City Council - Regular Meeting

or greenish blue. Ours is broke. Yours is broke.

We are live. And we are live. You're m we all ready? That's Mr. Pul. Perfect. Go ahead and start. Just go ahead and start. All right. Call this meeting to order. Uh, welcome to the city council workshop for the capital improvement sales tax. And we have Chief Dwayne Compton here to begin things this evening.

Good evening. Uh, I have Captain Tim King and Derek Bar with me tonight and they were instrumental in putting this together. We broke this up into basically thirds. There is a lot of information and we went old school because there's a lot of maps in this book in front of you and because of the televisions are so small it's hard to see. So we decided to print it off that would make it easier for you to read in front of you versus trying to look at it on one of these televisions. So we're going to start off. Captain King's going to take over on uh why this location and response times. Uh somewhere in here we'll have a break for food and then uh Captain Derek Bar is going to take over on our needs for training and then I'll wrap up on design and construction and why fire stations cost so much. As a side note, these two have never spoke before city council died and I got a ton of respect for him because they both stepped up and said, "Yeah, we'll do it." So

awesome. Take it away. Good evening. Welcome.

I am going to go over like Dwayne like Chief said, I'm going to go over the more entertaining parts of this numbers. So, do I have a clicker? Yeah. So, we're going over location selection like you talk Oops. Sorry. I'm so sorry. Um, a little while back, it's probably been what, three years ago, Chief, we did a study. We had IF IFFF do a study. The local union sent it up the chain to do it. Um ISO did a study and Josh helped us out tremendously and did a study here internally. And all three pointed to this location for fire station 3. That was all based on call volume um direction of city growth industrial all those different things. Current trends put all that. As you can see, all the new apartments going up over in this area, the new housing coming in this area. We got what, five, something you guys are voting on tonight at city council down east of the high school. More housing. It's all coming this way. Property size. That was a big big thing for us because it allowed for us to build that future training training site as we grow because we need a centralized place for all our all our training. Um, and then we needed the space for live burns. live burns put off a lot of smoke. They are not they're not good. Residential, dining establishments, all those things. Some of our response statistics, not sure where that's okay, that got messed up. Anyways, um don't pay attention to the pie chart because that's somewhere between yesterday and today. It's got messed up. So anyways, so year to date so far we've run 1171

calls for service that are emergency medical, fire or that other column that is everything that doesn't fit into fire or medical. So that is gas oders in the structure, technical rescues, um anything like that. So um last year we ran 1227, this year we're probably going to be up about 120 over that. Some of that came from a correction we made with dispatch in August that uh back in COVID we dro drastically reduced what we responded to. We responded started responding more of a a Springfield style where just life immediate life threats. They dispatch overshot that a little bit. We were missing out on seizures and things like that. So we've got that fixed. Um and that's averaged out about an additional 30 calls a month for us. So next year overall we're probably going to be about 240 more calls than we are this year at least based you know as we have more subdivisions and more residents that's going to grow too but just on that station one carries bulk of the calls they've run 877 this year station two is 252 if this station were if station three were to be put in place it's going to take some of the calls from both and we're we're going to see that here a little bit later on apparatus breakdown you can kind of see it again engine one out of station that runs 696 calls for this year. 63% comes from just engine one. Station 3 would take some of those as well. Rescue one would be moved to station three. Their calls, all of those calls wouldn't necessarily go to station three because of the way the districts or the ways that the response areas would lie. We'll see those here in a little bit. Engine two and rescue one currently, they run about the same. Ladder one and ladder two are truck two. Ladder one we try not to run because well it's old and it's struggles

at times. Year to date we've had 55 related fire related calls in the city of republic totaling a totaling a complete property loss of 677,000. Last year we were at 68 fire calls and 921,000. So we're about one fire away this year which will probably happen from exceeding last year. This is the first really busy map and I'm going to try to break it down. Uh key performance objectives for us in fire response. We go by NFPA standards and this is the first arriving unit for a fire. We have 5 minutes and 20 seconds to get there. So we have 80 seconds to get dressed and four minutes to travel. After that the second arriving apparass, they have 7 minutes and 20 seconds. So they get an extra two minutes to get there. That would be if the fire is in station one's district, that would be station two arriving. Everybody past that has 9 minutes and 20 seconds. So that would be Brooklyn, Battlefield, Willard, all of our auto aids coming in, they have a 9 minute 20 second response. If it's an EMS call, we have 20 seconds less. So we have five minutes flat, seven minutes flat. Well, for an EMS call, we wouldn't really ever have a second or second unit.

Excuse me. Yes, sir. So, just for my uh knowledge, where do how do they determine where the calls go? Does does do you guys have dispatch do that or you have 911 dispatch call? Certainly dis 911 does it. So, dispatch does it. Um we have what's called beats built into our mapping system with dispatch. Okay. So, and we have those split up into about I think eight zones is what it's split up into. Okay. Yeah, it's eight zones. And depending on where that address lies in the zones is what apparatus gets dispatched. Thank you very much. And we'll talk a little bit more about specifics on who goes where as I get into these different stations. Okay. Thank you. Going on.

So this map over on the side's pretty busy, but I'll try to explain as best I can. The overall shading, these yellows, that's a 0 to2 minute response time. So this is Nick was nice enough to build this for us. that is based on actual travel time and speed limits in the city. Um each of those big circles, the smaller circle on the left is station one's area. The bigger circle on the top right is station two and this bigger one's proposed station three. All of these colors originate from those stations within those districts. So bright yellow less than two minutes. Um light orange is 2 to four minutes of travel time. Dark orange um is four to six minutes. Light red six to eight. Dark reds 8 to 10. The dots you see on the map, that is call volume hotspots. If they're in blue, that means we made it in time in within our standards. If they're in red, we didn't make it within our national standard of uh response. Here's an example. It was a house fire I was on in June. This is over on Pickerity. Engine one made it there in 5 minutes. So, we had 20 minutes to spare. And in that 5 minutes and 20 seconds, I talked about, we have to be on scene performing an action. So, that could be tagging a hydrant, starting our investigation, whatever. But, we have to be on scene performing an action. Engine 2 took 10 minutes to get there. Now, mind you, this was on the probably close to the furthest point in Republic that Engine 2 would have to travel, but still 10 minutes for them to get there. took Battlefield 14 minutes and it took Willer 24 minutes. So, we met our f our primary response standard. We didn't meet any after that. And then we had Brookline covering our any other calls that occurred in the

city. We we typically have to do that with any long long call whether it's a fire, technical rescue, doesn't matter. We have to have somebody back fill so that our medicals are covered. Here's station one's district. As you can see with station one, especially out in Liberty Place, Lakes of Schuler, here's South Basswood. We've got another plan subdivision going down here at the end of South Basswood. All all of those are red responses. So, we don't make it make it out to those in time. Typically, there's a lot of zigzagging through streets to get back there, and it just really eats up our time. We got some out to the west. Um, and that's growing a little bit too, but and then station one, one of the big hindrances with it peak traffic hours, people don't let us out. Like that might add 30 seconds to a minute sometimes just for us trying to get out of our parking parking lot to get on the street to respond. Station two. So if three was built or when three is built, station two would remain and take everything north of of Highway 60. Station 3 would take everything south of 60. All the red that's right here along 60, that's our apartments. So that's Stone Creek Falls, Old Stone, 60 West, Station 2 struggles to get across 60 to get down to a lot of those calls. Um, and then the problem with with Stone Creek is they either have to come out James River and 60 to get down to it or they have to come all the way down MM and 60 and drive all the way back up to its entrance before they get in. Um, when the MM expansion comes through, Stone Creek Falls should be we should get there within time because they're going to come over the bridge and be

able to drop right into Stone Creek Falls and never have to get 60. Here's where that MM for reference here's where this new roughly where the MM corridor is coming through at. You can see where it dumps right into Stone Creek Falls. It'll also take a railroad crossing out for us which does hold this up sometimes. station three. So, I talked I said this a little bit with with station two. Station 3, we cover everything south of of US60 right here on this corner. It's going to pick up all of this that the Liberty Place calls Vintage and Opportunity out there. um all the all of Old Stone and 60 West, all the and this proposed development to the east of the high school. All of that would fall within station 3. Um I ran or Nick ran me some numbers based on 2025 data and within the constraints of what station 3 would be and it'd be about 265 calls for service for station two. So it would be be about the same as what station two runs. And it'll also some of those will be taken like I said off of station one's response like how many they respond to. Um this will also pick up that proposed subdivision down there at the end of South Basswood. It's just another map. This is what we use in our reporting software.

This is not the actual beats or the districts that I was telling you about um for coverage, but these are our coverage circles. The reason they're different size is ISO gives us different standards based on the type of equipment that we respond. So, an aerial apparatus gets a 2 and a half mile buffer and an engine pumper gets a mile and a half. We only we only have two aerials. Station three, station two is where we station three is where the new aerial is going to go or ladder one based on the industrial complexes, the multif family dwellings, all that. So, they get a bigger circle. The two red circles on there are are projected stations four and five. They're not a hard obviously not a hard set location, but that's where our coverage needs are. So, we need to hit the lower one is station four, and that's going to cover that's going to get us in that coverage need for uh Island Green and Lakes of Schuler and those. Anybody have any questions over any of this? I know I went through that kind of fast. Yeah,

I can go back to any slide you guys want to talk about. Yeah. So, if you go back to station 3's page and station one, will station three be able to cover any any of the area like Schuler Ridge or county line. So, Schuler Souler Ridge unfortunately that that's going to have that's going to fall into station 4 whenever we get to there. Like unfortunately where they're at right now, we don't have a means to get them within that coverage circle with and meet these other needs. So meet the multifamilies up here, right? But even with station three, will it not relieve some of the pressure off of station one? It'll definitely get us there quicker, right?

So station three will be closer in proximity than station two. So when we're talking about a structure fire or something out there, they will probably meet that second that secondary apparatus time. They they could potentially beat station one there based on they just get run they just get a run down Wilson's Creek here and then come down county line or uh come right back in the back side of lakes to sheler. So they may be they may be able to beat station one. Okay. Thank you. No problem. Yes sir. So when if they beat him there who's who's in charge then? Is that still under that

be station three? They're the ones in charge of the scene. Yes, sir. The the other station four and five, would they like sizewise, costwise, they would they be smaller than this proposed one or

Yeah. So, station three and I I think Derrick's going to cover this here in a little bit, but station 3 was chosen and the size it was chosen, it's partially an admin building. It's building for the needs of future admin. It's also a training ground. ISO has very specific qualifications for a training ground in the fire service for us to meet maximum points so that we can maintain lower that ISO rating. So the only way we can do that and Derek's like I said Captain Bar is going to cover some of this here in a little bit. We have to meet certain requirements for ISO to get the maximum points of that. And that was why this site was chosen. It was away from everything. We had a high school across the street. We know that wasn't going to build up. mostly farmland out here. So we had especially for live burn purposes, we had a longer period of time that this would be functional.

So a lot of the training burn training is at station two now which stuff is built up around it now. Yeah. Now we're we haven't had any since just because we can't predict where that that smoke's going to go. We don't want it going into habaneros. We don't want it to go into the apartments over there. So that's really hindered that training over there. Thank you. Anyone else? All right, I'm going to have hand it over to Captain Bar. He's going to talk about

Hello everybody. Um so like Captain King said, my name is Derek Bar. I am a station captain um uh for CE shift uh with the fire department. Today um I am going over um our training needs and what all that encompasses. So I will start with our current issues. Uh just like uh any other branch of the city, our services directly depend on our facilities and equipment and training capabilities. Um, with the growing development of the city and future projections, the fire department needs expanded. Um, with the evolving safety standards, our facilities are currently not meeting these NFPA standards. Uh, everybody understands NFPA, there's a lot of acronyms I'm going to throw out and try and if anybody has any questions, open form, please interrupt me if you have any questions. Um so with the proposed fire station 3 we are looking to develop a safe compliant and uh much needed consolidated training grounds. Our existing training capabilities will not meet the projected growth or the ISO standards uh that are currently set. So NFPA requirements uh the first bulletin is live fire. So that's um NFPA 1403 that is procedures for live burns and safety uh staff. So example of that is staff deploying handlines, entering a structure um and practicing fire attack. The next bulletin is company trainings. So that is NFPA 1410. So that is uh by company trainings, it's a an engine company or unit. Uh it's a standard on training for initial emergency scene operations. Um so an example of that is it's like on a training ground you'll have a simulated subdivision. You'll have the fire truck pull up. Someone tags the hydrant. The fire truck

advances. We have to deploy 300 foot of LDH. So that is the large diameter hose that comes off the back of the firetruck. So we have to advance that 300 feet, deploy two firefighters deploy two hand lines and they uh have to flow 150 gallons per minute in under three minutes. So we have to practice that annually and we have to have 16 hours uh per member. Next is officer's training. So that is uh so the first arriving unit the officer gives out assignments. So uh you give out an assignment. So either your rest of your guys are doing fire attack, deploying hose lines or rescue situations. And also with officers training we do a lot of leadership in the classroom setting. So next bulletin is driver operator or engineers position. This is the person who drives the firetruck. They require a minimum of 12 hours of some type of driver's training. So whether that's uh an EVOC course, uh EVOC is emergency vehicle operations course or a TIMS class. So that is traffic incident management. So when the fire truck pulls up onto a MVA or car wreck, we have to position the fire trucks accordingly so uh we don't get hit on scene. So all of our staff also do this EVO course that we put on every year. Um so it's like a training course that we put out with cones. We have to do skilled driving and not hit the cones. So next we have our hazmat. So that is six hours per member. Um all of our staff are hazmat ops and awareness certified. So the city does have a large amounts hazmat that comes through the city uh by road and rail daily. So that's something we have to continue our training on. Our new recruit training or probationary firefighter

u they require NFPA requires them 240 hours of training. So that is uh annually. So they're throwing ladders, deploying hose lines, uh extrication to anything the fire department does. So, and you can currently do you currently do all that training here locally? Yeah. Between the both stations. Yeah.

Next, we have our ISO requirements. So, ISO requires uh for full training credits. Uh so, these include that dedicated twoacre training ground. So, like on the slide, it does not include the fire station. So, this is a whole separate area just for training. Uh it is you could also have a multi-level building that's capable of various drills. So that is a structure that could be made of conx buildings. You can order these in any kind of configuration with breezeways to simulate apartments or balconies. The next is live fire capabilities. So you have to be able to have a prop to burn and actually have live fire to put out. Uh to meet these ISO requirements, every firefighter must uh complete 18 hours of training ground use each year. So that's hands-on training on the fire ground on top of medical training and multi- agency training and medical online training stuff. So here I'll go over training props. So all these uh are needed for staff to retain certifications and advance new staff so they can perform these increasingly dangerous assignments safely. Um some of the future needs for training props are this this multi-level building that I just talked about. Um ideally we'd like to get the ones made out of conx that we can arrange and build them specifically for our needs. Uh next is our training tower. So that's in the photo. Uh you can see our guys here uh doing high angle rope rescues uh repelling off of that. It has multiple functions, but ideally it's it's great for uh technical rescue. Um so this training tower we did receive on a grant 2017. Uh it was 95% grant

funded. The city did uh match 5% on that. Uh and we we got that in 2017. some other uh technical rescue props on there. So, the bulletin just says technical rescue that is encompasses um anything from confined space to building collapse to trench rescue uh and rope. Let's see. The last is the drivers training area. So, that is that evok course that we've set up with cones. Um I I do go over that in the next two slides, I believe. So, I'll have more information on that. So, next I have a few of these training props. Uh, in the picture here is this flashover simulator. So, like Captain King says, that is located at station 2. So, it is a 1403 prop. So, we do actually light live fires in this. Um, so we have staff that go in, deploy handlines, and uh get the actual feel of live fire and see what it's like to put it out. Um, so this prop is limited to only teaching signs of flashover and fire behavior. Uh, everybody know what flashover is? I can kind of describe it if you need to. Uh, so flashover is um, so we'll take a room and contents on fire. Say the couch is on fire. It is off gasing and putting out heat and it elevates the temperature to where everything in the room can autoignite and possibly explode. So, this prop does show uh how to avoid that. So, it is a very nice prop and it's we're glad to have it. Um, so yeah, it is located station two and like Tim said, it does put off large amounts of smoke as you can see. So with the development of Iron Grain, the future f uh future fuel station that's going out there, uh we do have to coordinate with them and make sure the weather the

wind's blowing in the right direction so we don't, you know, smoke all those establishments out. Next, uh we have this EVO course. So this is kind of the driver's course that we set up. Um, ideally it requires a a m a minimum, excuse me, of 40,000 square foot. So, our fire trucks are very big and long. They require a lot to turn around and back up. Um, ideally, these should be on concrete. Um, currently we do this at Miller Park on asphalt and it's usually in the summer, so when it's hot asphalt and heavy trucks, it can create damage on that parking lot. So, we we do try and avoid that. So this next is a uh a multi-level building or multi-level burn. You can order these to burn in. Um you have to do that specifically. I I believe this one is just a multi-level training tower. Um so this will be essential with the increasing development of apartment buildings and warehouses here in town. Um so this prop does require a 15,000 footprint. Um, so ideally it should be surrounded by concrete so our fire trucks can pull up to it and simulate a commercial or multif family dwelling fire to where we can pull up, deploy handlines or also use the aerial to pull up and elevate the aerial for simulated rescues or ventilation um or elevated waterways for defensive fire attack stuff like that. Any question on any of these props? I know I'm kind of flying to this.

So, so, uh, this one here, the the the multi-story, the Springfield has that. Uh, yeah, I believe this one is Springfield's. Yes, several of the areas have them. How about other municipalities? What what other props do they You know, I don't know. I know. We They were using our tower for a while. Something similar to that. These are available in grant fun. We don't have anywhere to put it for the grant. The key element in applying for the grant is do you have a dedicated training ground? Okay. Now, will will this be open up for training for other fire departments or just Absolutely.

So, yeah, we do uh yearly we have to meet multi- hours we have to do multi- agency training. So, that is with all the surrounding area departments so we can all be on the same page when it comes to a larger scale incident. Okay. So like if we do have a fire over here at Old Stone, we have I believe three or four other agencies coming and if it's well advanced, we have to ask for more. So is that not not to pick nits here, but do they do they pay for that or is just a free something that we offer free to them for us? We offer free to them. We do a lot of training back and forth between Republic and Springfield and Nixa Ozark Battlefield Brook line. We we just trade back. We have things that they don't have. They have things that we don't have.

Very good. Our problem is I can only send one group or one station over there to train. I can't get all of our people together at one time and train unless I call an entire shift back of of a dozen people to on overtime and send all the group over. So, this is where we're lacking. And this is when we go through our ISO rating. They this and they realize, okay, Republic Fire Department's getting bigger, the town's getting bigger. You're at this point, you need to have these props so that you're self-sufficient. Okay. And for anybody watching, our ISO rating determines

ISO rating determines your uh is a key qualifier in how much you pay in insurance.

The lower the number, the less. It is also we have noticed over the years it's a it's a key thing that development looks at. So Amazon when they come to town one of the questions that I had to fill out was what is our ISO rate. Amazon self assured they don't buy like from State Farm or shelter but what they're looking for is the grade of the fire department and the level that we provide. That's what they're looking at. So you know the lower we are the better we are. We'll go through an ISO rating. We're due next year. We actually went the wrong way last time. We're like at a 2.8 almost back to a three. We need to go back to like 2.5 or 2.3. We went the wrong direction. And the reason we went the wrong direction was staffing. Just don't have enough staffing for the call that we're having and the response times.

Do you have those insurance numbers or can I get them from you sometime? But if if you're this ISO rating, this should be your insurance at this ISO.

It's hard to say that because every insurance company does things. Every insurance company does things differently. So there is one major insurance company. Uh they rate off a zip code. And so when they rate the city of Republic, if you're in 65738, it's a good day for you. But if you're up in the village of Brooklyn and you're north of James River and you're 65 802, that's the central disc uh zip code for the city of Springfield and that's a high fire danger area, a red zone type area, what they call in the city of Springfield. And so they rate off dollar loss in a zip code area, not the ISO rating. They look at the rating, but they go by what the actual dollar loss in the zip code. The problem with their scale, and a lot of them use this, is you could have a huge dollar lost fire and be in the 65738 zip code, but not be in the city of Republic. So, you know, we could West Republic or somebody could burn a million-doll home out here and we kind of take a hit for that, but it's not in the city. So, some use it, some don't. The other thing, I'll be real honest with you. I hate to tell you this, your insurance is probably going to go up about 25% this next premium. And it all has to do with wind and hail. That's what is driving the premiums now. It's not so much the fire side, but it is the mother nature events that is just pushing it to the extremes.

But is there an actual dollar amount? That's hard to say. You could call your insurance and tell them said, "What happens if we go from a two to three? How does that affect us? How does that affect you? So, and that these are the questions that will be asked if we the more money we put in. So, so we got a ladder truck that cost X. Well, if we don't have ladder trucks, our insurance is why

we're constantly trying to hit those national standards, ISO and NFPA, because that they grade every fire department in this United States by those two standards. And that's just where we try to be. We try to strive to hit that. And like I said, it's it's homeowners insurance and it's also the development world that people they look at when they come to town and they want to know, okay, you know, do you have efficient uh wastewater treatment plant? Do you have enough water to supply our business? What's your crime rate? What's your fire department ISO rating? So, you know, when they're shopping for this piece of property, this next development, those are things that the that the property hunters are asking.

Okay. That answer your question? Yeah, but it sure brings up a lot more that we can we can discuss offline. So, happy to. How often is the ISO? Is it annual? Like, how often they do you guys get a do we get?

They used to be on a fiveyear rotation and right now they're running on a six. the guy that does the ISO evaluations. He is a local guy. He's actually a city councilman for the city of Joplain. He's a retired battalion chief from Joplain Fire Department. And I'll just be honest with you, he keeps a very close eye on everything that's happening in Southwest Missouri. So, he knows when we add staff. He knows when we do annexations. They just are pretty in tune. And then every now and then I'll get them a request for a new city map and they'll take that GIS map that I give them. They'll compare it to the last one. They'll tell they'll say, "Okay, so you've annexed all these properties. Are these properties built out yet?" Yes or no? No. The other thing they look at is the housing and the number of houses that we put per acre and how close those houses are. We got some houses that are 12t apart from eve to eve. And the problem we have is when one house catches on fire, we do damage to the next house. ISO wants you to keep the fire contained to that house and not damage the neighbors houses. So when we get into large lots or agricultural area, they're less concerned with that because it's a lower density housing versus the apartments. On average, if we have a fire and apartment, you can figure to rebuild an apartment building, it's $80,000 a door. So however many units, if it's a 12unit apartment, to replace that, not from the ground up. That's just to strip it out the sheetrock and rebuild it. It's $80,000 each unit.

Thanks. Good questions. Thank you, Chief Compton. Good answer. All right.

Okay. I'm almost done. I believe I have one more slide. Uh so like uh we were saying this grant or this uh this prop can be funded by grants. uh but we currently don't have the space. Uh this is another example of some training props. Uh this falls back into the technical rescue category. Uh here uh pictured is covers. So we can do anything from storm drain uh rescues to confined space and building collapse in this property. Um this kind of requires about 7,000 square foot just to fit um all these things safely. So uh with that isn't pictured as a trench collapse. Um we were fortunate enough to have that class I believe last year with uh donated or we grant funded through MU fire rescue training. So I think almost all the fire department and we even got some build staff that got to go through that. So that was very great. Um so that's one thing we were also wanting to add is a trench area along with that. So that's why it's 7,000 square foot and uh ISO uh has approximately correct you know numbers to where spacing and everything should be. So, but I don't want to bore you with that. Um, let's see. Lastly, we have our proposed indoor uh training facility. Um, so currently our gyms are used and stored out in the apparatus bays on both station one and station two. Um, ideally we would like to get these inside the away from the apparatuses and away from the higher de uh decon areas. So, um, when we get a fire, we come back, the app brass bays are always our gears are gears trash, not trash, but dirty, full of soot and cancer-causing agents, and we got to clean our tools. So, we're just trying to separate all that stuff from the uh, apparatus bay area. All right. Uh, so in conclusion, the fire department's looking to incorporate all of this training area into one location here at the new fire station through your headquarters property. Any questions?

Yeah. Um like the lifespan I know it varies like the multistructure on there. I mean I'm assuming it has a pretty good lifespan. Yeah. Like is it Yeah, it should last well into 50 years. Yeah. I'm not sure the exact guarantee on the on the structure, but you don't have to buy every 10 years. Many years. Yeah. It depends how you take care. You take care of them and paint them. And I'm blessed with the staff that takes care of our washes out keeps clean. There's a long uh station two. When was that bill? I was just kind of cur 2007 station one was remodeled the same. Thank you guys for your time. Appreciate it.

Thank you Captain Bar and thank you Captain King. Wonderful job for both of you. So we've got a signal for food. So we're going to take a quick break, grab some food and come back and then we'll get back started again.

All right, I think we're ready. All right, you ready to get started back?

We're ready. So, as you require uh remember a couple years ago, we purchased this land next door and we bought 9.9 acres. Uh and that was paid through through the fire sales tax account. Uh and that was one of those things that was on our checklist that we promised the voters we do is we would buy the land for fire station 3. We didn't say we'd build the building. We just said we'd buy the land. We knew we wouldn't have enough funds in the 15-year sunset to get the building started. So when we bought the land, uh this was a master plan that was developed. Um I think BKD did this. Fire department didn't have any input into this, but this was just kind of a rough idea how things would lay out. So the red building is obviously the fire station. Uh the blue building to the south of that is the joint police fire training facility. And then that other blue and green building back there, those were two other city buildings that were supposed to be built on the fire station property. Um, this was just kind of a rough design, a conceptual drawing that was developed. The problem with this is the fire station is way too small and the apparatus bay that was designed was so small that the truck uh a 53 foot truck will barely go on a 60ft building. need way more room to get around it. So, but this was kind of a placeholder as to where we were going to head with this. So, once we got into this uh and city hall started, there was a need to move the water retention basin over on the fire station property. And we had always thought when Andrew Nelson was here, we'd always assumed that basin would go back in this

particular corner here instead of where it went. And again, I didn't have any input into this where it's being placed. An engineer did this drawing. And that long white line that you see there, that is a drainage ditch going into that basin. So, what we're doing is we're taking all the water off of builds and the new city hall and we're pushing it over onto the fire station. That's what's currently there. Now, that green line is a detention basin. The other green line that runs from the north to the south is a sewer line that has dissected the property in two. The parking lot in the back is actually the parking lot that we do our drivers training at parks and recreation and that's roughly two acres in size. So that gives you a idea of what we would need for the 2 acres training ground. Um we would place buildings on that. The station that we're looking at uh 25,000 square foot that's probably on the big end of it. We'll probably have to shrink that down because of price. Uh pricewise, fire stations are anywhere from in the rural areas of Green County, $400 a square foot. In the city of Springfield are about $532 a square foot because Springfield requires them to be a green uh lead certified building. We don't require that here, but we meet the same objectives with the energy standards and the LED lights. And you'll see that in your new city hall. It's very energy efficient with LED lighting. We just don't want to pay the for the certification. You don't get anything for it other than a piece of paper. So, um again, that's where the detention

basin is currently and where it's dissecting a property. So, it really presents a real uh issue for us as to how we're going to design and get on this. And the other thing you got to realize through the bottom of this is a flood channel. The flood channel actually starts back uh on the other side of this building here. So there's not a lot of water that goes through there because the the beginning headway of that is the next piece of property over. But as you go southeast, it picks up steam quite a bit. So station design has changed a lot over the years. There are two things you're going to build in a city that cost a lot of money and that's a wastewater treatment plant and a fire station. And that's the truth. So the bays what we're looking at would like to go 100 by 100 dimension. Our longest truck is 48t 7 in long. When we open the cab to do maintenance on it, we need a minimum of 53 foot because the cab tilts towards the front. Uh, we want an 18t tall building so we can get the cab up open in there as well and then additional space to work around the truck. So, what we're talking about is the spacing between doors. So, when we built fire station 2, we used a 14x4 overhead door and we put 10 foot between the doors and that has worked extremely well so that not everything's compact and you're not pulling a saw out of the truck and then scratching the truck next to it and stuff. So there's room for staff to move around in there. Uh we need spaces for workbenches, tools, uh flammable liquid storage, air compressor, stuff like that. We do most all of our own repairs. U if I call the maintenance department and tell them I need to fix something, it needs fixed

because we really broke it trying to fix it. That's that's the truth. So, how stations have changed over the years is interesting from what the two designs that we currently have are extremely outdated. And so, what they've gone to now at the bottom of the screen, you can see a low hazard, a medium hazard or moderate, and a high hazard. And they want to keep everything separated out. So your living quarters, your sleeping area, your work area, the lowhazard area is on one side of the building. You got a transition and then you get into the high hazard area which is the apparatus bay and the equipment rooms which we do all the decontamination for your fire gear. And to kind of break this down a little bit uh further, this is up at central Jackson County outside of Kansas City. This is a station they built a couple of years ago. Uh big thank you to Adam Brown who found this picture and put this together and u Captain King. So the red zones again, the apparatus bay over on the far side you see those work areas and then the green areas is the offices, living quarters and then up in the corner here, the furthest away is the bunk rooms. And the design for the bunk rooms has drastically changed over the years. And I'm going to dwell on that here in just a minute. So, what happens when we come back from a a working house fire or working vehicle fire? And this pretty much lays out, you start off with number one, you get off the truck, you're dirty, and before they are allowed to go into the living quarters, they need to have an area now where they can change clothes, take their dirty clothes off that's got soot and debris on it, throw it in the extraction

washer. That's not a regular washing machine. It's a one that gets those particles flushed out and then within an hour and we make them we encourage them to do it now depends on colo that they take a shower and get cleaned off and get this stuff off your body. The cancer rate in the fire service is off the chart and it all has to do with the interior furnishings in a house. When I grew up everything was wood. If you look around this room, everything in here is plastic or some sort of laminate. There's no wood left. So, that's kind of how it flows when we go to a call. And you can just kind of follow the dots around that we go to. So, in the warm zone and the hot zone is the SCBA, that's self-contained breathing apparatus. That's the cascade room where we refill our bottles and stuff. Obviously, we don't want that in the uh lowhazard area because those have to all be cleaned when we come back. The straps have to be taken or the packs have to be taken apart to clean. Your mask has to be cleaned. And then they'll change out bottles or change out packs if we have one broken. And then the gear room is they have every staff member has two sets of gear. They have a primary set and a secondary set that they're assigned. So they'll strip the dirty set off and put their boots and stuff in the other set so that they're back on the truck ready to go in the event of another call. And then the decon room is the washer, dryer, the gear extractor, sink for cleaning stuff like that. All this needs to be in an area that is separate from the other station. And all these rooms that this stuff in needs to be vented to the outside so that air is not being sucked through the ventilation system back into the other part of the building. And all this drives up cost

when you're building a building. So the living quarters, what we're used to now in design of bunk rooms and how things are is not really acceptable anymore. And a lot has changed. And a lot has changed because of society and the people that are working in the fire service. So currently we have a a male and a female sleep quarters at each station. And there's just six foot walls between the beds and some lockers for privacy, but it's open to the top. And then the restroom that we're used to using is similar to the restroom in the back here where there's several stools, urinal, and showers, whatever. You can't really do that anymore in the fire service. So what they've gone to is a individual sleeping room. It can be a unisex bedroom, meaning the staff that's on duty today. A male can sleep in there and then when one of our female members comes on tomorrow, she can use that same room because it's a private room and it has lockers in it that their stuff is locked in. Their personal belongings are locked up in. And then the restrooms are a shower that's a private shower that they go in and a stool. So in how they're doing this is kind of basically you would have like nine bedrooms and then across the hall you would have four or five restrooms. So it's not one for one. It's a reduced amount but there's enough there that to to fulfill all the needs if they do that. And again, this is what drives up cost in a building. Each one of these has a light switch. Each one of these has a a furnace or a mini split unit in it. Um, and that's just simply the way the design standards have gone. Administrative needs, uh, this building will be our new

headquarters. We have simply outgrown fire station one. when Tim showed a map uh of the station response area. He showed station five on there which was going to have to go out west. Actually, station five can be avoided if we move station one off US Highway 60. And just so you somebody will ask me, we own three acres of land. And I think you could put a bronze on there, but don't want to start that rumor. So, we just got to have a somewhere to move station one. We've done some mapping, some preliminary mapping, and station one actually needs to go on Main Street. Um, and it'll be a smaller building, but administrative needs. Um, we need offices, but now myself and Deputy Chief Hollingsworth, we need to add back a future operations chief, which is what Mr. Neil's dad used to be, Dick Neil, when he worked for us years ago. We need offices for battalion chief training officers, a fire marshal, and an administration or administrative assistant office kind of a area where they come in. Somebody would greet them versus having one of the on duty crews members having to run to the front of the building to see who's there. And then the other thing we need to include is emergency operations uh center, the EOC. The current EOCC is in the basement of the police department. and the police department, uh, they're needing to use that space because they're expanding their detectives and they need more room and we kind of need to get out of there. Um, what we've had for years has worked, but if we have a actual emergency happen, the room down there for all of us to meet in is way too small. We would like to have training rooms. We'd like to have a room that is big enough to seat 150 people. We missed out on a free class that's being held at Nixa Fire because we didn't have seating

for 85. So we kind of come up with 150. We come up with breaking that room into thirds with those folding walls that would come out. That room would also serve as the emergency operation center. So when we went through that evaluation and they evaluated the city's emergency operation plan, one of the things they told us you you never want to do, you never want to have your operation center and your media in the same building. This is why this needs to be located in the fire station. Operations is over there. We'll have the media come over here or come to city hall. Uh we don't want them in the same area because they're looking for a story and when we're dealing with the ice storm, we're dealing with people being out of power, unhappy residents. I don't need them in our way. So operations over there uh small conference room and then for obviously teleconference uh training and stuff like that. A lot of stuff that we do now is online interviews. And then the other thing we need to do is we need to have a backup uh citywide IT server room. So currently all of our eggs are in one basket in the basement of the police department and it's worked for years and it's worked really good until this past winter when it got so cold power went out the generator wouldn't start and it was a just a combination of fluke things that happened. But there was a period of time the entire city was dead in the water. No phones, no internet. And the way we're doing things now is if we have a disaster, it's basically all of us getting on a Zoom call and talking instead of meeting face to face. And we always thought that would work until we lost the server room at the PD when the

power went out. So, we need to build a hardened room uh next door when we build the fire station, and we need to have it set up where the IT department can basically flip a switch and take that one offline and turn this one online. Um, and so in summary, um, kind of wrap this up, our presentation was based upon national standards and ISO. We're trying to fill the gaps that we've identified. Uh we'll need renewal of the 1/8 cent fire sales tax that re expires in 2028. The cyst tax the cattle quarter cent uh as Mr. Ford told you. Uh he's looked at combining those. Um that tax they want to do a renewal on that. Naturally, city council would have to approve that would be a no tax increase that would hit the ballot in April of next year. Um, any questions?

Yes, sir. So, be fair to say the two biggest hindrances are you got to have the land to put everything, which we have, and then the funding. Having both of those like time frame.

So, the land's there. We're probably going to have to redo the water retention basin is there. What we probably should have done looking back is we should have probably went with an underground structure. So that could have used the top up for parking lot, an under underground detention basin. And then that's actually done at Flat Creek. When you pull in the parking lot of Flat Creek, you're parking on the water retention basin that's underneath there. It's also done at Target on West bypass. Uh Mr. Gerky, you come from the world of finance and um extremely tight, tighter than bark on a tree. So, I'd really like to have some cash in the bank for a few years before we start building because I'm not real big into getting into debt. But if I had like three years of money in the bank to help buy that long-term debt down, it'd be a good day.

It would be. So, I mean that's I'm not going to lie to you. That's where I'm at with it. But we got to get there first. But, you know, we were talking earlier too and like I know it's not all about the ISO rating, but we're going to have one soon and then again then we got another five or six year before that gets looked at again. Correct.

Yeah, we there's a number of things. We should come up for an ISO inspection u in 2026, probably August of 2026. We're at We should have been done this year, but like I said, they watch us pretty close. A lot of the things that we showed you, like Captain Bar showed you the repelling, you're thinking we'll never do that in Republic. Well, well, hold on. It actually can occur real easy. It's not we're going to save somebody off a water tower, but we have numerous warehouses that are several feet tall. MLAN's 110 ft and there's product stacked to the top. So, if we have a worker in the top of that building that goes down, that turns into a technical rope rescue. Amazon's the same way. It's basically 40 feet to the top rack in there and it's completely stacked with product. If something happens to one of their employees or if something falls over, then then there's a need. We don't have a place to do that type of training other than what we have now.

Thanks. Yes, sir. How many apparatuses will have to be replaced before we start station three?

In 2013, we bought two fire engines, the twins, and they need to find a new home. They're costing me an arm and a leg to run. I mean, we're dropping $40,000 a year keeping them on the road. this practice has become in the fire service is that you run them 10 years on the front line and then you keep them on the back end as a reserve. Both of those trucks are approaching a 100,000 miles. 100,000 miles on a firet truck. You're saying, "Well, that isn't much." Well, whether it's a firet truck or a police car that that that Brian and Jame are going to talk about here in a minute, if it shows 100,000 miles on the odometer, it's really 200,000 miles because it never gets turned off. It's sitting there idling the whole time. So, you can just take that times two. Those trucks we in the perfect world, we would because it's a two-year time frame for a build. In the perfect world, we would go out to bid for those next year and take delivery in 28.

So, those will be the only two appearances that we need to replace between now. At the current time, we've pretty much got everything caught up. We're we're where we need to be. But those two fire engines, um, one of them I'll make a heck of a deal on. So, send it to Western Republic. I wouldn't do that to

How's House uh staffing? Well, we are still short staffed uh from the public safety sales tax that was passed. We are still down uh because that tax is not generating what we thought it would because sales taxes, as Mr. Ford said, flat. We're not going to deficit spend. That wouldn't be that's not how we operate. That's never how the city's operated. So, in the people come along, as the money comes along, we'll pick up more staff. really in the perfect world, I need to add uh four firefighters, three battalion chiefs, and uh if building keeps going the way we are, need to really pick up a fire marshal to take some of the load off. Uh plans review and stuff like that in the perfect world, but the money's just simply not there.

Any other questions, Mr. Harter? Oh, no. I was adjusting my glasses. I'm just checking on you. No, no additional questions for Chief.

So, listen up. I got to say one more thing before I sit down and I got to hurry. I'm blessed. These guys uh man, they stepped up and uh it doesn't matter what you do in the fire department. Everybody was involved in this. Even the the new people were sitting back watching, asking questions. Well, what about this? What about that? And so, uh, big thank you to Josh and Nick for developing the maps that you saw. With that, uh, I'm going to turn over to the police department. My wife's 60th birthday tonight. She didn't want to come to city council meeting. We could have sung her happy birthday. Yeah, we could have taken care of her. Have a good time cuz I'm out of here. Tell her happy birthday for us, Chief.

Thank you very much for your presentation. You have any questions, you know where we're at. Just ask. All right. Thank you, Chief.

Well, good evening. Brian CS, police chief. Uh, we're going to switch gears a little bit here and talk about the police department. And I got to mention, uh, Major Burks is going to take over here in just a few minutes for me. This presentation will be much quicker than the last one to hopefully give Michael some time to get things switched over for your next meeting. Uh, we're going to cover three main topics uh, pretty quickly. We're going to talk about the impact the cyst has had on our fleet. We're going to talk about some overview of our fleet uh data or data and then also we're going to talk about our rolling stock and fleet replacement plan especially if we get this uh cyst renewal in place. Uh since the passage of the original cyst in 2017 we have kept our promise to the voters we've got three new uh police vehicles every year since that tax went into place. What a lot of people don't realize before 2020 we had to maintain a 1:1 ratio which meant if we got a new car we had to give up a car. Uh as you can imagine that made it impossible at that time to grow our fleet because we were never getting ahead even though we were getting more officers. That resulted in some cars being driven 24 hours a day, 7 days a week which has increased the mileage on them as you can imagine. Thanks to getting rid of that 1:1 ratio and the cyst over time we have been able to grow our fleet up. Uh currently as of today we have 22 patrol cars. We have four vehicles that is assigned to our detective division and then we have four that goes into our administrative division for a total of 30 cars. I know those numbers may be a little hard to see down there but kind of broke that down into percentage. 73% of our fleet is dedicated to the patrol division while 13% is dedicated to the

administration side and then the other 13% over to our detective side. And with that I am going to turn it over to Major Burks. It's going to talk about the age of our fleet.

Good evening Major Burks here to present on this. So, as Chief Cells said, um the one to one ratio, um that got us in a bit of a bind with the the mileage being put on the cars. I mean, they we were putting again 24 24 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. And u these are their offices, right? Um as as Mr. D well knows, we we are in these cars for 12 hours a day at times. And when you're sharing a car with four other or three other officers, you know, four officers in one car, you you can't make your office your own. Um so our goal in 2020 when we stepped away from the one to one and we started getting three cars on the cyst um was to build the fleet up to where everyone had their own car. So we weren't racking up 24 hours a day on these and everybody was able to make their car their own because again they're in them all day. Um, but that also caused, you know, some issues with uh how many it it raised obviously it raised our um maintenance costs um because we now have more cars to take care of. And as you can see on this this chart here, we have this is a list of all our cars and the ages. So like one of them is a 2015, so it's 10 years old. Um I believe it has 160ome,000 miles on it. And then as we go down, you can see that even though we did three cars a year and it doesn't show that on some of these years, um that's because everybody remembers COVID and the chips not being available for cars. So it shows in 2021 we only were able to get one delivered even though we ordered the three and then we had a bunch delivered in 2022. So that that's why that reflects a little differently. So, most of our vehicles, we we range anywhere from the new ones a thousand

miles to we have one that's it's actually over 184,000 miles now. Um, and I'll get to this in a second, but 184,000 miles. I started to say, I hate to correct Dwayne, but um I kind of like correcting Dwayne. It's actually more than it's more than one to one, and we'll talk about that here in a second when we talk about engine hours. Um, but 184,000 mi on a regular personal car is a lot of miles. But in something you're driving fast with lights and sirens, um, it's it's a danger to the police officers. It's a danger to the citizens out there. Um, we just have to get those down. So, we have six cars in our fleet right now with over 120,000 miles. That's 20% of our fleet has over 100,000 miles on it. One vehicle, this this isn't the oldest vehicle either. It has 17,700 hours on the engine, right? So to put that in in easy to understand terms, the industry standard in the in the automobile industry is you average 50 miles an hour in your car. So a,000 hours at 50 m an hour, that's 50,000 mi. So 4,000 hours on a car, a normal car averages out to about 200,000 mi. So 17,700 miles on an engine in a police car, that's 885,000 in miles as as per the industry standard, right? So again, because we're putting so many miles on these cars and the fleet's getting older, um it's it's putting so many hours on these cars that it is, as you can see, 885,000 miles. That's that's a lot of miles on an engine. So take away from this, if you guys buy a used car, look at the engine hours, especially if you're buying an old fleet vehicle, and don't buy a cop car. So our goal with this cyst tax is we would like to start replacing vehicles uh at 100,000 miles because even though

we went from doing one to one, when we start getting three cars and maybe only getting rid of one, that doesn't mean we probably shouldn't have gotten rid of three, right? um we just kept them longer in order to reach this finally get a goal of every officer having their own cars. Uh because once we hit that goal now we can start working on getting rid of some of these older the like these especially these six cars that have you know over 100,000 miles on them. But the the goal with this new cyst renewal would be to get rid of them as they hit 100,000 miles or or you know they're just a little after um because again as I already said it um we want to we want the cars not only safe for officers but safe for the citizens that we're out there trying to protect, right? Um so having them in in a cru in a top condition is pretty crucial. Currently we spend about $75,000 per patrol vehicle. That's the cost of the vehicle. And then adding the lights and sirens, the cage, the computer, the camera system. All that adds up to to right just under $75,000. So currently we're spending about $225,000 out of the cyst tax. Now we would like to up that to 450,000 because three cars right now is is literally just kind of breaking us even where we're at. Um like I said, we we really need to get rid of like three cars next year. Um, and if we stayed at the three cars, that would put us back to the one to one. So, we're just kind of staying even there. Um, but that would give us six vehicles a year to where then we could get six vehicles. And if we had to get rid of three, we would still be able to keep three new vehicles. We'd be able to add vehicles to keep that as we add people keep people in their own vehicle. And then any additional funds that come over that $450,000. Um, and I and I I also want to add I'm sure car prices will continue to go up,

but we anticipate the tax would also go up along with that. So, once it does reach over $75,000 a car, hopefully the taxes is keeping pace with that as well. Um, but any additional funds after that would be used for other capital projects within the police department. Uh, like last year, we had to replace six, I believe, air conditioning units. The building, our building is 22 years old now. It still looks nice, but it is starting to age. And so we replaced the roof two years ago and those things aren't cheap. And when you're running on a tight budget, where does that money come from? Um, so those kind of things, we need to replace the sophet on the building. So capital projects like that is where any additional funds would go. They would stay within the police department and and be available for things like that. And that is all I have. If anybody has any questions,

any questions from council? How's your staffing? So, uh, good question. We we are currently, um, two under what we are funded. Um, so, and we I've actually got two in the hiring process right now and I should have hopefully those both hired by the end of the year. Um, so we would be as we're funded uh, fully staffed. And then the public safety sales tax, we're still five.

I think I think we would be five from ful for fulfilling that. But as Dwayne had said, uh the tax just hasn't and and from the beginning that tax it was it was pretty clear that it wouldn't quite get us there, but it would get us close. Um so, but we are technically two under, but I anticipate to have both of those higher by the end of the year. Okay. We were much faster than the fire department. Thank you, Major Burks. Thank Thank you, Chief Cells.

So, any additional questions, council comments, closing statements before we close? We got about 10 minutes before council meeting. Okay, you know where to find those answers later on. So our