it. It's live fire training. So, they get put in a live fire scenario so they can see what it's like. Um, understand what fire may do, things of that nature. Um, as you guys see, if you've driven by the new station over here, they have this available at the new station over here, which we're going to be able to do some things. I met last week um with some chiefs over there, and they're come up with some programs where we can utilize that training facility as well, not just for this, but for multiple other things. So, I'm looking forward to that. That's a

that's a beautiful uh building over there. Um and the other thing is conferences. So myself and the fire marshall go to conferences for continuing ed um for inspections for um fire prevention things. Um and number two is we go to a lot of stuff through through the chief stuff to learn about grants um more importantly like not just grants for our community but we're more apt to get them if we do regional grants. So that's a big resource that we utilize. Um look to the future. So, this is kind of off the CIP. Um, I have five things on there. Util utility vehicle replacement. Um, this is looking at we have that pickup truck. It's a 99 Dodge. So, it's been around for a little bit. It served us well. It's still going fine. Um, but that's why that's in there. It's been in there for the last few years. Um, the office renovation on the north side, that's the pictures you see there. So, the reason that's in there that it wasn't before is so when they closed the back of the station down, our guys actually moved all this stuff up here and put a um temporary kitchen. Little did we know it would be a year and a half, but um that's our temporary kitchen now. That used to be two offices. So, um obviously when that stuff comes out, you know, obviously be desire to to make sure that that's brought to where it's a becomes an office again. Um so, that's what those two things are in the pictures there. a hose and nozzle replacement. We've had this on for a little bit, too. Um, we're just looking to replace some of our dated equipment. U, we do have hose. Um, we have approximately a third of our hose that is pre-1987. Um, so it's tested every year. It it passes testing, but there are some standards out there that they don't want to use because just because of the age of it. Um, it's understandable. um the replaced aging equipment. So this is kind of goes along the lines of uh the

the life which you talked about some of the police equipment. Um these these are uh pieces of equipment that do have a life expectancy. Um it's usually about 7 to 10 years and after that doesn't mean it can't be used and is serviceable but what we are told is it takes the liability off of them and puts it on us. The equipment still works. they'll still maintain it, but those things are are are there. The benefit is they do have a a program that you can take and purchase it over many years. For example, there are monitors. Each one of those monitors is about $65,000. So, obviously to bring we have four of them. To bring it to you, it's $260,000. That's a huge hit. So, they they have a program. It's um I I talked to the rep. It's about $100,000 for six years and we get all new all that equipment there along with AEDs for the police cars. So, this is something you'll see in the CIP that there's small amounts for a few years and that the purpose is to get to that first big year to we kind of get to that money and then it'll go from there continuing on with the the larger amount. Um, that also includes service plans with those. So, they maintain them, replace any broken parts, and at the end of that we do own it. It's not a lease or anything of that. Um, and then the vehicles, the rescue and engine. I know after many talks with the city manager and and in the previous CIPs, we've had money set aside for vehicles. Um, but what this is is it's a a purpose is to say, hey, every year, if we can set a certain dollar amount aside when we do need those vehicles, like an engine that's currently about 1.1 or$ 1.2 million, that we don't have to take that large hit at a time. um rescues are approximately $300,000. So that would be able to um soften the blow when we do have to get those. Now the thing is that we always have in play are the grants.

So those generally are 10% uh match. So it would be great if we could get an engineer for say on that. It's a you know 120,000 compared to a million dollars so that money could be utilized elsewhere. That's all I have. Okay. Thank you, Chief. Uh, [clears throat] couple of things. Wouldn't it be better on the radios uh to do with the police because aren't they? They are. We're working on that. They actually um had I had some conversations and they asked for some information on us. So, we are included in that as well. So,

Okay. And then on the vehicle, I know there's the the cost of the vehicles, but there's also what, a two-year build on a lot of those?

Yes. Well, the rescues, if you get them like we have them now, they're they're anywhere from 20 to 24 months. There are some they have done some things now that they have similar vehicles with a six-month window. Um, so there is some availability. It's just not necessarily what we get exactly. So, it it's doable a little less time, but yes, if you order them, you're talking up to two years. Fire trucks can be up to three years. So, I guess that's a little bit of the forecasting is you have to be able to get in line. And everybody thinks like you hear three years for a firet truck. It doesn't take them three years to build it. You get in line to be built. So, the actual build time is like 12 to 14 weeks. So, it's it's not that long in that three years.

So, they're designing it, making sure all the materials there, and then you get in line, and then once your your numbers up or you're in the order, that's when they start building that. I would I would assume it's not like going to the Ford, Chrysler, uh GM dealership when you just pick one off the lot. It's not. You order it and then a specific company probably very few do it. So there are and I don't know if you've seen there's a lot of there's been a lot of stuff in the media about this, especially with the cost. Um they've been in front of Congress talking about the the how the cost elevated so quickly. So the hope is that maybe some of that brings some of that down. Um but only time will tell with that.

Okay. Thank you. Further comments from Council Member King. Um I was looking at the uh overtime for this year. It looks like as of January 31st we're at 133%. Yes. But I don't see and for 20267 2026 2027 we're keeping the overtime about the same. Is there

there is there's a reason why we're over at this point. I'm sorry to cut you off. Okay. Um, last year I was tasked to say, "Hey, if we were at 18 personnel, what would the overall talk time cost be um, predicted to be?" And that's the number you have on there. We did have a member retire in May, so we had a small area where we had to go through the hiring process. So, we incorporated some of that overtime through that and then we had a member resign in the fall. So, we had the same thing. So you have a few months where it's the hiring process takes effect and the training which is about 6 weeks before they can become manpowered depending on their qualifications. So that's where the the overtime comes in number one. Number two, we have had a couple injuries. So I tried building some of that in there, but most of it is through vacancies that we've had through the two two spots. So you'll see some of that the personnel costs will be down in the salaries but up in the overtime a little bit. Okay. Um, another question I had was regarding the CIP. Um, I had actually six items on the CIP. I had one that you didn't mention was the ambulance replace plan for 65,000 or maybe it's not no longer on there.

Um, that was the I'll go back. That was the vehicles that rescue and the engine. That's okay. Bundle together. Yes. Gotcha. Um, looking at the full CIP for the the fire department is about 370,000. I guess kind of similar question to the police chief. Is there like two to three items that you would see the most important to take care of opposed to if in the event we can't take care of all? Yes. So I think the the most important one obviously I think would be the station um those front offices.

Um I think that would be top of that list and then the the hoses and the nozzles. um just because of the age of the equipment and um obviously you know we need to replace some of that equipment and some of those we haven't we haven't replaced obviously in a very long time so um it's it's been worked well for us so those would be the two items I think that would be most important all right thanks that's all I have further mayor prom do

uh I've know I know we've had a few issues with the building and I was over there a couple weeks in uh the front lobby or whatever you called it up by the temporary kitchen caught my eye cuz water was just pouring pouring down as I looked up into the rafters with no ceiling. It's like the boards are turning black. I'm curious if our firefighters are safe in there if black mold was growing up in there. And then when I asked the firefighter over there about it, he mentioned that the roof was built wrong. They use OBS instead of regular plywood. um what's the plans to get that fixed?

So, that was included in in the bid that you guys uh had. So, there they are going to be redoing those front areas both for the carpentry and for the roofing material. So, a lot of that stuff that you see, the plywood or the OSB will be coming off. The the roof that is going up, the metal roof cannot be used with OSB. That's the manufacturers's requirement. It has to be plywood. So, any OSB that's on there will be coming off. So, number one. Number two, they have to rework some of those front areas a little bit, the vestibules, um just because they're not pitched correctly and the water is running back towards the building. So, that should be remedied in the in the near future. Number one. Number two, um those are not open to uh your everyday use by the firefighters. So, it's not like it's inside the building that's in that out part. Um so, um it's more of a pass through than anything else.

So, they're safe. Yes. Yes. Okay. We did have also we did have a air quality test done in the very beginning of this. Uh they went through the entire station and pulled um for mold and spores and things of that nature in the entire station. So we did have that air quality test done. Very good. Thank you. Yep. Mayor, Council Member Carus, first of all, I just want to make sure that you said you said the hoses there from 1987. Yes. Okay. That's number one. [laughter] And then um this time that I've been on council, I thought the CIP included that we're putting money away for the ambulance, does it not? Uh in all the previous years, we had been up until last year when we had to correct that budget deficit, but it'd be my intent to make sure we do that this year. Okay.

Go back. The police had a similar one for vehicle replacement as well. And uh to go back to that would be excellent. Okay. And then um the contractual services, is that because of the grant? Uh, you want to talk about me too? It's for fire. It's it's it's for all the stuffing the fire station. That's what I want to make sure. Okay. The contractual services in there, there is $16,000 that is in there that's in the normal part of the budget. That's for uh some of the programs we run, our documenting program, things of that nature. The other part is for the station renovation. The 295,000. That's a little bit of an increase. I want to make sure it was from that. Yes.

Okay. And then um the vaccinations with the o the OSHA physicals it used to be 8,000 then the last two years it's been nothing and then we budgeted for it next year. Are they not getting vaccines or it's every two years or those are not. So what that is is you'll see there's a gap there that those are contractual. What it is is there's testing that's done. It's uh to find it's early detection of cancers for firefighter specific cancers. So annually we have these tests done. Um what happened is last year why that was done. It was done prior to the budget year. Okay. So that's why it's built in. And the 9,000 is it's $500 a a person and there's 18 guys. So

Okay. Let's talk about the guys then. So we have 18 guys and [snorts] uh we're currently running a six-man shift with one ambulance, right? Correct. Okay. You said our EMS revenue was 700,000. Correct. Around there. Yes. And we have another ambulance available. We just don't have enough men to run it. Correct. Um we do run about 20% 20 to 25% of the time with six. Uh what that depends on is if anybody's off on vacation, sick, personal time. Um if there's not anybody off, then we we do run two rescues. Okay. So if we if we had more than 18 guys though on a regular basis, it would increase the amount of times we would be able to do it. I can't promise it would be every day because

but it could increase our revenue. Uh potentially. Yes. So, right, if we're running two because I mean obviously the 700 includes the 20% that we're running the second one. I get that correct. Okay. And then um [snorts] you say that about well if we don't have somebody off or somebody hurt is anybody hurt right now? No. Okay. But I mean it does happen. That's the nature of your job. So if we had more than 18 we would have coverage when people are hurt or on vacation. Um yes. But that I mean similar to the police that's covered by overtime. So, um, fortunately in the last year, we haven't we had somebody off for a month with the back injury. Um, and then a couple small things, being off for a couple weeks, being sick, but nothing nothing too large scale.

So, we currently have eight 18 um firemen for suppression. Do we need more? Um, and if we had all the money in the world, would you say yes, we need a couple more guys? Absolutely. Um, I I mean, absolutely. Um, if I could run two rescues every day, that would that would be great. But So, are we turning turning away No. So, this is where your mutual aid systems come in. Does that mean are we turn away if Wesland calls us? We say we're using our ambulance. We can't send the second one.

If we're tied up, then we do that. Yes. But we also do um if we have, for example, two medical going on at once and our rescue's on one and our engine goes to it. We're all paramedics, so we still can do the the treatment. But if it's a run that can hold, if it's not life-threatening, we will hold that until our rescue can clear a hospital and come and take that person. So to say every time we have two runs together that we do mutilate it um is not true. So it does happen though. I won't say that it never happens but Okay. It's about 250 runs a year that we mutual aid. Okay. Do you know how many we're turning away? [snorts] Turning away as far as because we don't have that second ambulance.

Well mutual aid is responding 250 times a year to to rescues. We we are responding. Do you know how many that we can't respond to because we don't need No, that's how many times we contact them for us. Oh, for us. Okay. But when they contact us and we can't help, do you know how many times that is? I don't know. I wouldn't know that number because dispatch doesn't even contact us. But I do know that we went on about 280 mutual aid runs. So, but I can't tell you how many times they would say, "Hey, are you available?" Because we have the regional dispatch center. When they contact them, they can see who's available. So, they don't even contact us and ask us if we're available.

Okay. So, we don't have all the money in the world, so we can't say how many guys do you need, but we have some money and the fire department's very important. Do we need more guys?

Um, like I said, it would it be great? Yes. It would give us an opportunity to run two rescues. Um, but as you can see, our historic manpower, we've run 18 for a long time and uh we are able to provide at least that one rescue and we have the a paramedic engine. So, in a in a in a perfect world, yes. But um we've we've and to be honest with you, we've struggled as you can see we are at 20. That wasn't because necessarily because we didn't hire anybody. We've also struggled like the PD finding people or keeping people. So um we have the same issues. So we, you know, we'll have a couple openings and we'll only have you know maybe two to three people for each opening apply even. Why do you think that is? [snorts]

Um it's across the board. So, um it's there it's the state and the local um places are working on this, but it's it's across the board that there's shortages. So, is there shortages because no one's applying or because we're not able Nobody's going into the field. That's what I was going to ask of. Yes. [snorts] Okay. Um or not as many people are going into the field. How about that? Um Okay. Another question. Is the CPR classes going to be at Redcliffe? Are they going to be over there? That was the plan. So that hasn't been solidified yet, but Okay. Um the 74,000 that's left over from the grant, obviously that's going to be easily spent. Yes.

I don't expect this answer right now, but do we have any idea like how much more? Like I mean I do have a ballpark. When you when you included when you included what we already spent, was that for the things that we've already approved or that doesn't include what we approved? Hasn't been done yet?

Yes and no. So the the grant so what I've learned through this grant process is um they're very particular in what you do. So I was audited by the grant and they wanted anything over $1 to have three bids. So and you didn't have to get bids necessarily but you had to get three prices to submit to them. So, what I've done with the remainder of the grant is I've waited and submitted stuff that has been bid out because then we have the the um the bid process that we can turn in and they don't question it. So, um that's for my own learning. I know we're going to go above what we had. So, I'm just utilizing that. So, I do have a ballpark for the grant where we're at, what we bid out, and then what the total is. Um the expectation for for a guesstimate is probably 2.5 to 2.6 Six was wearable land for the cost of the total renovation.

And how much of that is covered by the grant? 1.2 million that included the money that we paid to the original contractor too. Right. So, and [snorts] is this coming out of what's ne necessarily their budget or or just the general fund because obviously your budget can't

ultimately it's a capital project that hits the general fund basically our rainy day. um you know what we are operating efficiently this year and right now it's being recognized within the general fund and they're operating but it'll be transferred by the end of the year to be recognized as a capital expense but currently right now I haven't asked for it to be moved over to capital because it's my ability to track our overall performance at the fire department and our cost um because we're spending a lot of money over there but if they're operating below budget which they are if you take that away um we have a good idea of exactly what kind of general fund hit this is that we have. So, it's been a little bit of a tracking mechanism for myself, but one that the treasurer is, uh, soon to make me clean up. But, um, at the same time, it's really about getting through the end of this year and having the least amount of negative impact to the overall finance of the city from that project and so we can see what we can do about recuperating some more.

Okay. Thanks, R. Thank you. Further questions, comments from the table. Okay. Thank you, Chief. Good. all set. Zack. Okay. Now we have our 21st district court, uh, our court administrator, uh, Mr. Brandon Krooppy.

Good evening. Brandon Krooppy, court administrator. Um, make sure I Here we go. Thanks for having me. Um, so just go over our our organization. Um, there's our court staffing with one judge, an administrator, a court recorder, judicial secretary, probation director, and uh, one full-time security officer and two part-time um, that split the week. and uh five full-time deputy clerks. Um some our case load trends over the last five years. We saw a big dip in 24 and a decline 23 24. Um but we're getting our 2025 numbers. We're seeing an increase back up to closer to um not to precoid time just yet, but it's it's obviously there's a big difference in the in the last or last year compared to the two previous years. And here is a more detailed look at our case load. Um you I just broke it down into different types of cases that we see come into the court. the non-tra traffic is our highest um amount and then uh parking and civil is in there on the end. Um um just uh more information some of the things that we have going on. Um we started a collections program back in 2023. Um and in 23 and 24 we issued a total of 944 tax garnishments. So filing tax garnishments um through the state of Michigan to collect some of the um

outstanding monies owed in fines and costs. Um and those in those two years um it results in the collection of just under $92,000. Um, in the fall of 2025, we increased our garnishment numbers to over a th over a thousand. Um, which is more than we did our kind of first two years of trial run. Um, and so far we've we've received 14,000, but those are just starting now to come in um as the tax season has has begun. Um, so I won't have a number of what we'll see from that until later on this year. Um, and we are looking to just continue to expand this program and look to run approximately or about 1,500 tax garnishments um each year moving forward. Um, just some of the things what we do. This is um I wanted to share uh some information on how we do. So, the state periodically um has every court in the state of Michigan run public satisfaction surveys. Um just wanted to share our information here. The last time we did this was in 2023. Um they skipped the last two years, but um we're going to be starting it's rolling out again and we're going to start it here in the next couple of weeks. Um and just to look at again how we do um we met or exceeded um the statewide averages on the scores. People come into court and then they get a survey based to fill out based on their experiences um and interactions with the court, with the staff, with the judge. Um and like I

said, I I'm happy to report that we exceed the um the statewide averages um compared to other courts. Um, you can see like it's broken down into categories. You know, the staff listened to what I had to say, treated me the same as everybody else. Um, you know, the judge treated me the same as everybody else, listened to what I had to say. So, um, just um, like I said, we're going to start that the newest one um, a couple a couple weeks from from now. Um, so if you stop by, you know, fill it out. um what we're looking to do is um we're sustaining our mission through modern um resources. So how we're doing um what we're doing and what we use our funds for. Um so the 21st District Court will continue to deliver justice for all by providing access, protecting rights, resolving disputes, and applying the law under the Constitution. Um we rely heavily on technology these days. Um 96% of all of our civil cases exist in paperless form on the my file platform. Um 23 more than twothirds a little more than twothirds of all court hearings are conducted virtually. Um and the court will continue to use we have a court innovations program that um to resolve civil infraction tickets. people can go online, communicate with court staff, communicate with the police department um to resolve things in a virtual space um outside of the courtroom as well. Um and then um we try to maintain uh you know status quo through the years with with expenditures. Um the biggest things this year

to ask for the 3% cost of living wage increase for all employees which um runs with um what the city has in store as well. Um, and then we're looking for um spending through our building fund um for updating computers and technical equipment uh to keep pace with demands of today's evolving digitalbased operations. Um, regarding the building fund too, I mean there's some details that Judge Hammer and the city manager are looking into. Um but for the time being we are requesting use of these funds for technology upgrades.

That was it. Very good. Uh questions or comments from the table? Mayor, Council Member Hughes. Um [clears throat] you said that um the majority of your cases involve traffic. Uh yes. Okay. What percentage of cases? Oo. Um, I didn't have percentages. Um, I can go back to that slide. So, my bad quick math here. Um, more than double civil. Yeah, it's more than half. Um, 8,600 total in 2025 and then uh 5,000 of them were

Thank you. were Thank you. Um, with with that in mind, we have our new system. We're going to be managing traffic citations and court appearance. Is it traffic?

That's not in 2021. and staffing police department back up and you'll see. So will we will we see a somewhat of a reduction there? No, no, not from our police department. So really the traffic numbers driven from our patrol. Okay. All right.

The light side of it which would be on the far right. traffic the light blue but then misdemeanor felonies all those other kind of cases that come through I don't see the line share of the case that comes through them it's minuscule traffic and all the others no thank you thank you thanks anything else any other comments from the Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Okay. At this time, uh, we'll have public comment. Anybody wishing to speak? All of our public that's here. Anna. Okay. Um, with that being said, and I I do want to thank all of our uh uh chiefs and department heads that were here tonight, and uh uh we have more to come, but thank you for your time and the presentations. They were all very good, very uh explained a lot of things for all of us. So, thank you all for your time. Uh no further business. This meeting is adjourned. Heat. Heat.