Village Board - Regular Meeting

Recording in progress

Welcome to the Village of Cottage Grove and Town of Cottage Grove public meeting on Monday, September 14th, 2026. This is a hybrid meeting, both taking place virtually with the link at the top of our agenda and also in person at Village Hall. And then you can watch this on our YouTube channel. And I'm guessing that we could also find it on the town website. It is 5.30, so I'll call the meeting to order and we can do a roll call attendance.

I'll start with the town first. Anders.

Oh sorry, I don't return my hearing aid up a little bit. There we go. Let's try it again.

Anders present Williams present Fonger here. Here. And then we'll go with village board Benzo. Present Erlinson here. Here Murphy. Severson?

Here.

Stowa?

Here.

Villavicencio?

Here.

All right.

We do have a quorum of both the town and the village, and the agenda was properly posted for both. So we will move on to number three, which is we'll stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

your God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

All right, we can move on to number four, which is the public's appearances, public's opportunity to speak. We ask that you say your name, your address, and limit your comments to no more than three minutes. We'll start with individuals who have submitted a wish to speak forum and are present at today's meeting, followed by anyone else in the audience and then anyone else on Zoom that would like to give public comments. If you're on Zoom, we ask that you hover over the react button and use the raise hand feature so that we can unmute you. We do have a few wish to speak forms, so we'll start with Peter Dahl.

Hi, good evening. My name is Peter Dahl. I live at 901 Stony Hill Lane in the village of Cottage Grove. I wanted to speak tonight about something the town and the village of Cottage Grove have built together and something I believe is worth protecting, our joint volunteer fire department. There are plenty of issues where the town and the village may have different interests. Fire protection should not be one of them. For decades, our communities have recognized that we are stronger when we provide this essential service together. Shared governance gives both the town and the village a voice. We share the responsibility, the equipment, the facilities, the costs, and most importantly, the people who protect us. And those people are the greatest reason to preserve this partnership. Our department is made up of dedicated volunteers from both the town and the village. These are people with jobs, families, and responsibilities of their own, yet they spend evenings and weekends training, they maintain certifications, they leave their families, family dinners, children's activities, and warm beds in the middle of the night when someone's home is on fire or a serious accident occurs. And when that pager goes off, they don't ask whether the call is in the town or the village. They go. That's what makes this the Cottage Grove Volunteer Fire Department. At a time when communities throughout Dane County and Wisconsin are struggling to find firefighters, we already have something that many communities desperately need, trained, experienced people who are willing to serve. We should be doing everything possible to retain them. As our communities grow, additional staffing may eventually be necessary, but growth doesn't mean we need to abandon the volunteer department that has served us so well. And it certainly doesn't mean we should divide it. separating the town and the village would mean taking one pool of firefighters and dividing them into two it means duplicating equipment administration training and other costs and instead of recruiting together in an already difficult environment the town and the village could find themselves competing for the same limited number of firefighters I don't see how that makes either community stronger. There is also something here that is harder to put into a spreadsheet, institutional knowledge. It's firefighters who know the rural roads and farm properties in the town. It's the firefighter who knows the neighborhoods, businesses, and buildings in the village. And it's firefighters from both communities who have spent years training together, responding together, and learning to trust one another when conditions are at their worst. You simply cannot replace that with a budget appropriation. once a strong volunteer organization is divided or lost rebuilding it can be extremely difficult so before we consider changing something this important i believe the burden should be on demonstrating that an alternative would actually provide better service better response times and a better value to taxpayers until then our direction should be clear support our volunteers recruit more of them, invest in their training and equipment, supplement them where necessary, and preserve the partnership between the town and the village. This joint department shows what good local government can accomplish when two communities work together and continue to work together. We share the costs, we share the resources, and we share the benefit from one larger pool of trained volunteers. We provide fire protection without unnecessarily duplicating assets and services. those are advantages for residents and taxpayers in both communities we shouldn't dismantle that partnership we should make it stronger the cottage grove volunteer fire department belongs to both the town and the village i urge you to work together and continue to work together to preserve and protect our volunteer fire department to keep cottage grove safe thank you thanks pete mark

Okay, so I'm working to become an AI translator, so I'm taking extensive training in AI and how to use it. I've been doing this for over a year and a half before AI became a thing. With that, I did a deep dive into the history of our fire department, the high qualifications, and was amazed at the both leadership that we have here. I'm gonna read some of those. I also use the AI to go through every board meeting, every public works meeting, It looks at the video, takes everything that anybody said, consolidates it so I don't have to spend five, six hours looking at what's going on in the meeting. I see what's going on. Several board members talk about being data driven. I'm not data driven. I use the actual data and then I can pick and choose what I need out of that data depending on what the agenda is. So tonight I'm going to start with the history. 1929 is when there was a sound foundation started with Cottage Grove with people in the community that came together and said, we need this and it's important to us. Chief Nick Archibald joined the fire department in 2007, has over 20 years of experience in these communities, both the town and the village. Became fire chief in 2018. Previous leadership roles, training officer, fire inspector, operational... and administrative responsibilities to go with that. Leadership accomplishments. Expanded the department staffing from 20 members all the way now to where we're a little over 40. Helped secure a safer grant to support staffing and recruitment and improvement to fund their own resources to serve us, the village taxpayer. Firefighter safety and training. apparatus and equipment training. He's been involved in so much. He attends, this past year, over 78 of the calls personally in Cottage Grove, both the town and the village. You talk about somebody that cares, somebody that's committed, and if you look and compare him and April, our assistant fire chief, and compare him to any other chief and assistant chief in the state, they stand with or above them by a lot. The training, the ability to get grants, the ability to recruit, let's get to April. April, current position assistant chief. Been here more than 20 years also. Family connection, third generation Cottage Grove Fire Department. Started with the department as a firefighter, promoted to lieutenant in 2015, current assistant chief and head of administration. Fire service experience, she has multiple emergency service roles, including firefighter, EMT, emergency dispatcher, wetland and wildland firefighter. fire officer, fire service instructor, professional accomplishments involved in fire prevention, occupational safety, fire code development, fire service safety and health, serves as an integrated section chief for the fire prevention and safety health program, education and training. It goes on and on and on, and not just for our community, for the whole state of Wisconsin. We are looking to potentially replace these people with union firefighters that are going to cost millions of dollars to replace. And what we're gonna get in return are people that don't know the village, people that are gonna cost a heck of a lot more, people that do not have the institutional knowledge that Peter Dahl referred to, and people, quite frankly, that are gonna be less qualified. These are the people that we're gonna be hiring that have been trained by some of these people that we already have running our fire department. The other thing I wanted to bring up, I couldn't find anything about the agenda about a lease, about consolidation in any of the board meetings. The only thing I saw is there was a study to be done, and that study hasn't been, as far as AI can find and I can find, has not even been released to the public to be reviewed. So tonight, I see on the agenda that we're looking at a potential lease. Why would you sign a lease on a building you own half of? Makes no sense to me. Why would Cottage Grove, why fix something that isn't broken? There's a survey going out right now, and the survey states, one of the questions, what do you like most about Cottage Grove? Well, the only thing that hasn't been destroyed in our community is our fire department. It is the center, the fire in the summer when we have the big fire festival that benefits our great fire department. That's where the community comes together. It's the biggest event we have. A car show, too, but the fire festival, the fireman's festival. I'm here tonight to stand up for what's right and still viable in the village of Cottage Grove and the town. I'm hoping you can work together. There's a lot of information, a lot of it I can't even pull because I don't have access to it. This may have come up in a closed meeting, and that's why this agenda was set tonight, and I'm not able to see it because it's not public. It should be interesting, but I may be seen by many as a lightning rod in the community, but when I sit in front of you, I deal with fact and fact only. You can take what I tell you to the bank. If I give you a number as to what somebody's making or what the cost is, you can take it to the bank. I don't sit here and give my opinion unless it's backed by something that I think is in the best interest of the village or the town. I serve as the current commander of the American Legion. We have both town members and village members. We don't discriminate between the two. We're all American Legion members. And as far as I'm concerned, whether it's village or town of Cottage Grove, we're all residents of this great bedroom, what was once a great bedroom community, and still can be a great community if we plan accordingly going forward. So I thank you for your time.

Awesome. Thanks, Mark. All right, we do have one wish to speak for Mike Park, 803 Lindsay Way. As a village resident, does not wish to speak, but is in favor of road connections, specifically discussing sidewalk installation on a road slightly east of Sandpiper connecting sidewalks. That's all I had for email correspondence for this meeting. I don't see anyone else in the audience tonight, but if there's anyone else on Zoom that would like to give public comments, you can hover over the React button and use the raise hand feature. So we'll just pause to see if there's anyone online. No hands up. All right. So we'll move on to number five, which is a series of three presentations. So first, we have the Cottage Grove Fire Department chief, so Chief Archibald. And then we have Deer Grove EMS, either chief laying or designee. And I know that they are going to be slightly delayed because of some previous conflicts. So I think we'll start with fire. And then our third one is we have our PAA consultants. And just to kind of give everyone a how we got here moment, we have been working, obviously, over the last almost actually over a year on a joint fire and EMS facilities and operational scope study, kind of revising our previous documents. This is an opportunity to kind of ask questions questions of both entities and of the consultants to kind of get everyone on the same playing field for making some decisions at our next joint meeting. So we thought this was a pretty good use of that time. So turn it over to Chief Archibald to kind of give us an overview of the volunteer fire department.

Okay, is there a way to share my screen for the presentation? Okay, this was included in the packet, but I'll go through it, and if you guys have any questions along the way, just feel free to shout them out. So the mission statement for Cottage Grove Fire Department is we accomplish our mission through service. Consists of safety, education, responsiveness, vision, inspections, commitment, and empathy. Big note is at the bottom, all of our volunteer firefighters are a minimum certified to Wisconsin entry level firefighter, and we've actually increased that to a minimum standard being firefighter one state certification. It's encouraged for them to go further to the state firefighter two, and also once they complete that, then we also encourage them to go further and take extra training such as pump operators, inspectors, technical rescue, anything that's out there, we really encourage education because it just adds value to the department and to the community and just makes it so we can serve better. Our risk statement, the Cottage Grove Fire Department will respond with the assumption that we can save lives, property, and the environment. We will risk our lives to save a savable life. We'll risk our lives in a calculated manner to save property. We'll not risk our lives to save those lives, property, or the environment that are unsavable. District of Cottage Grove serves is the village of Cottage Grove, the town of Cottage Grove, and a portion of Pleasant Springs. This comes up to about 48 square miles for us with roughly 15,000. It's probably closer to 16,000 now that we serve. Staffing is 38 to 45 depending on the fluctuations. We get people that come and go depending on job changes, family, that kind of thing. Right now we are at 40 members. With a max staffing of 50, the staff all live or work in the district, and we pay the members for training, equipment maintenance days, and call responses now. Paid per call was added in 2026. This is the first year that we've done it. Members are paid $15 for responding to a call that they're on the truck and $10 for any call that they come and do standby on. All members respond via pager and tones that they respond to the station and then they grab the appropriate apparatus and Head out car one is staffed 24-7 by a volunteer So there's always one officer that takes that car they take it home and they respond directly from the home So you're kind of like getting a career Member for at a volunteer. It's not really costing the community anything other than driving the car So that's an extra benefit that we do This is our organizational chart. We have, uh, spots for 10 officers right now. One of them is vacant. Um, each officer has a specific duty that they're assigned to do. Um, the chief is myself assistant chief that has, there's an assistant chief of administration operations and assets, three captains, one overseas training, one overseas, the planning. like pre-plans, fire prevention, and then the last captain is fire prevention, fire safety. They oversee all the fire inspections and follow up with that. Lieutenants, there are two currently. One is personnel and oversees special events. And the last one is the public information officer slash pub ed. All members are broken down into a company. where they report to the Lieutenant. This is just a couple of charts of our responses over the last few years, starting in 2020 and up to 2025. You can see 2020, we had around 253 calls and 2025 we finished with 387. It's been a pretty steady increase. A lot of that's driven by, as we've talked about a few times, false alarms, medical calls, all that's kind of on the rise. Everybody, I guess all fire departments across the country right now are experiencing pretty steady growth. It's not unusual at all. This chart on the right is the one that breaks down the different calls by the municipalities. There's more information in our annual report where this is laid out more if you want to see more information as well. The biggest contributor or the biggest user obviously is the Village of Cottage Grove, then the Town of Cottage Grove, Pleasant Springs is pretty minimal, and then mutual aid is to other units. This is a call breakdown of our calls for service. As you can see, our biggest chart is this no emergencies. That's false alarms, good intent calls where people call in thinking that there's an emergency. It's really not. Pretty, yeah, kind of like we discussed already. Here's a breakdown by each municipality. You can see the village has a lot of those non-emergent calls. Um, the town, it's kind of a little bit less prevalent, same with the town of pleasant Springs, just because there isn't the same amount of, uh, alarm systems out there. So see a little bit of a decrease with those two. Chart breaking down the calls by day and the calls by time. You can see it's pretty well spread out throughout the days and pretty much throughout the entire time throughout the day as well. So there isn't really any big outliers where we're getting more calls or anything like that. It's pretty well spread out. Um, this graph shows our response times. Um, all of our response times meet NFP 1720 standards right now. Um, the department does practice a, uh, the Dane County comm center uses priority dispatching to assign different levels assigned to a call. Uh, the lowest level would be an Omega level call. And the highest level would be what they consider an echo-level call. Based on those priorities, the department chooses how to respond to the call itself. So we are using evaluated dispatching. So calls that are lower level, we're going to probably go non-emergent to. So it delays our response a little bit, but it's also about reducing risk for the community. Calls that are Charlie Delta echo then we normally go emergent to those so our response times are a little bit different for that But those calls justify the response The fire department currently does fire code inspections we're doing one inspection per year on all occupancies and two for certain occupancies like the some of the schools and the senior centers Um, there's currently six certified fire inspectors, uh, two that are additionally two additional trained inspectors that don't have certification, but they've gone through all the training, one commercial building inspector, a sprinkler fitter, journeyman sprinkler fitter, and a journeyman HVAC installer. Um, 2025, we conducted 400 inspections. Uh, this is the first year that we went down to a single inspection per year. So it's going to be a little bit less. AND THAT WAS THE LAST NOTE. WE PASSED AN ORDINANCE IN THE VILLAGE AND TOWN CHANGING THE INSPECTIONS TO ONCE PER YEAR. PLEASANT SPRINGS IS STILL OPERATING ON A TWO INSPECTION PER YEAR. ON TOP OF BEING FIREFIGHTERS AND INSPECTORS, WE DO A LOT OF FIRE PREVENTION ACTIVITIES. WE DO COMMUNITY OUTREACH. engagement with the communities. We go to the schools, daycares, that kind of thing, participate in the community night out, marketplace days. So we're always out and about doing something, trying to educate the community and being present. This is just a list of the trainings we do in a year. I'm not going to read through all of them, obviously, but every month we have a monthly topic for assignments. All members are required to come to one monthly training or one training per month that's mandatory. They're welcome to come to as many as they'd like. But we have a wide variety of stuff that we're training people on. We actually have two people right now that are going through some tech rescue classes. So we're always looking for new ways to get training out there and stuff. Improvement and retention, like 80% of the communities, we are all volunteer. Like I said, we went to pay per call this year, so that's a bonus to try and recruit. We pride ourselves on diversity and inclusion. National average for female volunteers in the fire service is 11%. Cottage Grove is around 18%, which is pretty good for an all-volunteer department. And we encourage anybody who's interested to apply regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, all that. So let's just try to welcome anybody that wants to join. Right now we've started the Fire Explorer program. We had one person who just became an actual member. He went through the Fire Explorer, graduated high school, and then he joined the department as a probationary member. So once his probation's up, He'll be brought on as a full member as long as there's no issues. And he already has all of his fire certs. He has fire one, fire two. And it's just an added bonus for us that we can get people that are still in high school, they can get all the training. So as soon as they're old enough to join the department, they can join. We're actually talking to one other individual right now that's probably going to go through that starting in January. So it's another tool that we added that seems to be helping to recruit more people. Um, we put together a list of goals and initiatives. This is something that we analyze every year and just kind of take a look at it. It's not necessarily that we're struggling in these areas. It's just that this is stuff that we'd like to do or try to improve on. Not going to re read through all of it line by line. It's in the packet. So if you guys, um, have anything that you want to elaborate on or talk about, but it's just, we take an internal look and see what we can do to try to improve our service. The future of the fire department, we're looking to, in phases, start adding career staff at some point. Currently we're approaching about 400 calls a year, which is quite a bit for an all-volunteer department. We were looking to maybe add in a full-time fire chief and prevention officer to handle the inspections and then phasing in duty crews depending on the load of how the fire service continues to grow. The assessment of the facility, some of the things that we pointed out that need to happen for the facility is some day room upgrades. There's currently no place for the fire department. to have people if they're moving to a 24-7 staff. So there's no sleeping quarters or anything like that. The kitchen currently is pretty basic. It's just a single stove, single fridge. That would have to be kind of changed. And eventually you'll probably have to add some bay space just because you're probably going to add more trucks as the communities continue to grow. I talked about Separate gear storage areas, because currently all of our turnout gear is stored in the apparatus bay. So anytime the trucks are running, they can get contaminated with the carcinogens from the trucks. And some additional office space and storage, because right now everything's in use. And that's a list of our contacts. Anybody have any questions for me?

it up to questions from either board casey yeah um out of so it's uh from the art chart nine officers and looked like about 30 firefighters right so 40 total uh how many are at that state level two um i made an estimate roughly um

I'd say, I think about 75% of them right now.

75%, okay. And how long does it take to go from the firefighter one that you require to two?

If you, starting out from brand new green firefighter, each class is a semester. So if you take entry level, that's one semester. Fire one's another semester. And then if you went through fire two, it'd be about a semester and a half. So about a year and a half from green to fire two certification.

Gotcha. And then off the division of type of calls, what falls under hazardous situation calls?

That's like your CO alarms, gas leaks, chemical spills, anything like that. Gotcha.

Okay. Thanks.

A comment. The chief is a leader, and I've known him for a while. He's a leader. He's not a manager. And there's four or five other people down the chain that are leaders. When you're in a fire, are you You're not a manager. You're a leader, and they've got people that are trained well to be leaders, and I think that's a very important thing.

Well, I had a comment, too. You're also teachers. You do quite a bit. I think you teach at Madison College, but I've observed you at some of your training nights, and it's very impressive how you are able to teach in those situations, and obviously stressful situations, too. So we're very lucky as a community to have very qualified individuals, not only training but responding.

Thank you.

With the call data, can you tell me approximately, maybe for this year so far and last year, how many calls that the fire department has missed where we've had to have another municipality come in to be the primary responder on a call?

That's never happened. I don't think there's been any that we've missed a call and had to have another responder come to. Okay, thank you. Literally right as this meeting came in, we had two calls at the exact same time. One was on the north end of the village, one was on the south end of the village. Crews responded in timely fashion to both calls. Sometimes when a situation like that happens, we may be delayed a little bit on the second one, but that's very, very rare. I don't think we've ever had to have another agency handle a call for us entirely.

What has been most successful for you in attracting new firefighters?

For us, it's just making it someplace that they want to be. We're now paying people to come to calls, and we pay them a little bit for training, but it's not like their career, you know? So, like, everybody's got constraints on time. They got family, work, you know, sports. Everybody's busy. So, like, to compete with all that, we have to just make it someplace they want to be. So one of the things we did is improved our members area, where we kind of made it a room where people want to hang out. It's like the upstairs room where They can do homework, we got a fridge up there and some food and drinks and that kind of stuff that we, the association uses some of the fundraising for to pay for. And then we got like a TV up there. They also have the weight room that we, between us and Deer Grove have purchased on our own through fundraising. So we try to make it just someplace they wanna be and welcoming and try to keep them engaged as much as we can, so.

I just want to, well, first I'm on the fire department, so, um, but the environment that we work in because of the leaders we have is amazing. Um, I'm so impressed with them. I've only been there for a little over three years, but I'm very impressed with the leadership and how they care about those who volunteer. But the second part is the fire department is one place where there is no boundary between village and town. We don't know who lives in the town, who lives in the village. We don't respond to calls based on who lives in the town and the village. It's just we serve Cottage Grove. And I think that's a really, really nice thing when you're there with those people, that it's just one big group, regardless of where you actually live. Thanks, Chief. Thanks.

Just one last thing, since you threw in some credit there. I think one thing that you didn't mention in this presentation, but that is very important, is the resources that you provide to the staff regarding their mental health. And I don't remember what you call it. It's like peer?

Well, we have a couple different things. So we have the Employee Assistance Program provided through Madison Services. And then we also have a peer support team that we've developed. Last, I think it was a year ago, a year and a half ago, we got another AFG grant where we were able to send all of our members that are on that team through specialized training, specifically for peer support, suicide prevention, and a few different other things. And it's just another resource for people to, somebody they can talk to that knows what they're going through, that lives it, and can help out. We had our incident a few years ago with our member, Nate, And that really opened our eyes to peer support and stress debriefing. And so we really run with that and try to make it so we can help our members.

I know I really appreciate it. And I think that the trauma that you have all seen is something that many of us can't even contemplate. So I appreciate that that is a pillar of what you're offering to the volunteers. So thank you.

piggybacking on that question do you feel like you have sufficient support in this area of mental health do you feel like you have enough support in this area for all of your volunteers i guess i i would say we we do i think we do a pretty good job of it i don't want to

become complacent or minimize it in any way, because it's always a real situation, real threat to our members. So I think we do a pretty good job of it, but I don't want to, there's always ways that we can improve and we can grow. There's more classes out there we can send our guys to, our peer support team to. So we're definitely not going to get complacent on it. Right now, I think we're doing a pretty good job, but there's always room for growth.

I'm a, I would call it recently retired after 40 years with Deer Grove EMS. And over those 40 years, 98% of which was here in Cottage Grove, I can't tell you the amount of times and the dozens, maybe even the hundreds of times that we've had the need for Cottage Grove fire that have responded quickly, efficiently provided top-notch service to help us out. And I knew that, excuse me, once a truck had arrived at the scene, that crew was going to go ahead and make my job easier because of the fact of the services that they were to help, whether it was just simply helping me lift someone or part of the crew, or having to tear apart a carb that was mangled beyond recognition in order for us to get a patient out to treat. I can't say anything, but they're totally outstanding. That's it.

Thank you. Chief, other than you and April, what are some of the tenures of people that have been there? How many years?

Our newest member is two months on the department, and we have one member who's been there since before I was even alive. So it kind of ranges. There's a group of us that have 20 plus years. There's probably a dozen of us in that club. And then there's a group that's between 20 years and 10 years. I'd say there's probably like 10 of those. And then there's 10 that's probably less than 10 years, if I had to guess.

So they're truly passionate about a family atmosphere that you have at your... Correct. Thank you.

So we're talking about major capital investment at the current ESB. We're talking about potential of a new satellite station somewhere in Cottage Grove. And then we've talked about organizational changes like going to a full-time chief or full-time inspector. What is the number one challenge that these boards need to consider when we're dissecting this information that we're planning on getting in the next month?

I THINK IT'S JUST LIKE I KIND OF BROUGHT UP A LITTLE BIT EARLIER, JUST TIME, YOU KNOW? WE ACTUALLY PAA, PART OF THE STUDY THEY ASKED ME TO PUT TOGETHER A LIST OF LIKE HOW MUCH TIME I SPEND AT THE DEPARTMENT PERSONALLY AS A CHIEF. SO NOT REALLY CONSIDERING THE CALLS OR THE TRAINING BUT MOSTLY JUST LIKE THE ADMIN SIDE OF IT AND RUNNING THE DEPARTMENT AND STUFF. AND BASED ON THOSE HOURS, IT'S COME OUT TO BE LIKE A PERSON AND A HALF AT FULL TIME RIGHT NOW. I do that on top of my regular job. I do that on top of having a family, two kids. And I'm by no means complaining because I brought it on because I like to do it and I like helping the community. It's just the time, you know, as Tim and Jim have kind of said, like, I'm happy doing that, but if, say, tomorrow I get hit by a bus, is the next person gonna be happy to do, take that much time on and that much commitment? It's just a lot that's that's the biggest thing I'd say it's a lot of time and you got to find the right person That's willing to do it and at some point there's probably won't be somebody that is willing to do it for as a volunteer thing anymore Other questions comments Seeing none we can probably move on to Deer Grove EMS then you know chief Lang.

Thank you chief Archibald I Yeah, I know that. Chief Lang's on online and I'm not sure. Chief, if you are able to talk now.

Yeah, I'm I'm able to talk. Is it OK if I share my screen?

Yes. As long as it's appropriate, yes, thank you. Legal sitting next to me.

It's just a presentation that you'll have in the package packet. All right, thank you all for affording us the opportunity to give us a brief overview of our department. Some of this information, I'm sure you've all had a chance to look over. There's probably much more information that we could present to you, except for, I want you to see me, so I'm going to turn my camera on because I'm beautifully today. Sorry about that.

Oops, this is the one that I wanted to share.

All right, so Deer Grove EMS was established. I'm getting ahead of myself. You can see our mission statement and our vision statement. They're in the packet so you can read them if you choose. This has been our long-standing mission and vision statements. Deer Grove EMS was established in 1978 when the EMS system was established in Dane County. Initially, it Was the 4 communities of the village and town of college grow a village in town of Deerfield. And initially established as a 100% volunteer agency, as I think almost all agencies works up for maybe the city of Madison in 1978. Some changes that we've incurred throughout the course of the years. In 2008, we added a contracted service to the town of Pleasant Springs, which is roughly the northern half of the town of Pleasant Springs. In 2012, the town of Deerfield left the IGA completely and received services from another vendor, but then came back in 2018. And as opposed to being an IGA member, they came back as a contracted agency. When you look at the district today, we're roughly 100 square miles in the square on the map up there. Throughout the course of the year since 1978, we've made incremental changes to our staffing largely as a reaction to what was available for volunteers. And very similar to the fire service, we've had a waxing and waning of volunteer availability. with also the increase in requirements of the volunteer to maintain their licensure and certifications. So as those responsibilities got larger throughout the course of the years, it became much more difficult to not only commit the time to respond to emergencies, but the overwhelming potential amount of time to keep your license up. So starting off as a volunteer EMT department, we are now primarily staffing with two full-time ambulances with two paramedics on it. Our staffing model also includes the use of casual part or slash part-time staff, and we still maintain volunteers on our department. Currently, the IGA that we have with the Village of Cottage Grove, Town of Cottage Grove and Village of Deerfield runs through 2023 and contracted for services runs through 2028 with Deerfield and Pleasant Springs. Our population is almost 19,500 total. So our full-time staff, all eight are full-time paramedics on the ambulance. All 16 of those are licensed paramedics. Some are actually critical care paramedics and nurses and advanced practice nurses as well. It lists the 16 full-time paramedics, our 18 casual paramedics. We've adjusted to the term casual. Some of you that might know our department, we used to call that LTE, but LTE indicates a limited term. And we like to have casuals on our department as long as they'd like to work for us. So we transitioned with the last PA study to the verbiage of casual so that it hopefully made more sense to more folks. We have currently 18 volunteer members ranging all the way from paramedics to basics. There was a question of the fire department of years of service. We have a 28 year member who is Eric Severson and a brand new member that in fact started today. We have 350 total years of service to Deer Grove alone. And that doesn't count the years of service that some of our staff have provided in the business before they started with us. Each ambulance is stationed at each fire department. So one in Cottage Grove, one in Deerfield. We own three ambulances. So while we have two ambulances on duty, we keep a third in a backup role. Periodically, we do need to put that ambulance into service for special events or maybe even some peak hours type stuff. When we look at over winter for some weather, we might add an extra ambulance if the weather looks to be very terrible that we'd want to have those extra resources available to us. Our licensure level allows us to respond from the EMT level all the way up to the paramedic level, which aids us periodically, especially with the special events where if we, say for Fireman's Fest, when we add extra staff, we can have that ambulance be at the EMT or advanced EMT level, depending upon the staff that we have available. Our operational plan allows us that flexibility. The Deer Grove EMS staff is committed to creating community connection while delivering the highest quality pre-hospital emergency medical services to our residents and visitors. You may have heard that for 2026, we've received the American Heart Association Mission Lifeline Gold Award, which means not only that we can verify or that we can verify the quality of care that we give by benchmark set forth by the American Heart Association. That means that our staff is putting in the work to reach those benchmarks, which are pretty high. There was only 19 gold award recipients in the state of Wisconsin in 2026. We have an in-house training division of which one of the lieutenants in our full-time staff manages the training division. They create the training for our whole department. We have provided enough education for every member of our department that they're able to maintain their National Registry certification and Wisconsin licensure without seeking training outside of the department. We have monthly trainings and then additional filler trainings through teams or distributive methods that basically our members don't need to go anywhere else for training. Our medical direction group works with us to provide those trainings so that they verify the quality of the training and supplement it periodically when we have topics that we'd like a higher level of expertise that then our in-house staff have for those particular trainings. We have a great relationship with Madison Emergency Physicians and SSM Health for our medical direction. We're part of the Dane County EMS, regional EMS system. We've signed on to several different IGAs within Dane County. So we have a mutual aid IGA, an ALS closest response IGA, and an ALS intercept IGA, all of which we participate in. What that gives us is the opportunity to have extra resources available to us when we might have incidents that need more resources than what our department can provide in the moment. We do have periodic moments where we have more calls for service than we have ambulances available. That is where the mutual aid system helps us to provide a resource when we don't have them available. In turn, we, as the word means mutual, we also provide mutual aid to our neighbors as we have extra resources and they might need some from us. We participate in the mutual aid box alarm system. It's a nationwide system that sets levels for fire and EMS departments, depending upon the size and scope of the incident that resources can be requested in an organized fashion. So the Mavis system might take us to incidents in Jefferson or Columbia or Rock County when you see us going out of the county for those. Here's where both of our stations are located, Deerfield and Cottage Grove. The Cottage Grove station emergency services building houses one ambulance, the response vehicle car 79, and we also have the rehab trailer there. It's also where we store the bulk of our training equipment as the building itself provides us with the most space as compared to Deerfield. Deerfield Fire Department houses, our primary ambulance on duty, and then our backup ambulance, along with the duty staff on duty each day. We have a vehicle replacement plan. So our vehicle ages and photos are in the screen here, and you can see those in the packet. Again, our pre-hospital level of care is primarily paramedic for our ops plan. We're allowed to administer 36 medications and 47 different potential procedures, but are also allowed to flex to AEMT or EMT level, depending upon staffing in need of the municipalities at the time. Here's our most recent staffing adjustments in a timeline form. You can look over those. As I mentioned, we do have a capital replacement plan that we work to have a continuing 10-year outlook at our larger expense equipments, ambulances, COTS load systems, cardiac monitors. Our ambulances are on a nine-year replacement cycle. Cardiac monitors 12 years and then various other years for other equipment that we try to keep all of it in good working order while also following the manufacturer's recommendations for service life. You can see here, here's a chart showing our responses since 2011. We have had some years that jump out at us. 2018, I'm pretty sure, was a construction year in 90s, so that's why we got a little jump out on that. 2020 was, I'm pretty sure, a little bit of a recession because of COVID. And then you can see us since then growing. We're on pace. to do about 1600 calls this year, which is a roughly 10% increase from years past. Here's our responses by municipality, the five village of Cottage Grove, town of Cottage Grove, village of Deerfield, town of Deerfield, town of Pleasant Springs, along with the mutual aid responses that we're giving to our neighbors and the mutual aid responses that we receive from our neighbors. This graph just kind of puts into percentages what it looks like for each of the five primary municipalities. This one's pretty busy. So all I did is blow out 2025 into one. So you can see it that the largest responses are to the Village of Cottage Grove, followed by the Town of Cottage Grove, then Village of Deerfield, Town of Deerfield, and Town of Pleasant Springs. This looks at the annual assessment percentage as calculated by our IGA since 2013 to 2026 to kind of show you funding-wise where the levied dollars are coming from by municipality. This also compares the amount of dollars that we need to get from the municipalities as compared to the funds that we generate ourselves through ambulance run fees. In a perfect world, we would be able to fund ourselves. But unfortunately, we don't work in that perfect world. We work in healthcare and government type funding where if you know anything about especially Medicare and Medicaid, they effectively tell us what they'll pay us. And it's sometimes one third to one half of what it actually costs us to provide the service annually, about 60, 60 to 65%. of our payer mix is the the government model which should be medicare medicaid and va sources so we provide a service knowing that there's no way we're going to be able to be fully refunded by those through the government This is our average revenue per call from doing comparisons throughout the county. The $829.91 that we were able to generate in 2025 is... pretty close to the top in Dane County. We put a lot of work into ensuring that our patient care reports and the documentation we acquire throughout our calls for service are very adequate to not only ensure we're documenting the incident for the patient and their insurance for our staff in the future if there were to be any litigation, but also to ensure that our billing agency can be successful in getting the most reimbursement for us out of all of our calls. This breaks down on an average basis. And I'll go back to this slide. This slide doesn't necessarily mean, or this isn't about the billable calls. This slide is about, we had 1,438 calls last year. That took our total revenue and divided by those calls to get to this number. We have some calls that we don't receive reimbursement on at all, especially the ones that we get canceled on or the no transports are the most difficult for us to receive reimbursement on. So this shows you by municipality and their call number. We're taking the calls, multiplying it by the average response per year to show that not only are each of the municipalities providing their assessment to us, but this is what it would look like for the call generated revenue by municipality. This shows the contractual value of are provided to us from the town of Deerfield and the town of Pleasant Springs. This shows that we've taken big strides to ensure that our contracts are paying full value for what the services we provide to them are. When our contract is set to be renewed, this will be reset and have some increases in it again. This is the funding formula we use. It takes equalized value population runs and makes an apportionment percentage, we plug the contractual townships into the same formula to get to the number that they would need to pay to, or that it would cost us to provide the service to them. If you, for a review of current governance, currently we have an EMS commission of six members, two members from each of the commission municipalities, so Village of Cottage Grove, Town of Cottage Grove, and Town or Village of Deerfield. Some things that provide a little bit of background in that, and this is a change with our last, renewal of the IGA in that budgets and expenses and important decisions in the past only required a majority vote by the commission, not a majority vote by the commission and a majority vote by the municipalities, not a unanimous vote. This was, in my mind, a very good change made to the last IGA to give equal footing to each of the municipalities so that not one or two could effectively overrule another so this sentence specifically talks about non-budgeted capital expenses so this would be something mid-year we had something if we had something we needed to buy we would need to get unanimous approval from all three municipalities just like our annual budget or any amendment to the iga so that it would need all all three municipalities to approve it When we look moving forward, we expect to have future needs. We know that our call levels are going to expand. We have certain areas that we have some anticipated increase in call volume from and are always looking at new developments as they arise to attempt to anticipate what type of call volumes could come from them. Specifically, the things that we've established in our five-year plan that we submitted was in about three years, our structure has a deputy chief that's currently on the ambulance. As long as our calls continue to grow and we can get it to fit responsibly in the budget, we would look to have the deputy chief potentially move off of the ambulance and into a more administrative role. and then need to backfill that position in four to five years, depending upon call volume. We would look to have a part-time third ambulance begin to respond to the calls that were potentially missing. And we would... base the need for that off of unit or utilization and number of calls that we're missing and make smart decisions on growth to meet the demand of the municipalities. I would suspect that by 10 years from now, we might need a full third ambulance. But again, that would all be call related in our ability to respond to the calls. Again, using the metrics of unit hour utilization and calls missed. As we grow out to a third ambulance, that ambulance is most likely going to need to respond in the Cottage Grove area. So we would need some space for that. Currently, we don't have another bay to place an ambulance in Cottage Grove. So we would need some place to put that in a place for staff to be when they're not responding to calls. And then looking even past that into the future when we have a consistently running third ambulance, we would also want to have a backup for that ambulance. So we would figure out where and when is the right spot to add or keep a fourth ambulance in our fleet. So that's the information I have to present tonight. Does anybody have any questions?

Yeah, chief, I'll kick it off and then open it up to everyone else. Same question. Knowing that we're going through. Be for dear grovia mess that these boards should be aware of.

The number one challenge is always staying up on the growth of the communities to be able to ensure that we're providing. the right amount of response capacity. There are other municipalities that maybe are behind a little bit and have the numbers flipped over different than what we have. We're able to respond to all Almost all of our calls, we have a small number that we're unable to respond to. Um, that's because of adjustments that we've been able to make in the past till today. Uh, I think. That's the big thing is to be able to know that we're, we're going to ask what. What would be the right number and hopefully not too much. And that we can provide statistics to back those up.

Questions from other board members.

Hey, Chief. I see that your replacement schedule is nine years. Do you take into account mileage, or is it just a nine-year replacement schedule?

We've taken all that into account, Patrick. I think the biggest component of the ambulance replacement schedule is the insurance part of it. So when we look at insurance, our vehicles are insured to 100% replacement up to 10 years old. Because we have three, I think it naturally fell into buying a vehicle every three years. And that means you would replace them after nine. When you look at our 2017, we're at 170,000 miles on that ambulance right now, and we'll need to keep it for another year or a little bit more. So we're looking to get that maybe close to 200,000 miles. That's actually getting up there for ambulances. So... I think with the rotation we have, our mileage will be 150,000 plus on all the vehicles when we send them away. We've found that that's kind of the rocking chair area where they're not nickel and diming us to death because of the amount of repairs that we have to do. And we're trying to meet that balance with cost of repair versus overall cost of ownership and buying a new one.

Thank you.

Chief, I'm gonna ask you the same question I asked Chief Archibald, which has to do with the number of missed calls where another agency has to come in. And I know your presentation said 31 calls from 2025 where we had mutual aid received. Do you have any idea of what that number might be so far in 2026?

yeah the number right now as of the end of august was 21 and it's on the same pace for last as last year okay thank you does anyone else have any other questions thank you chief lang and thank you for not driving during the presentation Yeah, no problem. And the call volume thing, I think we're just fortunate enough that we don't get a lot of consecutive calls. I say this a little tongue in cheek, but if we could schedule our calls, we'd make them all. But unfortunately, we have no ability to schedule emergencies. So sometimes we have those calls that we just simply can't miss or can't make. But I also understand that there's no way that we're gonna be able to put 10 ambulances into a building to be able to make sure that we can respond to all the calls. Unfortunately, the business model has us where there's gonna be a time or two where we're just gonna miss a call because three came in together or four or five or however many at one time. In fact, over the weekend, and thank you to the fire department for helping out, we had four within an hour. There's nothing we can do about those, unfortunately.

All right, well thank you again. I think we'll move on to C, which is Tim from PAA, to discuss the historical perspective, relative merits of a consolidated or shared fire EMS service, frame issues, current issues facing public safety, and then answer any questions from both of the boards. So again, this came up. We have a stakeholder group that was attached to the RFP that had gone out and that eventually contracted with PAA. And through one of our reviews of a previous draft, it was mentioned that, again, having... a good foundation moving forward of information, especially with new members on the board, kind of brings us all up and levels out the playing field so that we can hopefully make some shared decisions moving forward at our next meeting. So Tim, thank you for coming. You can share your screen.

so all right thank you so um my name is tim franz and i work for public administration associates i've been here in the past actually starting back in 2020 i think when we started our first study a little of my background is that i started as a volunteer party firefighter and then Over time got a job as a career department and was a paramedic and worked majority of my career in the city of Oshkosh. And the last 18 years of which where I was a fire chief. And then along the way I started working with PAA. And so worked with a lot of different departments of various sizes and organizational. differences from volunteer to career. And we usually, I prefer to work with smaller communities, and that's where we do most of our work. And there's a lot of challenges out there, very similar to what you're going through. I shouldn't say that you're going through, that you're preparing for. And as we were going through this part of the study, one of the things that initially had been part of it and then was was dropped was governance and then that led to some discussions and then in those discussions about you know that that what we had shared is that operationally we're not seeing a lot of issues with the department's what we're seeing once again as we did five six years ago is we still have issues with governance we believe and uh... how everybody is, how things are perceived, how everybody's getting along from an organizational standpoint. And I think that we need to look at that. So we're having some discussions about the merits of why we should do shared services and the values of it. And it's good because it's interesting. Every part of the presentations leading up to me being here are supporting things that I'm going to be talking about. And is that a strong believer in regional services i'm just going to tell you that that's primarily in a lot of places we go and people don't like that even when we come in because that's what we're somewhat known for making that happen for communities that aren't doing that because of the challenges that are out there so one of the first things that was we discussed is maybe we should go back and take a look back at in 2021 just a quick summary because a lot of folks have a lot of faces have changed here since then is some of the things that we looked at. And as we did this, you can see a lot of it is kind of governance type of things. One of it, we recommended some updates to the Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws of the Fire Department to reflect the current organizational practices and positions. The Fire Department is registered with the state as a Chapter 181 private non-stock corporation. And it is contracted with the district that was created by the village and town of Cottage Grove. And then also provides service under contract with a portion of the town of Pleasant Springs. So that's that development. How things, the state of Wisconsin allows that to happen, and interesting what was brought up in the history, why 181 fire departments kind of came into existence in the state is that firefighters saw a need for providing protection a lot of times before the governing bodies did. So they lobbied the state, and the state allowed a system for them to develop a fire department outside of the governance, even if they didn't want to have that yet or that they made it happen. They found a way to make it happen. So that's why some people find that strange that that's there. And some of it's just carried over over time, that that's what it is. Um, and, and some of them have transitioned change. Some have not in this case that they haven't, but, but over time, I would say that it's more, and this is organized under chapter two 15 in Wisconsin state statutes is that it's, it's separate, but it is a, it is the fire department really is a quasi government function because their budget is approved by the district and you have the district, but it doesn't provide some of the direct oversight that a municipal department does. Okay. Now, I also want to clarify concerns that, before we even get to that and options that are there, there are many volunteer combination, and by volunteer, I also can mean paid per call, paid on call, all the variations, and there's some compensation in it, but we call them volunteer because primarily most of their hours are, is that you can have a volunteer department that is a municipal organization. It doesn't mean that they can't I just want to make sure that that's clear before we head into that because everybody right away, we don't want to do that. Municipal doesn't mean career, okay? And another thing that actually really bothers me, and you won't ever hear me say that sometimes because sometimes I hear people refer to this that they say, well, you know, so you're looking to make this a professional department. It's like it is already a professional department that is staffed by volunteer paid on call people, okay? So there are career and there are volunteers. And professionalism is a whole other thing. And you can have career folks that are not professional and vice versa, in my opinion. So some other things we said, continue the successful recruitment efforts that are in place because the department was, this is fire now, doing really well with keeping their numbers up. And one of the things we suggested, considering expanding the payment for work of members, developing on-call groups for responses to incidents that don't require a full response. So just recently here in 2026, that's happened that they're, have gone to paid per call. And we did have some discussions again about what we mean about on-call groups for responses is that not every call requires a full response, and that to take some of the burden off all of the volunteers that you designate, a smaller group of people sign up, for periods of time to handle what we would refer to as a one or two company response for something like a CEO alarm, some of the false alarms, actually a lot of the increase in call volume that they're experiencing. That's just a means of dealing with that without having to switch completely over to a full-time staff or other solutions. And that's what we mean by that. Most calls don't require that full response. And just including all expenditures, including capital expenditures in the annual budget, looking at developing a new formula for distribution of costs for the district. And some of that, it was based off of feedback that we got from governance officials at the time, not necessarily feeling that costs were distributed equitably. And I can tell you a lot of times that's where everything works real well. I've helped negotiate a lot of contracts in the last few years with creating joint departments. And everything goes pretty smoothly until we get to this point. And I strongly believe in formula-based versus other things so that you don't have to keep coming back, revisiting it year after year, coming to some agreement on what is equitable. And then also adopt a local ordinance per the provisions of SPS 314, allowing for a reduction of inspections to once per year or non-overlapping 15-month periods, as you just heard, Chief, that they did implement that. does not mean that they cannot inspect more than that it's just that the state the way that the law is written says non-overlapping six-month periods annually that's very difficult to schedule and meet and we don't want anybody to get disqualified on technicality by overlapping some of those periods other things for one and then number two is that there have been some studies done that said you know, there really wasn't anything that proved doing two inspections per year was better than one. And we also found some business owners, we actually were irritating them more than we were helping them. There are some problem folks, and then that allows you to spend more time then with those places that need more follow-up work to make sure that they are compliant. So a lot of these things, recommendations have been completed. Future outlook for the fire department. Looked at that eventually an additional station north of Cottage Grove, knowing where the development of the community was going to be going. And similar to what Chief Lang just said, as far as a specific time goes, and I'm not gonna discuss a report, will be coming out soon, but within that, rather than specific times, we always say that that should be more of a trigger on when the data says that it needs to be done. And that could be sometimes sooner than later, but sometimes it could be later. When does it get to the point that your current resources are not delivering the response times and the availability that you want? And then also some other triggers that you always want to make sure that you have that coverage within the parameters of what the ISO, the Insurance Service Office, states that it should be. And that's an important one. And some of it is on distance that we don't want to exceed that from the station. And then anything under that, if you're better than that, it increases or improves your insurance rating for your community. And the other thing so is to accommodate in-station staffing eventually. And Chief talked about that, Nick did that, Right now, the fire side of things doesn't have that. It doesn't necessarily say that you need it right this day, but part of this study is looking at remodeling and or building additional buildings who are saying we're going to need buildings in the future. And if you're going to do that, you know, the recommendation is that they should be built that eventually they may need, they're going to need to accommodate some full-time staffing. It doesn't say right now. It doesn't say where they're going to come from. and how many hours per day. But I can tell you that I've done a lot of work in communities that hadn't planned on this, and now they were in a situation where they had to do it, and they were already behind, and it was a recruitment and a retention problem that I just, some of the accommodations I see folks in, even right now, I can see why they don't want to stay there. They're sitting in like an old town hall on, folding chairs around the table and it's really wasn't meant to be living quarters, you know, or they just put up some paneling and a few beds over in a corner and things like that. It's it's not good. And as as chief pointed out, a key thing in buildings and we've had these discussions all the way back and the other one and he hit the nail on the head is making the station a place that your firefighters want to be. And one of the things that I think is really important right now is like 18 to 21 year olds, what are they gonna do with their time? And I think, boy, what a better, opportunity is to make the firehouse be their place to socially want to be and some people well we don't want this to be a social thing but to a certain extent with the volunteer community it needs to be and you need to have that um that collective social fabric in order to make it work so whatever it takes to make that happen i think you know a day room there even even overnight accommodations they could choose to stay if they wanted to why not men even inclement weather other things that gives you that opportunity and eventually you may need to grow into it with full-time staffing when turnout time response time measures fall below established performing measures that's when you can add it in and even then not getting to all the details doesn't mean an immediate twenty four hour solution Doesn't mean an immediate seven day per week solution. It may begin with daytime staffing. When peak times are harder, when we look at the numbers and say, yeah, it's harder to get that full crew or get these crews there during daytime hours versus it is 24 hours a day, things like that. And there's many ways of accomplishing that. Probably the first step is one of the things that we call Right now they're paid per call. The other one is called paid on premise, where it can be taking some of your current staff and spreading it out over those higher numbers of putting those folks into the station and paying them to be there. and quite interestingly a lot of if you're a lot of i don't know i do there are some very large volunteer departments on the east coast in in areas even surrounding washington dc in prince george's county some of the stations are staffed by volunteers and and they're going on a high number of calls interesting thing and how that staffing works actually is paid on premise they'll have a department with one station, 60, 70 members, and just like a single engine or ladder truck, and how they do it is they all choose paid on-premise shifts, and actually that helped name the gear that we carry, it's referred, our firefighting gear is called bunker gear, these pants that we jump into, because that came from, they've been doing this a long time, was when they were bunking in the station, so they could just jump into their pants and go. So this isn't something new, it's just, it's a different means of doing that, but it takes large numbers to do that, so there's a lot of different ways that it can be done. Then last on this list here, and Chief mentioned it, that was in their long-range plans, and I didn't tweak this. I actually went back. I didn't take every slide verbatim. I just wanted to hit the high points because I know we had limited time here. It's that when administrative demand exceeds part-time commitment, a full-time chief will be needed. As Chief said, as part of our study that we did right now, we looked into how much time that... that he's spending. And exactly what he said, the answer to this is, well, and you might say, well, he's doing that. And I can tell you almost every department that I've studied that's in this type of transition right now that does not have a full-time fire chief, I tell them that, but for the current person you have in there, be prepared when that person isn't doing it anymore, the next person's going to have to be full-time. It's a lot to ask, and times are changing, and you've got a lot of people that are very committed right now, and that goes through all of your staffing, and it's great that they are, but I'm just telling you that trends across the nation in this state are, in time, volunteerism isn't what it was. Look at any kind of organization that you're involved in, or someone that you were in the Legion, I believe, or Vietnam, You had an organization you said you were in charge of. Was it the Legion or the VFW? And probably your numbers are down in that. Unfortunately, there's so many types of organizations in the past. We just don't have people. There's so many things, and that's a whole other social discussion, but that's just a reality that most people are dealing with. We're doing well here right now, but again, with all these stations and other things thinking about to the future, you need to be prepared to react to that, especially now that we're gonna be building buildings that I hope are here for 50 plus years. They should be able to accommodate these changes when we get there so we're not ripping buildings apart 10 years from now and redoing them or having problems recruiting and retaining staff because we didn't build them right, because we didn't anticipate what we're going to need. In 2021, governance issues. The key issues we discovered in our interviews is the discord between the municipalities and the fire department. Unfortunately, and why I said we need to talk about this again, why I think we need to revisit that because I don't think it's completely gone. Some of it, a little bit, is that just with the fire department alone, there's multiple agreements that fall into place. There's the agreement that creates the district. There's a contract between the district and the department. department has bylaws and it's and you know so we have all these all these different legal documents that may not necessarily be in congruence is there other some ways that we can either get them in alignment or our recommendation was to eventually make it a municipal department again a municipal department i'll get into how that can be done it can be done just like it is somewhat like it is right now being a district we just changed that governance model a bit and take out the contract and that's directly reporting to the uh... district so that's what we recommended an intergovernmental agreement that would um... establish a district And an agreement regarding ownership of the station contract for services between the fire department and the municipalities of the district is in there right now. And and all these different. Sometimes that creates a little bit of a burden. I think some of this discourse that we have. How can we streamline that? so but this is interesting and i like this first line here again because of some of the concerns that i hear and i think some of it may have been just and i know by my sheer presence that i'm showing up and we're talking about consolidations mergers and things like that is but this was this was a line in this slide came right out from 2021. Our recommendations are built upon preserving your fire district and preserving the EMS district really as well. And said most of the time I find myself working in environments where we're trying to bring communities together to do this. And with the merit part of it that I'm going to talk about here in a little while of all the advantages of doing that. And so that's why we want to make sure that we talk about governance. And the governance of the district needs to get refocused and a mission statement and strategic goals and measures established. And I don't know that and so we're going to study that now. But I think that's very important because these the mission in these goals need to be in place so that retains the focus necessarily not so much the means of accomplishing that and the cost of accomplish those things but what we're trying to accomplish as a district keeping our focus with that excuse me And and I think that's one of the things that would help and and we said that five years ago. Makeup of the district should be reviewed to ensure equitable representation. And some of that comes with voting and. And as Chief Lang pointed out in EMS, I was back here in between. There was some changes in EMS and discussions on cost. And the village doing its due diligence. Is this still the best thing for us or whatever? And from those discussions, some changes actually came into place as far as the voting rights and how voting was done in the EMS district as far as when expenditures were made. That may be some of the things that can be looked at. And then one of the things we said, these steps may require an outside facilitator, mediator to accomplish. And at times, you know, my greatest concern, and this probably kind of drew this discussion for me being here tonight, that I told the village president, I said, I just want to be very frank with all of you. When it comes to meeting the mission and the strategic goals of fire and EMS, we need to really get that focused and focus on those things. And as governance, put our differences and disputes on all the other governmental issues that we might have and try to focus on getting those things accomplished. because individually we've heard that as we were going through our discussions here, our charge was not to talk about governance, but everything fell back to governance with folks individually having some sort of issue with either how it was designed or with one of the other municipalities, things like that. That is your greatest barrier that you have right now doing this. And one of the things that I come to awareness with when I initially didn't quite understand why the fire department had such resistance to want to become a municipal department. I think I have a little bit of an understanding now. And I think one of the pieces of that was is that And I didn't quite get it and their concern was as well. We don't. We don't want. Our governing oversight getting in the way of us getting her job done. I'm paraphrasing. I'm not putting it in there. I don't want to put them on the spot, I kind of understand that a little bit, so we need to take those barriers away because I also believe that you need to move to a municipal Department, especially now that you're looking at creating full time positions and it does not work well in the private side. uh... need not look any farther than a community or north that didn't start out that way and now is transitioning it it's kind of messy and a lot of it has to do with the state pension system and be able to attract and recruit people and and be competitive with that you need to be a municipal department to be a be a apart of that and and that's the best compensation that you can You know, being a recipient of our pension system is awesome and it's, you won't be competitive without that, okay? So Deer Grove EMS, there was an operational issue there. It wasn't just governance and some minor things. And that was, at the time, there was only one paramedic ambulance staff 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It spent two days in Cottage Grove and then two days in Deerfield. And that distribution was not based on the peak demand times or anything else. It was just like, well, we're all kind of, paying into it, so that's what we did to try to share and make things equitable. That was not good. And the other part about it was that at that time a question that was asked, you know, what are the number of calls that are missed now? Then it was nearly 10%, and that was the year that we studied that, and I'm sure it grew before the staffing all got into place. And 10%, and that's why I always say, can't just say percentages, we gotta say numbers, because sometimes percentages make things look better or worse than what they are. When I look at 90, and I'll just say from an elected official standpoint, that's 90 unhappy phone calls a year. That's a lot. Luckily, I don't know that that was happening, but that was really something that needed to be fixed, and it was. It has been. Additional staffing has been put into place. Our initial recommendation was to, because of the number of calls and you saw the percentages that Chief Lang put, it made sense that this station here had to be staffed 24-7. The majority of the calls were there. A lot of things we do in emergency services, I'll be perfectly honest with you, we are playing the odds. We're never 100%. And we try to put our resources as much as possible to the time and places that they're needed most. Because you could, you know, we could what if and could all we, you know to all kinds of different uh... possibilities you know and you know what if there are five fires at the same time you know what if this happens and that happens it's like what we have to be able to do is be staffed to cover what happens on a normal daily basis there are always going to be those times where we can't and that's what mutual aid is for but those should be a few one offs it shouldn't be in this case it was like a regular On a multi time a week basis, that's that's I believe too much. OK, initially our solution that we had recommended was to start with 12 hour staffing seven days a week that wasn't met with a lot of favor. I'll just say that that. and then eventually work to staffing the ambulance in Deerfield 24 hours a day. The ambulance in Deerfield wasn't staffed right with 12 hours, but it was staffed with more 24 hours and eventually worked up to where it is now staffed 24-7. So we have two ambulances on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That is why you also need that third ambulance, as Chief Lang said, that you need a mechanical spare when they're broken down or other things. And I'll just support his rotation with that. It's amazing they're getting that many miles out of that. Think about that with your own vehicles and cars. And a performance measure, I think, that we recommended is that also could be sooner than that. When their reliability starts dropping to less than 98% of the time outside of unscheduled maintenance, that's too much, too. So you have to keep an eye on those things. Because you can't just say, well, the ambulance didn't start. That's unfortunate. That doesn't work that way. So maintain that fleet, we said. Identify how Cottage Grove and Deerfield fire departments are being utilized with Deer Grove EMS. And one of the things with that and hasn't been implemented yet and that will probably get there again is that truly believe that official emergency medical responder, first responders, I think would be a good addition because there are those times where The ambulances either have a delayed response, and I'll talk about that why here in just a second, or they are being called upon quite often to assist. The fire department called in to assist EMS for both lift assist, other things. My other partner that I've worked with here, Jim Wostad, had a good saying about this. He said, there's times like, situations like a cardiac arrest or other major medical problems, he said, in those situations, it's the race for life. Do you want one mechanic or do you want a pit crew? And it takes a lot of people to make all of these happen. And the other thing is just people are, your houses are generally designed to move about vertically, not horizontally. So it takes some help getting people out of buildings, things like that. So you need that assistance. One of the handicaps in the way it is right now is that legally the fire department can only respond after being requested by EMS because they are not an EMR service. EMRs are allowed to respond to a scene before an ambulance arrives or is there. So that's something that can help and buy a little time. Because here's one of the situations you have with your staffing. And Chief Lang had pointed out that besides response times, monitoring, unit hour availability, what percentage of the time There are the ambulances available and also fire trucks that we have to monitor those in a situation that affects yours and makes that number higher than what it is in other communities is the distance to hospitals because it's not just the trend time to get to the scene and time on scene. It's time to get to the hospital and back and the hospitals aren't located very favorably for you in that. So you have an extended amount of time so ambulance calls. here in Cottage Grove take longer per call than they do in the city of Madison. Just because of the location, they can get them there and back and get into service quicker. So that's why that needs to be closely monitored. So just in general, so that's where we were, and operationally, some things have been done to make some changes, and I will just, for those of you relief not getting into our study in any depth is that from a response standpoint and delivery of services, both the fire department and EMS are doing a very good job and and I heard little to no complaints about actual service delivery or performance. And and what we're here complaints were again more about other issues. So, but in general, in the state of Wisconsin, I'm looking to the future. You don't, we don't necessarily see that here. Chief Lang did indicate from an EMS standpoint, they kind of went through that transition already because You know, it was getting more difficult, more calls, and the amount of training that it takes, especially if paramedic service is desired, which it was here, that's a big ask for volunteers or somebody to even do that on a part-time basis. So, but in general, studies have been done that volunteer fire departments in the state have lost over 930 positions since 2020. A Wisconsin Public Policy Forum review of state data shows this. The loss has prompted responses that include the addition of 488 full and part-time paid fire department, and I shouldn't say just fire department, probably fire EMS across the state, 10.4% increase, as well as decisions by local leaders to pursue partnerships with neighboring departments and outside contractors in order to maintain emergency services. different ways of accomplishing this. Even if it isn't happening here right now, which it really isn't, it has and it hasn't. Some said with EMS it's kind of already been transitioned, but there's still volunteers part of that that help out with additional staffing, peak time, and special events. Fire Department has maintained themselves as predominantly volunteer and now paid per call and paid for some of the other things they have. But realistically, it's volunteer because they're making all of their time available. Their standby time is not compensated. Any time of day, 365 days a year, they can respond. So there was also a study done on the reliability of Wisconsin's 911 ambulance response report from the Office of Rural Health. summary of issues, staffing and shortages and availability gaps, dependence on core staff. And what that one means is that even a lot of departments, they may have a, looks like a large roster, but when you look at the number of people who are actually in the majority of the responses, Sometimes that gets to be a little bit more of a burnout factor for one, and then the other thing, looking at the demographics of it, is are those the folks that have been around here for a long time that are making the majority of those things? What's going to happen 10 years from now when they're not here anymore? Are the people coming up behind them? I hope so, but a lot of times not so much because just society has changed, that they're going to be able to make that commitment And put in all of that effort and be able to make all of those calls. So we have to be prepared for that. I hope that it doesn't change, but I'm going to tell you that the trend is is that it's going to. OK, the other thing that we also see in a lot of departments as far as like the distribution is that. The one through five-year folks usually pretty strong on the roster, and now we're starting to see gaps starting to develop after that five years up into the 15-plus year range. So what that's telling us is that we're recruiting people in at the bottom, but the longevity isn't always there in a lot of places. And then we've got an older, more tenured staff that it's there, but it's like, what is going to happen when those folks move on? Hopefully not recruitment and retention efforts. We'll do our best that we can, but again, we gotta be prepared and we can't, when things start to change, this has gotta constantly be monitored for trends to make sure that we're ready for it. And I think one of the things is this is talking about buildings that the building's ready for it. This also creates over-reliance on mutual aid that puts more stress in because not only for the one community, but now other communities are responding in. quite frequently and provide resources. One of the first places that I did some work around here was in Verona. And that was when I was doing interviews there, I heard complaints from neighboring departments that it's just like, this isn't mutual aid anymore. We're coming here a lot. And this was quite a few years ago. And, you know, so we have to be careful with that. Mutual aid wasn't intended to replace a local community's responsibility. It's for those times where we're too busy or we have larger incidents where we need additional help. In the state right now, it's creating a little bit of a strain in some places doing it. I'm going to be perfectly honest, okay? And in some cases, when I've talked about creating a regional department, I'll ask these departments, there's no way we can't work with department X, Y, and Z. It's not gonna work. And I'll say, what does it look like if you have a structure fire right now? Well, we'll respond and department X does and Y and Z comes and we all come together and we do it. Isn't that interesting? Why can't we design a system that does that? And in a way here, you've done that probably over a hundred years ago because You didn't develop a town and a village, separate department. You did it on a regional basis. And maybe it doesn't, if it makes sense to be bigger, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. This creates financial strain, unanswered calls, future risk, all those things were what was pointed out. Can I ask you a question? Yes. so if you go back to the previous slide thank you this is a report from rural health on ambulance response and you keep referring to fire departments when you talk about this yeah and and the reason why i do is um many fire departments in the state also provide ems and a lot of it's i i also look at it it's It was primarily focused on delivering EMS, but it really is this state of volunteers in both fire and EMS is why I referenced this. It was primarily focused on that, but it actually data came from both. Okay, that makes sense. So options for providing regional fire EMS services in Wisconsin. So the state allows several different ways of providing regional shared joint services. And so there isn't anything that needs to be created there, and that's what you worked under. Joint municipal departments can be created within accordance with Wisconsin intergovernmental cooperation. So that's the statute that allows it. As long as we follow that, so that is one way. And then one of the parts of that that's a little different with fire services is that depending on the population that you have, it also is 62-13 mandates the creation of a joint board of police and fire commissioners to oversee joint protective services. It could be just police, it could be just fire, but that's how it's listed in that. The purpose of a police and fire commission, separate from the governance part of it, is, and what the state's intent by doing those, and your village attorney can correct me if I'm wrong, but it was to separate the day-to-day operations from hiring and discipline, to take political influence away from And actually, I think it generated out of Milwaukee that every time a different mayor came in, they had a different fire chief and things like that, depending on what political persuasion they were. So so it was done in that it said pretty much. It's a citizen committee separate from Governance boards that oversees and then the other thing that they can also oversee or one of their charges is that if someone has a complaint against either department that they're the folks that Would would have a hearing over reviewing the merits of that if it involved discipline or discharge of any members of the departments. So hiring and firing is what they're, to put it simple, is what police and fire commission's job is. Another means of providing service that does not require creating a joint municipal board is providing service under contract. So we have a mixture here of Some of it is done within part of a joint agreement. And then we also have some communities that are added on under contract. Like Pleasant Springs isn't a whole township. It's a portion of it. So that makes perfect sense to do it that way. It can be an entire municipality. And I'll talk about some of the merits and good and bad about these things. So the merits of regional services, municipal borders are rarely aligned with efficient resource deployment models. And my area where I live in, Fox Valley, is a perfect example of that. That I could show you places up there where there are fire stations that I can throw baseball into the next community from. And there can be a call where that baseball lands and they would have to sit in their fire station and not respond because that's not their area and things like that. That does not make sense. Mutual aid and things like that, now if it's a structure fire, I'm sure they would have them respond with it. That's the worst kind of examples that we can have in there. School systems figured this out a long time ago, and school systems don't follow municipal borders. They have separate district borders to deliver the service based on what's closest to the school. Interesting concept. So, apparatus and equipment is often duplicated. I just worked with a community, it was a village and the two surrounding townships on it. And one of the townships had to drive through the village to get to some of their calls, things like that. There's a lot of duplicated apparatus. And some of it is because, by design, by insurance service office requirements is that if you have an engine you're supposed to have a reserve engine so everybody's got a reserve they don't share a reserve i can tell you in the city of oshkosh we had six fire stations when i first started we had one reserve unfortunately with the reliability of modern fire apparatus they have two now okay um but you know that there wasn't a backup fire engine in every single building That's an example of things that can be done. Specialty apparatus and equipment can be shared over a larger area when we do it through more than one municipality. Again, I'm preaching to the choir here because you've done this already between the city and the town. But I'm just saying, just try to think for a minute what it would look like if they had been separate and how much equipment. And for sure, there'd be two fire stations right now and there'd be a whole lot more than what there is right now. And probably fewer people or they'd be fighting over the same folks trying to staff these two separate fire departments. administrative efficiency with leadership and definitely administrative efficiency with support with finance hr legal all economies of scale by sharing that over more than one stationary department really what it's a matter of in a lot of cases that can't necessarily get a Eliminate a lot of stations, but we certainly can put them under the roof of being one station Purchasing economies of sales supplies services things like that and the distribution of cost over a greater population in tax base So we have should produce less cost but now then also that cost is being spread over a larger area and At times, as I said, depending on how well developed is, where the greatest savings usually come in is in the administration and apparatus part of it. When it comes to the actual operations, the number of firefighters, sometimes You don't have to have as much reserve apparatus and things, but in a lot of cases, you still need distribution of fire companies. ISO, as I mentioned earlier, no less than five miles, or no greater than five miles from a given station, or ISO looks at it as there's no station there at all. Unfortunately, I had a client once that didn't heed our advice and said, please let us look at this before you contract with a different community, and they did, And some people found out that they couldn't get insurance because now their response was more than from coming from more than 5 miles away. You know, so there's a lot of things to look at with with that. So some of the challenges though of this. Developing a governance models that's perceived as equitable. That's obviously a challenge. Making sure that decision making appears to be equitable. And a lot of it comes in, I'll go back again to a case study for you, it was in Verona, Wisconsin, is that the village of Verona was growing at a pretty fast rate, and they needed to add additional resources to the fire department. And I'm not passing any judgment or anything, I'm just telling you the reality of what had happened there, is that the townships were, that's kind of the village's problem, They were a joint municipal Department. They didn't didn't want to pay for. They didn't want to grow. And the village is just like we've got to deal with this. We really don't have a choice. I recommend that was the only time that we ever recommended was to dissolve a district. And it was because of governance in making decisions. It wasn't because we didn't think it should be done regionally. And it has continued to be done regionally. It changed from being done by a joint municipal department that it was done by the village contracting with the two townships. And they worked it out through contract negotiations. So where the issues start coming in, and historically, and if we look at things, sometimes what starts breeding some of the issues or problems is that initially in here, why I look back and I say why are, we've gotten along for so long, what's changed? And some of the things changing is that populations demand are not as homogenous as they used to be. They're dissimilar. The village has grown and has a higher demand sometimes, so that creates tension. Some of the other things that get in the way sometimes are loss of community identity, what the name of the truck is going to be, and a lot of other things. where a department merged a few years ago, and believe it or not, probably the thing that almost derailed the whole thing was who was gonna be in charge of the annual festival pig roast, and was that gonna continue or not? almost stopped a merger and being able to provide service. And you might think, wow, that's kind of, but all those things are important. There's a lot of community identity, a lot of emotion tied into this. So all these things need to be looked at. Ensuring local issues and needs are not lost in a larger bureaucracy. Sometimes it shouldn't be made bigger. And again, this is what I alluded to earlier. Sorry, I jumped ahead. Communities with dissimilar makeup and demand for service, sometimes it creates tensions or they move apart. Contracted service, some of the pros and cons of that. Streamlined governance doesn't involve having to create districts or intergovernmental or a district governance board. Services and costs can be negotiated based on community. So I said I'd like it to be that we recommend as much as possible to stick to a formula. but then again sometimes any other and the formula doesn't make sense and i think this is another statement that came up and we're having some discussions with that village president is that you know when you're contracting for service with a smaller community a question would be so i don't think we're getting enough money from that community but then again on the other hand it's like what would we cut if we stopped doing it And a lot of times the answer is nothing. So we can't. And the reason why, and you just say, well, how could that be possible, is that emergency services sometimes do have what I would, I don't, this probably isn't a good word, they have the capacity to be able to cover another extra 30 or 40 calls. If run volume grew by 50 calls, we wouldn't necessarily be adding a lot of resources, so we take, look at this community. If it's about 50 calls, I think we can do it within it, and we charge a certain amount for that. And when we get that, what that actually does from the standpoint of the community is providing that service, what does that do? It lowers the cost for the host community that provides those services. So sometimes we have to be careful when looking at, I just saw one recently again where I saw a community that, oh, we're gonna end our, we're not gonna provide ambulance service to our surrounding townships. We're done doing that. And my question to them would be is like, what's your budget gonna look like next year? What are you gonna cut? You know, oh, it's costing us too much money. And is it? I don't know. But those are questions that need to be asked to find out when you do those things. Because otherwise, you stop doing it and all of a sudden there's a hole in your budget. Well, where did that come from? Well, we used to contract for service to another community. I was questioned once as a chief when we were providing services to another community outside of us. And he's like, I think you're overstaffed now if you can do that. And this was actually the person from the newspaper, and they had just put a new press in. And my question to him was, I said, if I had a newspaper, could you print it for me? Does your press have the capacity? Oh, yeah. We probably only use it about five hours a day. print that out. And I said, so you bought too big of a press. No, we just needed this. I said, do you understand where we're coming from right now? You're using your resources more efficiently. And again, that goes back to this whole concept of regionalization, sharing the cost over a larger area. But it does require a well-planned contract strategy, if you're going to do that, on what the resources are needed and what would be the incremental cost, the additional cost for doing that. Certainly, the incremental cost should not exceed what the revenue is that you're going to get for doing that. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense.

Yes? I could talk way louder, obviously. We're dealing with right here, right now. You're going with all this other stuff. At us, the village, running the whole fire department, and then we would be contracted at the town? Is that what you're looking to give to us? But you talked, like you said, the village president. We're all in this together. We're two different groups here. We've got a town chairman. I'm missing a little bit where you're coming from because I don't care about what's happening in Verona or anywhere. I think we're, it just seems to me, it seems like we're going through the same report we did five years ago.

Okay. somewhat you are but in others you were there there was also a representative from you were you were there at that meeting and that's where that question came up well what about town of pleasant springs under that contract that's why that's why i'm talking about because you do have contracts right now yeah so it is i believe it's somewhat relevant but i'm just saying these are all your options i'm not telling you yet what we believe, what you should choose. I just want everybody, it was what are all the options that are out there for doing this? That's what I thought that I was supposed to be doing here tonight. So that's why I'm talking about all of these things.

it is we have not had x i've been involved like steve has been there just to be in full transparency so during stakeholder meetings how this meeting even came about was not just me making decisions yeah i'm sorry i just happened to be looking at you and i pointed out that you were and you were there too that question came up and i posed the same thing i said what would you do if you stopped doing that when people say well i don't know that we're necessarily that that's

That's a fair amount of money to be getting for doing that. Those are negotiation questions to ask. But here are the cons of contracted services.

Can I ask a question?

Yeah.

So you aren't having conversations with the village president without the town chairman present?

No, the town chair was present.

No, the town chair is over there. So I hope you recognize him if you've been having conversations.

There was a representative from the town board there when we had that discussion.

So no discussions without town board?

No. We had a meeting to review this presentation because this was financed by the village. We had a meeting on Friday to go over the presentation and what was approved by the village board. Otherwise, every single meeting that we've had has had town representation, village representation. The entire stakeholder list has been invited to every single meeting.

And we decided not to do this governance part. We weren't interested in it. Why are we doing this?

I'm gonna piggyback off of what he just said was the standpoint of I'm hearing to me there's too much extraneous background stuff and I personally don't care, strike that. I care greatly about what happens up north where they truly, on a day-to-day basis, have issues with fire, EMS, all sorts of emergency services based upon lack of money, volunteers, the ability for paid staff, equipment, and so on and so forth, all right? Those issues up there do not apply to us. In my opinion, we've got an outstanding, fully staffed, professional, full-time paramedic service here that serves, I forget how many square miles the chief said, but it's a lot. All right, yes, we do have a volunteer fire department, and there is reasonable discussions with regards to potentially hiring at some future point in time a full-time chief. But you're talking about regionalization, which kind of died here, both at the town and the village, because geographically, We don't have anything within five miles of us, except for the city of Madison. And you know we're not gonna get into a regional fire department with the city of Madison, okay? So the regionalization part just geographically isn't going to work. Stoughton's nine miles away. Deerfield, I'm gonna guess, is probably seven or eight miles. City of Sun Prairie's nine miles north of us. And there are no satellite stations from those departments that are close enough to us that we could begin to draw from using your scenario as far as regionalization goes. We have a great region here between Deerfield Fire, Cottage Grove Fire, the EMS that takes care of everything, and even I have to include Cambridge Fire. Cambridge is just as important, although they're not used as much, but we have our own region on this side of the county. We go all the way to the county line. I don't know how often the chief... gets involved with like say Lake Mills Fire Department coming mutual aid over this direction. I don't believe it's that often, but I wish we just condense it down to what directly affects us currently right now. And the you know, the idea of contracted services. For those of you who don't know, we purposely, and this will be another point later on in the discussions, we purposely don't go to look to make a profit from the town of Pleasant Springs. We're in direct competition with the city, or excuse me, the village of McFarland, the village of Stoughton, to provide coverage for that particular area that we currently now provide service for. If you take a look at the amount of money that we get for the calls that we provide down there, we make a lot of money, or I should say we collectively here, make a lot of money for those calls. And because of the fact that, and because of that, that formula that he's referring to about geographic area and making sure everybody pays their dime, I'm a firm believer that's out the window. We are looking to go ahead and present ourselves to the town of Pleasant Springs to provide them the service that they need at a cost that keeps Pleasant Springs coming back to us. And I personally do not want to lose Pleasant Springs. The contract at Pleasant Springs, Chief, what did it get? Is it an engine or was it a tanker or something?

Over the entire lifespan of Pleasant Springs, excuse me, we bought engine four, almost all of brush one, a complete set of turnout gear, all the SCBAs that we currently have, the compressor for the SCBA, full set of extrication gear or extrication tools, and car one, and a few other things along the way. So it's been very... lucrative for us for the amount of work that we've had to do for it, I guess.

And can you imagine what our taxes would have been or our budgets would have been in order to spend that? So again, while I appreciate all the effort that you're putting forth here now, my suggestion is that we just kind of condense it and bring us home. Thank you.

Just going back why I wanted to present that when I'm telling you a lot of the things that I'm saying here, and perhaps I didn't express that correctly or not, or things that you've already done. As I said, and we had that discussion exactly what you said about the town of Pleasant Springs when your supervisor was there. What I made that statement was. Contracted stuff should be looked at a little bit differently because there's that loss in revenue and everybody's gonna pay more if you don't get that, exactly what you said. But a lot of it is that you guys, a lot of the town folks have been a part of this for a long time. Some of the folks here haven't. What I said earlier and back in our other study is that I'm talking about trying to tell you, you have a region, I'm trying to get everybody to get on the same page so that you preserve it, that we don't break this thing up because of disputes and governance. Because I think that's what's best, both from a cost standpoint and a delivery standpoint. That's why I'm bringing these backgrounds around and questions that I asked. And I said, the other bad thing about contracting is perception of no government input or control. That was just here. No ownership and assets, which can be dangerous because I had just one community now who was under contract, got in a dispute. They need to start up a fire department from scratch because they don't own anything, and they never had anything in the agreement that gave them ownership. And then it creates a shock because you said they're looking at going to other communities that you don't want them shopping for services every couple of years. So those are... So... And perhaps maybe you don't even want me to, you can tell me to stop here if you want. The other question was, what about merging fire and EMS? And what are the good and the bad about that? There's some good and there's some bad.

I think regionalization and consolidation was part of the RFP. And so just not saying that we are doing any of that, but I think for the, especially for the new members on the board, just have, again, the whole point of this as Steve had recommended was to get everyone on the same page. And so background information, I don't feel like hurts anything. No decisions are being made tonight.

Correct.

No decisions will probably be made at the next meeting.

So, and questions came up, why do some fire departments in EMS, why are they one department? Okay, and a lot of it is the same thing, sharing cost, you know, between the two of them, rather than having two buildings and all this other stuff, cross-trained, dual role personnel. Another one from a cost standpoint, and I think this one is short-lived, though, actually, is right now there's a lower overtime threshold that, Firefighters don't earn overtime until they hit 53 hours a week. And EMS people hit overtime at 40 hours a week. So we have to have either multiple shifts or pay higher overtime. Here, Deer Grove EMS has four shifts versus the traditional three that a lot of fire departments operate under in order to do that. But as I get into some of the cons or what's going on, there is a movement afoot in many places even in fire service to move to shorter hours in that shift. I see in the future that that's probably going to happen with everybody. But right now that's allowed. They can be social security exempt with the Wisconsin pension system so there is some savings that can be there although the pension contribution rate is higher it's still less than the sum of the two parts would be otherwise. And this you already do some of this thing shared stations the one that isn't there isn't shared Governance for the two which still could be done and cross-staffed apparatus The cross-staffed apparatus thing is a double-edged sword and you'll probably hear that and some some of the communities around here and I think that's why there's regional looks at studying things is that if all you have is enough personnel to cover the fire truck or the ambulance in the station it's whichever call comes in first pens on the call volume whether that works out or not i believe that it works for a backup unit but i don't necessarily believe that it works very well for a front-line p m s uh... that's one of the things how i operated with we had three front-line ambulances and the other engines were crossed after with an ambulance that they they could cover So the other thing that can happen at times in fire departments is leadership lacking EMS background or the focus. Or it could be the opposite, that they put all of their efforts and things into one. And I was the president of the state fire chiefs and involved on the board for some time. did battle with them about EMS because I'm an advocate for it because 85% of most fire departments that do EMS, or I should say, departments that do EMS, 80 plus percent of their calls are EMS calls, not fire calls. And they don't focus on it enough at times. It's a big culture change. Personnel aren't interested in providing fire. Some aren't interested in providing EMS. So that's something that's got to be dealt with. When you're building things up from scratch, it's a little bit easier to do, but when things are already established, it makes it a little more difficult to do that. Maintaining the priorities to make sure that both services are financially supported and with equity to make sure everything and their needs are met. There's increased training time because now you have to maintain training in all of these different specialty areas, not just fire, not just EMS, so it takes work in order to do that. Well, can it be done? But it just takes work and I already talked about the cross staffing issue. It can work. And why I throw that in there is that down the road a possibility or that we said that. usually in a transition time that um once the fire department gets the point where they need staff they're starting to need potential day staff maybe ems needs day staff maybe they could share it and that's where a cross staff unit might work those are those are situations where we recommend that but that's where the study is going to come into play so My point and what I believe that the discussion was this that there's a lot of different options in and how we go about this, but. And you have most of those here you are regional. And but you also have some communities that are that contract with the intergovernmental boards. For service and said right now, definitely for partial communities. I think a contract is the smarter way to go and I don't want it. I don't want to openly talk about contract strategies, but those are correct statements that are. I want to lose it because it's going to have a negative. And your current cost. uh... for doing that in the in this part of the ms it isn't just what you're getting for your contract amount it's also the revenue for the calls that you're getting so there's two sources of income that you could potentially lose if you lose a contracted community so those are things that you have to think about with moving forward so art art next step i believe is that com You know, we're also going to be looking at not just the staffing and the potential staffing in the long run. So just a reminder of what our other contract was for and our look at staffing was more of what is it going to look like for the future to drive your station needs? You know, where are you going to need, you know, how should we remodel these buildings or do we need another one? You know, how should we, how should, to give that information to the architects so they know what to put into there. Because sometimes that doesn't happen. And needs either get unmet or you build stuff that you're not going to ever need or don't need at all. So don't want to see that happen for you. Or an additional station. But if we do that, why these things are there? There are still options between now and then. And I agree right now, as I said earlier, fire departments are meeting this demand. And changes are happening other places. I hope you're immune from it, but I don't know that you're going to be. But the stations, when we're moving forward, should at least be built for that. Because regardless of how you go about any of those things, I think you need additional room in your stations, even for anything, for the recruitment and retention of your volunteers. And I think that's important. And the other thing I just want to stress is that we don't and we didn't in many places that even if you do need to add some full-time staff, I don't see this becoming a 100% career fire department. I mean, not in my lifetime. And from a cost standpoint, and need standpoint, the majority of calls could be, a lot of those could be handled by a single company, but there are a lot of calls that firefighters, fire trucks don't put out fires. They don't get people out, pin in people in cars and other rescue situations. You need firefighters to do that. And that's not the majority of calls. The best way, the best design for a department when they start getting to have large numbers is not to make it all careers to make a combination i think that's what's most affordable but those are options that work we're gonna throw out there so i think i would just tell you that that fear i can dispel right now that we're not going to tell you that you're gonna need to hire like it takes minimum fifteen people for a structure fire to have a shift of fifteen people would be phenomenally expensive you know some of it can come from mutual aid and other things but It's how, and the actual, sometimes adding some staff in different ways that I mentioned can help you preserve and keep that combination department and keep the volunteer folks around for as long as you can because it's, one career firefighter is 100 plus thousand dollars right now, easy. 100, 135, 150. And you don't hire just one. And so that I just want to try to relieve some of the tensions and worries and fears around that might be about that that those aren't. You know the study isn't complete yet, but and I don't want for open records and other reasons don't want to get into that, but I just wanted to relieve some of those things and I just want to say you are regional right now. Most of the things that I talked about is reinforcing why I think it's important that you continue to do this. But even as it's here, I just think the best thing that we can work some of these things out, that's so we can get these agreements somehow and get our relationships to a point that it works a little bit better, that it takes some of the tensions and everything away, because that's really where it's at. The department said it's more issues with governance than it is directly with the technical operations or anything of the department's.

Thank you for coming tonight. Open it up for questions. Paula.

Yeah, a couple of questions. First of all, prior to this meeting, why wasn't this slide deck made public and posted with the agenda so that we had a time to kind of chew on this and also for transparency for the public?

And that was, and I usually don't in our presentations because without the information that I added along with it, I think a lot of things could have been taken out of context like was somewhat now that it almost would appear that I was advocating for all these different options that were there versus explaining that these are options. That was my number one reason for not doing that, that I didn't want it out there to get a life of its own and close people's minds before they got here. You know, thinking, these guys are telling us we have to do all these things. No, that's not how it is. These are just options that I'm presenting. And then also trying to create an awareness of some of these things you're already doing. A lot of them you're already doing.

Thank you. My second question is, you know, you started off your presentation and you introduced yourself and you said kind of right off the bat, and I wrote it down, that you're a strong believer of shared services. And so my question to you is, if you're already coming from a position where you think that's the best model, how do we know that once the study is complete, we're getting an unbiased look at data versus coming from a position that the lead study person is taking.

Okay. And so I will give you options and present reasoning, data, and recommendations why those options should be looked at. And why I say that I believe in shared services, and it's the same reason why the town and village are working together right now on this, because if you share people and cost, it's a more... efficient both in an operation and economic standpoint to be able to do that. Now that doesn't mean, as I've said to other places too, sometimes there's places where I went, we should look at a county-wide service. And I'm like, even though I believe in that, I don't think we should trade one artificial border to another. As was stated, do we need to be any bigger than we are right now? Based on what's around you right now, I'd say no. It's what you are. So your services are already shared.

You also mentioned and you said, I believe you need to move to a municipal department. And I guess when it comes to the final study presentation, I hope that there's data or performance triggers or something that backs that up because I look at, for instance, Sun Prairie. And I had the benefit of serving on the Sun Prairie City Council in 2003 when we just started having the conversation about should we look at doing something with the volunteer fire department some paid staff and so forth and it wasn't until 2024 that they actually became a municipal department and their population at that point was 39 000. um you look at our combined population we are a ton smaller um and that was a 20 plus year process and so i think you know when you when you made that comment, it just raised more questions for me. And I feel like parts of this presentation is kind of putting the cart before the horse. I know Cindy and I exchanged some emails and I specifically questioned why we were talking about the relative merits of consolidation and shared services. And she told me that it was because we discussed it at our August meeting. And I went back and I ran the transcript and we never had that conversation at all as a board. In fact, JP made the motion to include the governance and such. I second it and it passed. There was no conversation about this. So I think it's unfortunate that this piece was pulled out because I'll tell you what, it has raised the anxiety of myself, of people in this community about where is this going? Another thing that really stuck out to me that I hope you're gonna really unpack a little bit more is requiring our volunteer fire department to have EMRs. I understand the value of them, certainly, but I think also I'm hoping that you put into the study the fact that our EMS CAR 79, which is staffed for paramedic level response, in addition to our office administrator being hired so that, because she's an EMT, it was told to us by Chief Lang many times that Chief Lang and she would be able to respond and kind of act as that third ambulance for the time being. So I think you know putting another thing on people who aren't getting paid or volunteer firefighters Versus looking at what we already have within the EMS structure really needs to be dissected as part of your study So that's another thing that I hope you will look at So those are just my initial kind of comments and questions and and you know I am looking forward to the data that you can provide for these things and the

The beginning of the study was a recap of the previous study. Of that, and that's where that recommendation for. Municipal Department was made back already in 2021 and and I'll just and not to get too far into that or whatever. One of the primary reasons again I said is that when you start now having employees. You know that's. was more of the reason for doing it. Similar to how Deer Grove EMS is, it can be done that way also, but it's just that they're employees of a governmental body versus employees of a private non-stock corporation that opens up different potential for the retirement system, other things. That's it. It's when triggered by employees more so than anything when when the need for that arises and that was that that came out of the previous study, but we will. Flesh that out more in the Y.

Does anyone else have questions? Otherwise we can move on.

So you had a mention, you know, fire department all doing well, EMS all doing well. And you alluded to that the problem with that world or the UC is what are you saying that the town in the village or the can't talk to each other? Can't get along, can't govern this.

It there at times it from when I hear discussions individually, it doesn't happen there that we have differences on well. The city needs that we don't that they should pay for this. We shouldn't have to pay for that. Those those are the types of comments that that I hear, and I think that sometimes could get in the way of moving forward. Or and I and I said that I think I said I didn't quite understand what the fire Department sometimes what some of the fears were. You know of of why you know that? And I think streamlining some of the agreements and things and working together as a board, I think you still should, but I just, how we can all get onto the same page, that's a little bit, I think there's differences of opinions, very strong ones that sometimes can get in the way of moving forward.

So are you talking about when you discussed this in 21, or did you get the exact same feedback in this recent study?

I would say very similar how it was in 21 to right now. A little different on the EMS side, but on the EMS side, we were back here in between because there was some dispute about cost and operations, and that's where some of the changes were made in the intergovernmental agreement about voting when it came to it. Now it had to be a majority vote on issues of budget that added in and things like that. So it could be just some simple things like that or concerns about, you know, representative government. I, you know, what I said, I don't want to go any further because we're going to talk about governance more, but I was just As I said, as we were going through and talking with folks on this study about staffing needs and everything else, most people that I talked to didn't really want to talk about or had any issues with staffing or current levels of operation. They more related back to about are we paying our fair share and do we all have an equitable say in what we really need?

So that isn't something that would have come from the fire department. That would come from people around this table. Yes. So you had mentioned that the fire department had felt that there was an issue with dealing with the town and the village. And I think that after your 21 study, I think changed a lot in 25, if you're revisiting it.

And that was one of the things that we had asked for. I said, we believe you need, to have us look at that governance part again. You know, because that was the outstanding, really the only outstanding issue. Maybe it is better, maybe it's not. We haven't studied that in depth. We're just getting to that now.

So again, you think that the issue is here with this group of people?

So in our first discussions, as I stated, it was more of that I didn't hear anybody have any issues with either department. It was more about equity and fairness and voting and representation issues.

Thank you. My point to that is that the disagreement, you gotta have, you gotta have different opinions on everything. But when the vote takes place and it's over, it's over.

Any other questions, Casey?

You'd mentioned back with the state pension system that there's the requirement that it has to be a municipal department for it. You'd also talked about municipal doesn't necessarily mean all career. It can be still a huge majority volunteer. So what's the trigger? Is it just how we have it incorporated? Or what triggers it for municipal and lets you buy into that pension?

It's who you are employed by. It needs to be a governmental entity. So the folks that are part of Deer Grove EMS are employees of the Deer Grove EMS district. So that is a governmental district. So they can participate in the Wisconsin retirement system. Whereas, you know, some, like, that I know that, Sun Prairie, when they hired a full-time chief, he was not in the Wisconsin retirement system. They provided a different option for him, a private one. Again, there's no law that says you have to do that. I would say our suggestion from a recruitment and retention standpoint, that that's a very attractive benefit and you should set things up that allows you to provide that.

Sure. I'm glad you brought up the Sun Prairie part again. Well, and maybe this is a question for when you present the full study, but like as Paul alluded to, you know, they sort of started their process like way back 2003, you know, took 20 odd years before they went to a municipal fire department. Would you say that, is there anything that shows like if they had done it sooner, you know, what would have been different? Would they have...

saved money would have been better or is that not is that outside of the scope of what you say yeah and we're not going to study them you know on on what they could have done he said and this said that's just one one of those reasons for for doing that okay you know enough thanks and yeah i'll just leave it at that sure

Other questions?

I just have a follow-up question since you brought up the retirement system thing question. Chief Archibald, have our volunteers been asking for some type of retirement benefits? I know we talked about LOSA, but is that a request that's being made?

Yeah, so we specifically talked about LOSA, Length of Service Awards, which is a form of retirement, and the department did a survey, I'd say June, I believe it was, and the majority was in favor of not participating in that. There were some that said they would be, I don't remember the exact percentages, do you have it? Oh, OK. The majority was not in favor of doing those, but there were some that were, so it was kind of a mixed bag.

Can you hop on a microphone?

We opted out of not putting it in the 2027 budget because of the results of the survey. That's what she was saying.

Other questions for Tim? I know he has a drive back.

That's fine.

All right, thank you. And the plan is to have a final presentation for October 6th for another joint meeting to go over that. So now that we have kind of the basis, so again, thank you, Steve, for the idea to have some presentations to level the playing field. And then we can all go into the joint meeting October 6th with the study and the presentation and then whatever actionable item maybe comes out of that, if any.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So I think we'll move on, if that's okay with everyone, to new business. So we have, I just have... Discuss joint board meeting expectations and guidelines which perhaps should have come earlier in the meeting, but there's two PDFs here and I think it's just I am a strong believer in You know having some grounding guidelines and whether that's mission vision values Or you know kind of some shared expectations so we can because we do have some pretty tough decisions coming in and a board collectively of 12 individuals is awfully hard to make decisions and I can make I In my line of work, we make all these analogies to molecules colliding and solutions and the statistical probability of interactions and how after three, it becomes statistically improbable. And so having a smaller board or committee can easily make decisions versus a body of 12, and especially a body of 12 that represents two different communities and has different priorities. And that's okay. And I think we just need to, hopefully we can all agree on that going forward, but we need to come together and ultimately it's provide, how do we provide the very best service for the residents that we represent? And so that's just my idea behind the shared expectations and goals. I know it's something that I plan on reading before the next joint meeting too, but hopefully we can take this I'd ask that you take it into consideration also for the next couple of agenda items, too, where we're making some shared decisions. The second PDF there is the study scope timeline, because we do have new board members, some rookies on our team, and having a how did we get here moment again of all of the work, and there's been a lot of work, especially that stakeholder group, and the chiefs have really spent a lot of time on previous drafts, and hopefully we're going to have the best possible deliverable for you on October 6th, and so there's been a lot of Work that has gone into that and I want everyone to be on the same page of how we got here And what also triggered it because we did have You know, there's going to be a future expectation of paid staff and there has been talk of You know cap major capital of investments That's either going to be over here over here and what the you know what that scope looks like Hopefully again October 6 is when we can give a better idea of that but Early discussion of those has prompted the last year and so Just I think that timeline really highlights all the work that's gone into it and again coming together and working together Looking forward to that on October 6 Any comments or questions yeah Comment that I had or maybe it's a question is so in reviewing the second draft there is a number of issues that some are

Is it okay to keep talking?

Don't keep going.

There was a number of things that I'm not sure if they were caught by you guys reviewing it or not. Do you want us to share those with that, whatever, whoever the state, could you just name who the stakeholder group is?

So it is our village administrator and your town clerk. It's me and Steve. It's the two chiefs. and we have all had the opportunity, we saw the first draft and gave a lot of written feedback back to PAA and then we got a second draft and obviously we've shared both of those with you all. Came together again as kind of that stakeholder group and gave additional written feedback but then also had the opportunity to bring PAA back here and we had an in-person quite lengthy meeting of giving additional feedback and so that's where This idea for the presentation meeting came from the fact that we had discussion then at board levels of whether we wanted to fund the add-in of governance again, because every time we tried to pull something, from my perspective, every time we tried to pull something out of them in that stakeholder meeting, it was like, well, we can't touch that. You took that out of the study scope. That's how it got added back in.

So if I do have things that I think are incorrect, who should I share those with?

I think you could put an email together to the stakeholder group. Okay, great. You can find it on the last page of the RFP. I have a request.

We've been meeting for two and a half hours and I would appreciate a one minute stand up and stretch.

We can do that and then we can move on to lease agreements and shared sidewalks and all of those things. Let's just take a recess for a minute.

There are cookies.

All right. We are at new. Discuss joint ESB lease agreement. PDF in the agenda. And I will actually, I think, turn it over to village attorney. for introduction of the item, which maybe I'll say one more thing. So just to remind everyone. So this first appeared on a June 15th village board meeting agenda item, and then it went to the town board and they had a discussion bringing it back now.

And we do have, obviously, later in the discussion, or later in the meeting, the ESB service animal policy, and really this is all kind of related. Some of the issues that have popped up over the last few years have shown that it would help if we had good, clear direction for both services and the other users of the building as to how to lay out responsibilities and space, control over space, things like that. In the most recent version of the fire agreement, we have reference to lease, we reference it in the It's referenced in this document we'll be looking at next for the service animal policy. So it's really just about kind of putting together the pieces that we need to have that well defined and so everyone knows their roles and responsibilities and where they sit in that building. And I don't know how much there is to discuss the memo. I thought that the comments or the information from the town board meeting actually on this topic provided a really good list of sort of the types of topics that we'd look to evaluate in the leases. It was a good list. It's a great starting point for this project.

So I think action item tonight is just to give direction for the drafting of the leases.

Yeah, and I mean, ideally, some of those things in that list, again, from the town board meeting, some of those things are probably best served being in an overall village and town joint policy for that building. The leases can certainly be the next step, but even the service animal policy, I would see that as being a component of an overall, between the agreement of the town and the village as to how to manage that building. That's something we can talk about moving forward, but I think the next step is just putting those leases together you know that the services have been working with us to help us to understand sort of how the building flows and who uses what space and what's shared and where there's overlap and it probably makes sense to to do that and you'll learn not learn but but there will be discussion later about why that matters in particular with respect to responsibilities for employees and members of each service in the village in the town so everybody understands what their role is in what space

Open it up for questions or comments. JP.

Larry, you kind of alluded to this, but has there been conversations with the various attorneys from the town, fire, Deer Grove EMS regarding kind of the needs and the challenges and how that could shape our future direction?

Yeah, actually I had a conversation with the attorneys for the, I frequently have conversations with the town's attorney on when things come up, but for the fire and EMS attorneys, that came up in the context of the service animal policy. So we did have a conversation and we took that as an opportunity to just real quick talk about You know how do we establish sort of these agreements so that all the pieces are filled in and and I don't want to speak for them, but it seemed like we were all on the same page in terms of be good to have the pieces that are referenced in the documents that we need to have to build on. It's not a big project, it's just. Fairly standard.

because this is going to be effectively codified into a black on white, you know, agreement here, is there a penalty clause in there as to if fire does something that belongs to EMS or vice versa? I mean, because of the fact, if you're going to have a lease and if people don't abide by it, and I'm not saying that there is going to be, you know, chief Lang, Chief Archibald, the EMTs, the paramedics, the firefighters, by and large, everybody's just like one big happy family down there and has been forever and ever and ever. But because of the fact this is being codified into a concise document, what happens if somebody infringes upon somebody else's area?

I wouldn't, so a lot of this is based on the, what's in it will be based on the direction we get. If we don't get a lot of direction, we'll throw something at you. You can evaluate it and see, but I wouldn't anticipate any kind of a penalty clause. I think it's really, I think you made, if I can take your words, I think you made a great point. If someone infringes on someone else in some way, right, this lease will just kind of define whose is what. And so that you can get past the is it mine, is it yours, is this space what I should be in control of versus the other service or the town and the village. So I see it as being more of getting past the first question of whose space is it so that you can decide together what the outcome should be if there's ever conflict.

I personally, and I believe I speak for my entire board here, the town of Cottage Grove does not want to become the administrator of a lease for the ESB, meaning the two chiefs, those are the people who are going to determine what's what there. I don't want the village to exert influence on who gets what, where, and why, no more so than I would want to see the town do that.

I think that's good direction and that's sort of the sense that we've been getting about how we would build this is it's really, with any policy there has to be someone to bring your issues to but I think that that's very consistent with sort of the direction that I've been feeling and getting on this. It isn't really like landlord tenant everyday kind of management.

I was hoping it wasn't going to be. That's what I'm hearing, yeah. And your suggestion as far as who to bring it to, if, God forbid, if there was conflict, I believe my opinion, I don't know if everybody else agrees, would be that it come to the Fire Commission. I don't believe that Deer Grove EMS should be necessarily involved in the administration of that. Simply from the standpoint you've got Deerfield involved and this way it's Cottage Grove, Cottage Grove with the Cottage Grove building.

Yeah, some of that we might not wrestle with in this exact step. I think this is more about location than it is anything else. It's just where are you responsible for your, you know, behind your doors and what spaces join. And remember, there are things that occur there in the building that aren't service specific and there's some things that occur that are in shared spaces. So it's a little, There's some nuance there, but yeah.

My thing, I just hope it doesn't turn out to be just the dog thing, because the time and money and effort has been put into this dog issue is absolutely ridiculous. And to now this document here, and it's probably a great document, but my goodness. It should have been solved right at the bottom level, and we shouldn't have gone through all this.

I just have a question, particularly because of Deer Grove EMS. Does Deerfield have a lease agreement in terms of their building between Deerfield Fire and Deer Grove? I don't believe they do.

I've never heard of one.

Okay. Yeah, my inclination also is that we don't need a lease agreement. I think the memo was incorrect in that it said it was in the service agreement with Cottage Grove Fire District. It's actually in our joint district agreement where there is language in there, but that's easy enough for us without opening up the whole thing um to make an amendment to and just pull that out um i think um a better direction is you know a memorandum of understanding or some just kind of guidelines but i don't think we need to go to that formal especially since our shared ems service doesn't have that from the other municipality i i think

Yep, I think that we might be talking about the same thing, just the name, because I think what we've learned, the service animal process has been involved, as was just mentioned, but one of the things that we learned is that really for the protection of the services and for the village and the town, we do need to have a clear understanding from all sides about who's responsible for what where. And to Paula's point, that's something that could be, I wouldn't focus on the name of it because it could easily be a different name than a lease. But the things you articulated that would be valuable for us to have is what we're really aiming for here. And there's two services, two, maybe it's a joint document, just call it a document. The idea being we've learned that from a perspective of each of these services to their own membership or to their own employees, depending on what service you're talking about, it is beneficial for each to have the ability to delineate what's their job and what's not.

But we still need to deal with the agreement where the word lease is actually in that document.

Well, we can name this MOU a lease and then we don't have to deal with it. Okay. The same thing with the service animal policy. that we'll talk about next that references the leases too. That's just kind of what we thought, where we thought we were going. But either way, it's really just a name. I think the input I'm getting about what should be in whatever we call it is the important part right now. And I'm hearing that loud and clear.

Well, I guess the other piece is we can all have ideas on what should go where and so forth, but really, I believe this really falls to the two departments and the two chiefs to establish what goes where and so forth. I mean, I think they should be the ones kind of spelling those parameters out.

And they are.

Okay. Yeah.

So do you have something already that has bullet points as far as what you're going to shoot for in this agreement?

No, what we've worked on so far is just understanding the space, the flow of the space, the use of the space, and we're working through that, but no, nothing yet. This is really, do we want to go this route because we didn't want to do something and then have somebody say, this isn't what we wanted.

And this mock-up, the sheet is?

That's the dog policy. Yeah, this is the dog policy alone? Yes.

Yep. I have a question. So over the village board discussion where it identified several areas, most of those areas are already addressed in the ESB with the fire district. If there's damage done, how the insurance is taken care of, all those things are already covered in there. And in our town discussion, I believe we just wanted to have, like you're saying, map something out or some memorandum of understanding that this is how it goes. But I believe all of these are already signed and in there about how it's insured, how damage is handled. All those are already in that agreement. And then my second thing was, you're talking about naming a policy administrator in this one. So would that be the person that would be to enforce if there was a lease issue?

So the, no. It's really a... town and village, just like anything else when you're talking about upgrades to the building, things like that. The decisions have to be made by the town and the village board. We'll talk more about that policy in a minute, but I think that's designed around, It isn't just a dog policy, right? That isn't the only benefit that came out of that project. It's a better understanding of how we deal with ADA requirements with four different users between the village and the town and the two services, including use of the EOC room, that kind of thing. It really elevated that discussion. So it is helpful to have gone through that, even if it was in the context of dogs, just to, you know, everyone needs to know what their role is.

So one more question. With this policy, is it going to open up for the ability to train dogs there to be service dogs on a continual basis?

Yeah, but we'll get into that in the next item. But yes, yeah.

Other comments on the lease drafting ESP lease slash MOU slash document? Christy.

I had one and that is somebody is very good at taking notes because I'm recognizing the exact discussion during the town meeting in here and one of the things that we said was an MOU rather than lease because we think a lot of things are going pretty well but to document them because we're not always going to be there. I'm not always going to be on this board. Not that I do anything there, but we had a situation when the town chairman left after 30 plus years, and there was an issue because he was taking care of some of the maintenance things, but nobody knew about it. So this is what I hope will be handled with what you're doing.

I guess a valid question, too, and especially for the town board members is, are you willing to pay the shared costs for our attorneys to do this work? I appreciate your work, Larry, very much, but you're not cheap. And I don't know, again, when I think about things that rise to the level of having village attorneys involved, This to me is not one of them, but I guess I'd like to know from the town kind of what their flavor is for paying for this development.

And to be clear, I think what we had anticipated is that we'd be working with the town attorney to do this and consulting with attorneys from the two services. That's the idea I had in my head. That doesn't mean that's the way it has to go. And for all I know, the town's attorney might take the first shot. You're right. We hadn't assigned any roles yet as far as that goes.

So again, good point. I'm looking at the town or even the fire department. If their attorneys have to take a crack, how much are you guys all wanting to pay for this?

I thought things were going pretty good. Did you hear me?

Nope.

I thought things were going pretty good. Right now I I. I've watched the two chiefs. Work tremendously well and not to say down the way there could be a total change in in attitude, but I'm to the point that it's just all the things they've done and now to have ordinances and regulations on everything that they they've all they've been trying to do all these years. I just I don't see it.

But there have been issues where a potential lease document MOU would have been helpful in the last, over the course of the last year. And I think the... What is it? The location of where to put the Deer Grove vehicle was a pretty big issue. It came to both boards. We got several emails about it. There was the windows that were leaking and caused mold to be in the basement of the ESB. I think the dog policy had a, I mean, we were talking about the, we have a final, or a more final draft of a dog policy that's been going on since March. They're shared spaces. The public is allowed in there. We are the owners of the building and having a Documents whatever you name it that lists out all the things that we had in the village board discussion and you had in your town Discussion makes a lot of sense from a good governance and from protecting ourselves The window that you just the window the leaky windows that you referred to that

does not come into play here. That defect in that building should come to the fire commission, period. The fire commission then determines what remediation steps would be necessary, any more investigatory type stuff. It does not need a memorandum of understanding or a lease or whatever between fire and EMS to go ahead and take care.

Bad example, apologies. I moved my example from the window example. I think the car example is a good example.

The what?

The the vehicle of where to put the EMS vehicle is a good example. I'm just they solve that issue.

They solve that issue on their own. It wasn't something that was needed at the village or town board.

That issue came to both town and village board and we actually had village board votes on it.

OK, we need to move on from this. So is there appetite JP?

OK, thank you. So I appreciate all the comments that happened in Mike. I echo your comments that how I appreciate how well the chiefs in the departments are really working together. But you also said something right after that that I agree with is like who knows what's going to happen if there's turnover in there. So I think for us to maintain where we are in that level, just having a document so we don't go backwards in the future so that we don't go through all of these things that we've gone through with. I mean, we'll just pull out the dog. Those steps having a document could have had to. headed that off early on, nipped it in the bud. So I think having something in place can go a long way so we have a shared understanding and it codifies some of the things that really the intent is to codify what we're doing right now so that we're safe and we're not having to revisit things again and again and again.

Basically, we hadn't been. doing what you just said. We haven't been doing this over and over again. We haven't done it. They've solved their own problems.

Is there appetite for moving, for giving direction to legal, to work with the entities to draft? I see nodding, nodding, no nodding. Yes.

Your question is if you want to. I apologize.

The majority of the village board is interested in moving forward. Correct. Is the majority of the town interested in moving forward?

That's the question. Well, I thought the question was about our attorney. I think that moving forward with it, we've already said that we would do that. I think that it would be something we would review, correct? We're not looking to have our attorney write something. No. But for them to go ahead and write something and us to review and look at it, that seems appropriate.

Okay.

They're going to do it. You just made a motion you were going to do it, correct?

I didn't make a motion. Oh, I'm sorry. But the board would like to. The village board is interested in moving this forward by directing our legal staff to work on a draft.

I am fine with that.

For review of the lease. Not the dog yet. That's next. Yeah, he has direction. All right. All right. Next up is discussed. Now we're on the dog. The ESB service dog policy. We have Troy Thompson from Axley who has drafted this for us. He's labor counsel. He's an expert in ADA. And I know that has come up quite a bit. This has been something that has been discussed for many months. And so I'm hoping that we can bring this over the finish line.

Can I say something before he starts?

Yes.

Okay.

So I think that where this has gone and where it sits right now, um, was completely preventable by the EMS commission. It was also something that should have happened with canine companions, um, right in their thing for a facility dog that you have the approval from your employer to use a facility dog. How did canine give him, canine or companions give him a dog? No one gave him approval. Did the EMS board give him approval?

I just, yeah, I can answer that because I was on the EMS board at the time, and so it's a point of clarification. We did not give approval. We were notified in an email that this was happening and that the dog was coming, and we had no say. It was not a governance decision to start with. And in fact, when the policy was actually first presented, it was actually a dog policy that anybody could bring a dog. And so it's kind of morphed over time, but no. I mean, the EMS Commission did not sanction this at the beginning, just so you're aware.

And as I look through the notes from your meeting, The assumption was that it would be okay because it was an ADA dog, and those are the notes to the commission from, I believe, it must be Chief Lang. It's not an ADA dog. It's not a facility dog either. It doesn't meet the definition of facility. You would be able to tell me this more. It doesn't meet the facility dog from the canine,

What is it called?

I apologize, Canine Companions. So I know it's here, we have to deal with it, but it should have never come this far, ever. The commission, that's the commission's job, not ours, to say that, you know what, you don't have permission to bring a dog in, you never got the permission to bring a dog in, you did, it just can't happen. And a lot of people's feelings have been hurt. I'm probably gonna hear about it now because I said something, I love dogs too. I'm just saying that as he mentioned in a different way, a lot of time has been put in on this by everybody here and before I was even on the board. So I think that if we're gonna have commissions or we're gonna have committees that they really need to make decisions about things like this before it gets to us. Maybe you're right that a policy would have taken care of this and it couldn't have happened. If there was a policy maybe canine wouldn't have given him the dog or he went to brought the dog in but Before we even saw it he shouldn't the dog shouldn't have been given to him according to theirs unless someone approved it and it should have never been brought into in a workplace that Has a new dog's policy

Because I think that's, and I don't think we need to rehash all of the things that have happened over the last month and how we got here. I think that has been communicated. It's been communicated at the EMS commission level multiple times over in different meetings that this could have gone in a different direction. But I think we are now... we have the ability to move this forward. There was no policy ever before. This is also a shared building and not only a shared with tenants, it's owned by the two of, you know, our two entities, there's two tenants and there's also public space. And you do have, you know, other groups that may come in for emergency management, for training, for all sorts of different things in that building. We now, you know, deer Grove commission did take up, they have their own internal policy that would, uh, you know, that, they are approving you know a facility dog and training service dogs you know all of those things they have their own separates policy um it has gone obviously through all the commissions come to the boards we've all talked about it we all love dogs we're all on that same page um but now it's we're to the point where we need some guidance on that building and we need to again protect ourselves and so that's where this policy is coming in And there's probably going to be some minor changes to language and make sure that we're all on the same page. But I strongly believe that this needs to make it over the finish line so that we are protecting ourselves as municipalities in charge of that building.

Yeah, legally I believe that's totally on par. I guess before we do anything, since you're the attorney that would understand ADA... As a building owner, why do we need an ADA dog policy? I mean, we have to follow it. Now, I can understand if we want to make a policy for other dogs, but I'm just wondering why do we need a policy if it's already something we have to do? I mean, I believe Title I, is that where that comes in?

That's a great question and from a big picture legal perspective, we have federal and state law that apply to the village and the town in their capacities as employers and then separately as governmental entities with open spaces to the public. uh... and it's our i don't represent either of the tenants uh... so i can't speak to their processes but but they were progressive and they went ahead and they they develop their own service animal policies before the vote before the town of village had one in effect and i uh... they did a a good job in with respect to their separate capacities as employers of their employees and volunteers but their policies created some risk for the landlord the village in the town by attempting to foist upon the landlord certain duties and responsibilities to engage in an interactive reasonable accommodation process especially when disputes arise between the tenants And so I was directed to review those two tenant policies, to respect them as much as possible, to give them their autonomy, but to try to piggyback off the good in those policies rather than start from scratch. And we developed a building owner's policy that really has two purposes. Number one is to ensure compliance with federal and state law by the building owners. And then as Larry was explaining, to familiarize everybody and align everybody in terms of roles and responsibilities. So to the extent that EMS or fire has an employee with a disability that necessitates a service animal, that's not the landlord's responsibility. That's the responsibility of the employer, whether that's fire or EMS. And we don't want to get in the middle of that. Their policies would have put us in the middle of that. And so that's a primary purpose of this building owner's policy. And so then we look at, we try to organize it in terms of tenant exclusive spaces and where we want to give them full autonomy as to their employees, agents, invitees, et cetera. And then there are common areas not open to the public. like the fitness center, et cetera. And we want to give them a say in it, but also to the extent that there's a obligation on us as a government building owner, then we want to make sure that we're satisfying our obligations under federal and state law. And then third, there are from time to time portions of the building under limited circumstances that may be open to the general public. Infrequently, but we need to address our obligations as a governmental building owner for open public accommodations. So the policy is intended to address all of those things while sending a clear message to the tenants that that the the town and village are not going to be responsible for providing accommodations to their employees so if an employee says i need a service animal that they must work with them not us if uh... if i are unemployed if if an employee says i'm allergic to that service animal that's their responsible ability if they're gonna buy filtration or put the person in a different work area if they're going to change that person's shifts, et cetera, to protect against exposing them, that's not our responsibility. And so we wanted to put some guardrails up, and I think we've done a very good job at it, even though you guys might be on the front and edge of legal compliance having such a complete policy.

That was an excellent explanation. We're looking to protect the town and the village as the lessors, as the building owner. I think that's great. I don't have any issue with that at all. So basically with all the stuff that's off here that is part of the ADA requirements, at the end of the day, it puts the responsibility of conflict resolution on the two tenants.

That's exactly right. And the law distinguishes between service animals that perform a service for a disabled person and emotional support animals. And service animals, from an employment perspective, An emotional support animal isn't a service animal, but an employee of either of the tenants might be entitled to that type of accommodation under state law for a disability necessary to perform the duties of their job, but that wouldn't be our responsibility as the landlord. And so we're being very clear about that as to the different categories and whose responsibility it is.

My question is, can the dog be there?

Can the dog be there?

Full time.

That's not my issue because that's for the tenant to decide. We can have a policy that talks about whether the dog can have access to common areas open to the public. And then it would be typical for there to be a lease that describes what the tenant's respective rights and responsibilities are to tenant common areas.

Okay, so... Now it's going down from here to there, right? And they already made a decision, correct or not, or correct or can the dog be there? That's what I'm asking.

A service animal, we would typically be required to permit the service animal.

I'm sort of asking the two chiefs, can the dog be there?

Dr. Rene is on and she can't hear anything you're saying when the mic's not on.

Okay, I apologize.

I'm not sure what they missed of yours, but my point was is that this is protecting the town and the village. The decision will ultimately be made by them. And it has nothing to do with us. It's just like if they wanted to, they decided that they wanted to, I can't give an example. It doesn't matter. But that wouldn't be anything to do with us if we're talking just about this lease. OK.

So the question is, this is a, from now on, forward-moving document, correct?

It's a draft for your review and consideration. Okay.

If considered, it would be added before moving that service animals in training could be brought in. Regular dogs, before they get the papers, could be trained at the facility. Correct.

Correct. And even in the absence of this policy, federal and state law apply. And in many instances, an employer may be obligated to permit a service animal in training to be there, even in the absence of a policy. So the policy is beneficial to... to familiarize people, align people, and to avoid a situation where somebody relies on common sense or a gut feeling and makes a mistake where they just don't have the understanding of the legal obligation.

So I'm not saying this is going to happen or come up, but... Does the town and the village have a right to put a number as far as how many animals and training can be there or ones that have papers? Do you know that?

I don't know the answer off off the top of my head. It's kind of an incomplete hypothetical from a big picture standpoint in the tenant exclusive areas. Um, the tenants get to decide what, what the answer to that question is in common areas. I, I, the, I think that the landlord could have some input on, on that to some degree.

Okay.

Steve. Item number two, paragraph A. Page, I'm sorry, page four. Both the town, I'm sorry, 2A? Correct. It says working dogs and facility service dogs.

Mine says unless otherwise prohibited. Yes, yep, okay. Okay.

both the town and the village now have police canines, okay? Does, I'm trying to make sense out of paragraph A here, does that, if say a village officer or one of my deputies comes in with his dog into the building to speak with either fire personnel or EMS personnel, do we have to obtain prior permission? It says must be authorized and supervised by the responsible tenant. And I don't know what that means. So in other words, if, say, tonight the village's officer needs to talk with the duty crew down at the ambulance station, if this was in effect, do they have to? I mean, typically they just knock on the door, walk in, conduct their business, and out the door kind of thing. So I'm just curious as to what the intent is there.

Well, that provision that you're referencing refers to building tenant staff and invitees. I believe that the owners would be permitted to do that. Okay, so isn't fire and EMS a tenant in that building? Yes.

Okay, but it says supervised by the responsible tenant.

So the tenant is responsible for supervising their guests. When an owner enters the building in a common area, they're not a guest of a tenant.

Okay. May I try to explain that in a different way? So in this case, your example specifically, fire's inviting a police to come in. So that invitation in there, it could be form of the authorization saying, hey, we invite you to come in. We authorize you to come in to do that. So in your specific example, that's how that conversation can be. And authorization, again, feel free to jump in and correct me, can take many forms, not just a written one. It could be kind of verbal. That's right.

And you don't have a lease right now that limits your ability to access the building. And so if you're walking through and doing patrol or whatever, or visiting, I don't think you're necessarily a guest obligated to comply with, be subject to the tenant's supervision.

That's fine. I just wanted a clarification.

Troy, so this document obviously is written from the perspective of the town and village in protecting us, and obviously it does that very well. The one area that I really struggle with, and not necessarily from a legal standpoint per se, is on page seven when we start talking about balancing accommodations. In essence, it still clears the town and the village from having any sort of obligation with balancing those accommodations. However, I think it also leaves a gap for the two services in terms of, you know, we know that we have at least one firefighter with a dog allergy and at least one EMS staff with an allergy. you know even though we're not necessarily the employer because it's the district or the fire district um in essence all of these folks kind of work for us right and so i also want to make sure that somebody that has one of those competing accommodations has the ability to really um you know work through that and or if a decision is made by whom and what is the appeal process. So can you walk through that a little bit more? Because I want to make sure that the personnel that are in the buildings and particularly the ones with the allergies have some sort of recourse.

That's a great question and something that we looked really hard at in trying to develop the policy to protect the landlord's interests. Understanding that there's a divergence of interests between the tenants and the landlords in that area. And so from a legal perspective, if an employee of one of the tenants has an allergy to a service animal, then the employer of that employee would be obligated to engage in what's called an interactive process to explore reasonable accommodation under the federal ADA and the State of Wisconsin Fair Employment Act. And the interactive process is a two-way dialogue between employer and employee to understand what is the condition? How does it manifest itself in the workplace? Is it temporary or permanent? Are you subject to, if temporary, how long is it in effect? Are there any limitations on your ability to do the job? What limitations? How does it limit you from doing the job? Are you subject to any restrictions? Are they permanent? So you go through this back and forth process where the employer is limited to asking job related questions that are consistent with business necessity. And then the employer and employee have to come up to, they identify potential reasonable accommodations. One might be let's get rid of the dog. But if the dog isn't under the employer's control, that's not the first option. The first option would be, can we move you to a different location? Can we provide you with air filtration? In some cases, there's been positive pressure masks that have been provided to employees for allergy conditions. and they go through this process and the the policy contemplates that that's the sole responsibility between employer and employee and the village and town are not going to agree to be a joint employer of that employee responsible for the accommodation process or the failure to accommodate and But we created a relief valve such that if the employer and employee have exhausted all possible reasonable accommodation options, and there doesn't exist any accommodation option that then that then the tenant can come to the landlord with recommendations of here's here are some accommodation options we would like you as the landlord to consider that would help us the employee or accommodate our employee with the sensitivity so It's on the the obligation is on the tenant to do the work with the employee and then if there's still a barrier that that they that exists the tenant can come to the to the owners and say we the lease if one exists or an MOU, whatever you call it, the lease says the common areas are under the control of thus and such. We would ask, we the tenant, ask for relief from that to assist us provide reasonable accommodation So that interactive process is highly customized to the particular employee. And so it's really, all options are on the table, but that's the big picture of how I see it working.

So even though the conversation is customizable to the employee, doesn't it make some sense that we have two different entities, which will probably have two different labor attorneys, that perhaps it's one attorney that oversees so that both tenants, if you will, are operating under the same framework? Is that a recommendation you would recommend?

Well, I think it's important. So when an attorney represents a client, there's the loyalty to that client, the obligation to give advice to that client. And sometimes there are related or affiliated entities. As you said, they all work for us in some respect. but they have divergent legal interests and obligations. And so I think it makes sense to get everybody aligned and on the same page to the extent possible. But in some instances, there may be an unwillingness of the two tenant entities to cooperate with each other on that type of issue. One might say, well, we feel very strongly about having the service dog. And the other tenant might say, we feel very strongly about protecting our employees' health and welfare. And so that's one where you might not be able to have one attorney representing all of them, maybe helping to mediate it.

I would say, just my comments on this, this is the provision that gives me the most heartache, if you will, or heartburn, rather. So I guess if we move forward with this process, I guess I would like to make sure that the employees from both entities basically have that framework that you mentioned and have the ability. they're being kind of held to the same standards because I think that's only fair for sharing that building and especially those shared spaces. So I don't know how we tie that in or if we just strongly encourage fire and EMS to work together and present us with how their documents look or what that looks like, but I really want to solve for that because we have known accommodations right now, so.

Right, and on page seven at section Roman three, sub three, balancing accommodations, it does say about halfway through that last paragraph, if a tenant believes a proposed accommodation requires modification of or access restrictions in a joint building area or building owner's controlled area, the tenant must submit a written request to the policy administrator. And so it I I contemplated that that that situation you described could very well occur, and so that is a on that. That's the starting point, and then hopefully there would be dialogue.

Other questions or comments on? The ESB service dog policy.

Um, so again, just going through some of the definitions, um, it talks about a facility service dog, specially trained dogs to provide services and behaviors that will suit needs of different facilities. These dogs also known as therapy dogs on the ADA. Well, it's actually on the, on the canine site. They distinguish between the two. So I'm not sure if that's correct. The facility dogs are highly trained specific tasks. trained by professional trainers, aren't permitted in the public, just like ADA dogs, where they work to accept where they would improve client outcomes. Therapy dogs are pets that have been certified to visit, provide comfort and joy to people who need it. They're not allowed in public places as well. So it sounds like facility dogs and therapy dogs are completely two different levels of training. Does that make sense?

I can't speak to that. I think of these as the latter is the animal that would, you know, you have an animal at the station to bring down stress levels after seeing some traumatic stuff. And then the facility service dog could be there to provide security.

Patrick, your microphone. Sorry.

I just was wondering about that distinction, if we should make that distinction or not. That's your lawyer. I'm just looking at what I've been able to find on it. And then the other definition was I believe trainer and handler. We talk about a trainer, but we don't have any definition of a trainer. So would we require a definition of trainer? Or should we just say between your hands?

It's pretty broad. So some of this, we look at the statute, we look at the regulations, we look at advisory opinion and feedback. There's a limited amount of law on this issue. And so... some of these are kind of broad concepts and we've done our best to frame it within the contours of the law, but as you're looking at it and having those type of questions, put a bullet list together and we'll address all of them.

That's great. And I think I just had one more. And that was, I guess it was concerning the part about your policy or the building, our policy, the building policy is really strict on handling and keeping control of the dog and all that. So the dog that currently is there, that person, that handler can be responding to calls and you can't take the dog with you. So what happens there? What are we going to let happen there? Are we going to say that you're going to be kenneled or?

That's for the landlord to decide. And that would be something appropriate to be in a lease.

so that wouldn't be in the dog policy.

It could be in both.

I think we should address it just so that there's no... Yeah, that's a business decision. But in here we say they always have to be with that person, I believe.

That's the best practice.

It might not always be the same person, just a designated person.

So one other question that I have, we're talking about this in regard to the emergency services building. I know that there are service dogs or at least one or some type of animal in one of our village departments. So is that going to be kind of a separate situation or is this, I guess, where are we going with this?

So we have an interactive process, and we have policy and protocol for the village. And I think Inga can, I mean, if you want additional information, Inga has all of that.

So we already have a policy in place and have the interactive conversation going for a village department?

We have a policy for village employees to go through an interactive process that's established in our ADA Title I policy. So that's how that's handled and related to other service animals with our staff. That's a personnel matter, so I'm not going to discuss that right now.

It would just be helpful to know what the policy is and how close it is to what we have in front of us.

Yep, I can send a link to our policy for employees. Okay, thank you.

And it's common for a reasonable accommodation policy just to say that the employer is committed to complying with the ADA providing reasonable accommodation to disabled employees in need. It's unusual to have a full blown reference to a service animal. So most municipal employers don't have a service animal policy. This one I think the genesis was because the two tenants created their own and it complicated things for the landlord and it was necessary to develop a building level policy. So it was really unique to those facts.

Troy, what do you need from boards tonight then? Direction to finalize, and do we bring it back to our respective boards for approval?

I think that's exactly right. If there's any improvements or questions, if you want to get that to Cindy, she'll let me know and we'll update as appropriate. Otherwise, I think it can be ready for approval.

Because that question came up, just one more. Um, so when we talk about procedure for service animals for building owners, employees, it sounds like you're referring to an employee of the village. Uh, and so this refers to service animals, but not working dogs or facility dogs or therapy dogs in that. Does that need to be addressed?

I'm sorry, I'm not tracking.

I apologize. So under procedure, um, we talk about service animals for building owners, employees. So a service animal is covered, but what happens if someone wants to bring their therapy dog into our building and they're an employee, or not our building, into the building?

if an employee of the town wants to bring emotional support.

I guess it would be the town or the village. I only bring it up because you just said there was an accommodation for the village.

I think then, in providing feedback, I think you should let me know what the rule is that you want the policy to cite.

I just don't know if it even is an issue. I guess we can discuss that.

Yeah. So, yeah, send minor corrections or clarification, and I will get that over to Troy. And then... Are the boards in agreement that we work to finalize this and bring it to our next board meeting? I don't know if it has to come back to the joint meeting. We can maybe kind of keep that agenda a little bit leaner than tonight's. But if we can come back to our board, next respective board meetings for consideration.

I'll put it on our next board meeting. Okay.

Nodding heads all around, okay.

Yes. Yes, if we wanna stop talking about this for months, let's just get it done.

Casey, JP, did you have anything else to say? Okay. All right. Should we move forward? Two more. Discuss and consider approving road connections. It's a number of roads in the West Lawn Estates area of the village. There's the packet that's listed second in there is everything that has already gone to all of the boards. So you've already seen all of those emails memos and lengthy attachments and so tonight i think you know there had been requests for connections of current stubs at the four streets that were listed and if there is appetite to connect one two three or all four um direction can be given and if the and then we can kind of take it next steps. But if there's no appetite for any connection, I think the conversation is going to end. Yeah, Steve.

Because there are new faces here, and this is a 20-year project, I mean a 20-year discussion that's been going on. I'll be brief but detailed. When? The village row or correction when the town built those would come out to a dead end road. There was at some point in time. Plans yeah to extend the subdivisions further West before the village annex that property. On town residential roads or streets rather. They are only, I believe they're only 11 feet wide. So there's 22 feet of actual paved surface with ditches, all right? And the town actually does not allow parking on the street. Technically, if you go by our ordinances, you gotta have your two tires on the shoulder and then the other two tires partway down the ditch. And most of the ditches are pretty benign, all right? The first time was when we get the formal request was when Mr. Homburg first started developing that area immediately west of our streets. Mr. Homburg came in. He was, I don't know if it was a joint meeting between the town and village at that particular point in time. The town was open to allowing at least a couple of those streets opened up if the developer, AKA Mr. Homburg, built the town roads that were currently dead ends down to Sandpiper, which is about a block and a half, if they built it to the same standards to the village streets that were being proposed in that subdivision. And Mr. Homburg says, no, and left. Okay, and because of that, the town has been against any type of connection there, number one, because We couldn't do anything in our streets ourselves because of the fact that it's so narrow and the amount of traffic going through that would actually impinge on our use of the streets in the manner that we were accustomed to being used. Obviously, the town is not going to put in curb and gutter and storm sewers and all that kind of stuff. All right. Now, the question that came up later, and this kind of was asked from my board here, why aren't you, rather than visiting with us, okay, about our streets, according to some informal policy, Surveys that we took with the village side of the folks on the other side They don't want to see the roads go through any more than our folks want to go see the roads come through On the west end they don't want to see the road come through All right, because it's not going to serve any purpose to them Especially now that Taylor Prairie is closed because there's no traffic coming east all right and Mike I believe it was you who said that nobody from the village had contacted those residents

I walked down the, just when I got this memo from two months ago or whatever, I walked on the village side and I just talked to anybody along the street there about the roads coming through. And I talked to probably 15 people, not one person wanted those roads to go through. They like the dead ends, just like our people on our side, 100%. Like wanna don't want to live here if they have to have that street open again. So that was what I saw.

And I guess looking at it from Morning Dove and so on and so forth, if people are coming from the village up to Sandpiper, rather than continuing straight through that little hole in the trees that's currently there now, okay, it takes them up to Damascus where they make a left-hand turn, walk whatever the distance is to the school and go in. Why is it any different than walking up to Sandpiper, going down Sandpiper to... Huh? whatever that first street is walking straight all the way through to Damascus and You know, so I guess I don't see the reason to and then there was I don't follow Facebook that much but when that Gas main was cut and people felt trapped. Okay, and I learned from the fire department that they weren't trapped. If they wanted to leave, they could go up north to the construction road that Homburg has there, out to Gaston, or excuse me, out to Bus Road, and then continue on. So they weren't actually trapped. And then lastly, and probably the hardest question for any of you folks to answer is, why didn't you hold Homburg feet to the fire and tell them to put a road all the way through To Gaston before you improve the subdivision. Right now, as I understand it, he doesn't have to put any roads through until he starts developing those lots. You guys have kind of created the problem that you currently have right now because of the fact that. A decision was made at some point in time not to make Mr Homburg put the roads in. And so. I had a request, matter of fact, just today to consider possibly a walking path coming from the north end of, I think it's, is it Meadowlark? Meadowlark across that little area there to our Meadowlark out to Gaston Road. I don't know what the heck it would serve, but I was going to be talking about it at our next town board meeting to see if there's any interest, but based upon our previous conversations, Nightingale, Morning Dove, and Pheasant Run are off the table. Is that correct?

Yes. Well, then I think the conversation ends there. Paula?

Well, I don't want to just slam the door shut. I think there's asking for everything or asking for something, and I guess we're I think the people sitting at this table probably weren't on the board when you're asking about Homburg. But I think going forward, and this is why I've been very detailed when we have a development in front of us to make sure we've got two ways in and two ways out. So I think, obviously, I'm going to continue to push that. But one of the thoughts that I had was the ability to look at Meadowlark. And so you said somebody talked about a path. And so one of the thoughts that I had was could we even just put a gate there that emergency responders have? And the reason I'm asking for that is because we know that in Hamburg's plans that construction road is not gonna be there. So that's gonna actually be built over in his future plan. We know that's going to be going away. But at least Meadowlark has a small, I think it's 60 feet or so between the village and the town. And if we just maybe threw some gravel down on the village side and put a gate up so that right now, today, there is another outlet for folks to go through Meadowlark and then obviously up through to Gaston. I don't know if that would be a compromise position. It's basically, in essence, the road is not going to be through traffic all the time, but then we do have a second outlet if there is a situation. So I guess rather than just saying the conversation's closed, I guess I would ask what your appetite is for a solution like that.

I guess, again, why not put the onus on Mr. Homburg to create a gravel road or some sort of escape route, as you put it, because of the fact that if a gate was installed there, I can tell you that it will start to be used, well, we just needed to get a truck in here today, and oh, we just, you know, it's gonna end up being a construction entrance, especially seeing it's at the very north end of the current development and at the beginning of the next proposed one. And I'm, you know, Meadowlark number one isn't set up for that kind of traffic at all. It's a very old road, it's got four houses on it, and...

No, and I should have clarified, I'm sorry. When I mentioned a gate, it would be a gate that only our first responders have access to, not for construction. So I apologize for not clarifying that in my request, but I agree with you. I know that that could be a possibility. I've driven, I've physically stood there to look at it, and like I said, it would only be in the event of an emergency and our fire, EMS, police, whatever, would have access to be able to open that gate.

Can I make a comment?

Just a question. This came about because we had residents reach out to us. This has been something that started with sidewalks. It has now progressed to roads. I mean, we've had a lot of communication to the village board, and that's why this has become an agenda item over the last several years. But if there's no compromise that can be reached here, then... I'm surprised because we have heard so much and we have that you have the complete opposite data set that we have so when you see a lot of data what you talking hundreds of people thousands of people or I don't think hundreds or thousands well I'm just saying I mean I've so yeah we've had I've spoken to dozens of residents in just that neighborhood who've requested the connections I I

It sounded, Mike, like you said, that you talked to the folks directly on the ends of all of these roads?

Yeah.

Okay.

Not every one of them.

Sure, sure. But I'm saying in the rest of that subdivision, there is a very, very clear majority who do want the connections. So that's where we're getting different.

Matt, can you say something, and then Patrick will say it.

Sure. Just a comment as far as... thoughts about the village could have or should have on requiring Hamburg to do such and such on extending a road. I mean, we rely on a legal opinion at that time when we're evaluating a development, and we can't just require, we can ask, but when there's pushback from a developer, It comes down to what our attorneys think we can legally require a developer to do, and generally that is we're pretty limited outside of the confines of whatever is being proposed. So difficult to require a permanent road or anything outside of the limits of the residential plat that's being proposed.

Patrick, and then Stoa.

Thank you. When you're talking about, I think, the residence and walking, I did go over there. It's only 300 feet from Morning Dove to Killian. So it's not that big of a thing for walking. Now if it's access for driving, that's a different thing, just because of where you can get to. So it's only 300 feet there. And if this is a concern, not just if residents want to get out, but also for emergency services, would there be an appetite to a temporary solution where you do reclamation after you have an out? get rid of that and put people's lawns back the way they were. And I mean, there's one lawn, maybe two lawns.

Um, and, and I'm not speaking for the rest of the board.

I could be getting myself in trouble, but, um, if it is an emergency services issue, then it's important. Uh, but I don't think that there's any appetite by the town to fix something that has already been covered with Mr. Hamburg. And the last thing I want to say is I wasn't elected to just get it done, so just responding.

Okay, I have two things, both of which were kind of covered, but I haven't said anything, so I want to say something. uh... one thing it's going to remember that access road is not a public road so it may or may not be open uh... most of the time is so it's not an issue but there could be a scenario which is not and second i was just going to ask larry which matt pretty much went over but If we're doing a subdivision plat approval or a site plan approval, can we make requirements on an unrelated property that the same property owner owns? Or are we limited to the plat or subdivision or neighborhood that is in front of us?

it kind of depends on the context that arises and generally if it's just flat approval you know the type of development that the homburg development was the answer is no if there's situations where maybe there's some village incentives or something you can bargain for more things than what would normally be allowed but but generally no um it would it yeah no so we can ask and hope that he's amenable to it but it's not something we can make a a condition of approval Right, but yeah, and I guess what I mean is that, you know, depending on the funding source and, you know, there's ways to get there, but to have them do and pay for that, I think we couldn't do it. We could require them to go out to the stub, right, to the line of a splat, but going beyond, and we could probably tie it in, you know, to some extent, but to go down and further into the town, I don't think we could.

I got a question for Paula. You said that construction road is going to be gone away with?

Yeah, so his long-term plans show that where that road is now will be lots that will be developed. And I don't have the document in front of me, but yeah. And I've even had a conversation early on in this process with Andrew, and he told me, I can't really do that because these are gonna be developed. I think the key for the village is let's not get to the point where we get to these plat approvals and then scramble. I think when we start looking, even when that land was annexed in from the town to the village, I think we need to start putting up some guardrails at that annexation phase about What access to those subdivisions look like and we've done that a little bit?

Since I've been on the board which is good, and I want to see it continue One quick thing I would just say that if there is a proposal for an emergency access road Using your words. I think at the north end of Meadowlark Get it drawn up get a plan and get it to us and we'll look at it

I'd be happy to work on that.

That's direction then on that one. And then lastly for tonight, we have discussing a consider amendment to net fig landfill agreements. This was been discussed at the village board, the town board, the landfill committee. It was approved by the village board. I think it was not considered by the town board, but the town asked to put it back on the agenda for tonight. So it's under for action for the town board only.

May I?

Yep.

I asked that it be added from the standpoint of at the last landfill committee meeting, there was a, the committee, I was not there, 30 seconds background. I have two kittens that that day of that meeting destroyed three freshly watered plants in my living room. And I missed the landfill meeting. I made it for the fire meeting. But anyway, the folks at the landfill committee voted to change from every other month to one meeting in June. Well, which was not thought through very well because of the fact that what about in September when we do budget and all that kind of stuff, all right? And having been on the landfill committee for almost 30 years, for as long as I've been on the board, I don't take it lightly. And because things can go south very quickly and The town was not in favor of just an annual meeting. While we agree that perhaps every other month is a little bit too frequently, we asked for quarterly, and it looks like the village says, no, we just want one meeting a year.

Yeah, we weren't asked for quarterly. I believe it was already in the agreement.

No, it's so the way that the amendment has been adopted, it's a minimum of one per year and it doesn't specify when. And it could be quarterly a particular year. If there's something going on, it could be monthly if need be. I think this was more, this puts it really into the hands of the, the leadership to decide how often to meet and what's necessary. So it could change from year to year, season to season. Could I add something?

If we do it annually, the chairperson changes every year.

Well, it's supposed to, but it really hasn't because of the fact that It seems I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be very nice with this. It seems landfill committee gets the junior members of the village board, which is fine. Huh?

I just said we're all junior.

Compared to me, yes, but I'm just saying. And so anyway, there is a pretty steep learning curve with everything that goes on there, okay? And just to show up to hear Tina Seabold, our engineer, explain VOC levels and exceedances here and exceedances there and groundwater and all that kind of stuff, just really doesn't work for me to help you folks understand. So that's why I wanted, I would hope that there'd be some continuity, that there'd be the same people show up term after term after term, if they're still on the board yet, to learn the landfill. Because, I mean, and so anyway, and to learn, number one, and also learn the history, or at least somewhat of the history. Because that agreement that your attorney references was a whole lot of money from both the town and village because the village denied ever any culpability in it, but anyway. But my purpose in suggesting more than just one a year is to hopefully teach somebody, because I'm not going to be here forever. I wouldn't use that old adage. But I would like to be able to know that somebody has a clue as to what exactly you know, we're doing there at the landfill. Yes, it's only a 10 minute meeting. And for those people on the village board who are alternates that has to take time out of their night for 10 minutes, sit down, the chair doesn't even get warm and you're off again because you're not staying for the fire meeting. I understand, but I'm trying to be a good steward and be the teacher and so on and so forth. That's the only reason why I had suggested quarterly. but, or maybe twice a year. I mean, it's gotta be more than once, because otherwise it's just useless information in one year and out the other. And when you come home with a one inch plus thick stack of paper at the end of the monitoring year, at least you know which way to turn it, you know, the graphs and everything. So anyway, that's my signature, thanks.

Steve, I think your concerns are very valid, and I would agree that quarterly is reasonable.

Chris.

So this thing in the packet says Natfig Landfill Committee shall meet at least annually. Is that enough flexibility? Do you want it spelled out quarterly, or is saying at least annually good enough? Would you prefer to say at least five?

Like Larry said, you can call a meeting every day if you want. Well, then you have to have a quorum.

Or it could say, like, shall meet at least biannually or... You know, there's all kinds of committees in all the communities we work in. Most of them don't say anything about how often they meet when they've got business to attend to, right? Or, you know, maybe there's just a... A check-in meeting, but if it's the will of the two bodies as to how you do it, you can be more specific. I don't think we say on our other committees how often we would meet. Your call.

Can I add something quick? Yeah. So when does our report come? How often do we get the report?

they, whoops, Strand and Associates does quarterly monitoring on the water wells, the gas wells, and the private drinking water wells.

Could we have a meeting or put this forward that we have a meeting after a reception of each report so that there's actually something for the meeting? Correct.

That was my thought. And you could cancel it.

If the report says nothing, you could say, hey, we're going to not have this meeting.

We could do that, too. But my plan was to, after receipt of the monitoring results, this is what we have. So again, I'm somewhat flexible, but truly it has to be more than just once a year. That's.

I mean, it sounds like that this amendment is fine as written and it's a policy decision by the two boards to meet when you receive a report or an abnormal report or there's some other issue to discuss.

The other nice thing about that is that if you, You know, if there's a delay in a report for some reason, and it doesn't pay to meet at the end of this quarter, but you might meet right at the beginning of the next quarter, I think that this is why this, one of the reasons why these boards get together occasionally is you could say, we all agree that we should get together when there's something to talk about. everything's the same since the last, maybe that's a cover memo from Strand and that's it, but it gives you the flexibility. But I think you can have every intention of communicating and getting the board together when things are, there's things to talk about. And it is a very important topic, no doubt about it.

guess i you know steve requested quarterly you know i'm requesting that you guys look at meadowlark i think it's the right thing to do and so i would make the motion that um we discuss and consider the amendment to the nat big landfill agreement to meet quarterly this is renee i second that

So point of clarification, this topic is not up for village discussion based off of? Do you mean action? Sorry, action. The agenda allows it. The agenda allows it, okay.

Can I amend that to be four times a year rather than just quarterly based on what you had said for the reports? I think it's very important.

Yes, I accept that amendment.

All right, and who seconded?

It's got to be over here.

Yeah, Rene did, okay.

Oh, Rene did.

Discussion?

So again, I totally understand where we are and especially I appreciate, Steve, your thoughts on preserving the history and making sure we ensure that we have that viewpoint as we move forward in here. My one concern by stating it has to be four times or quarterly is then we're bound by that. Do we have enough flexibility in the case that you state is like the report comes back and that quarterly report comes back and there's no changes whatsoever? Do we wanna meet or are we gonna be hamstrung and have to meet because we already said that there's four meetings that has to happen in there? So that's my one concern with this.

Any meeting can be cancelled. Any meeting. There's nothing that makes it law that you have to have the meeting.

Thank you, Mike. I just said the same thing, but I didn't have my mic on.

I said at least four times a year, so I think my amendment.

I guess I would add or make a suggestion for whoever made and seconded the motion that. That the chair could. You know, not the chair of that committee could. Cancel the meeting for. For cause I mean. That makes sense that.

I think I get that everyone. Concerns with having extra meetings, but obviously keeping this important topic at the forefront of every you know in front of everybody and making sure that. issues are taken care of?

Yeah. Okay. We'll come up with some language. There's enough changes now, I wouldn't, we don't have really anything to vote on right now with this change. So we'll come up with something that just provides that flexibility. Really creates an expectation that unless there's no reason to, we're gonna meet.

So what with the motion on the table right now, what do you want us to?

I mean, as long as it's okay with Paula, I would just say we'll bring something to this board and I'll send it over to them for that board and we can all.

Just have that at the next board meetings?

Yeah.

Is that agreeable to you guys? Okay, I'll withdraw my motion.

I would just like to make a comment about and criticize my town chairman. That cat thing was really a joke. That really was.

Point of order. Yeah. Does Renee have to also, okay, thank you.

Okay, how about we move on to seven and eights? The town can go first.

Could I ask a quick question before we do that? Yeah. Our next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, October 6th at 5.30. I have a conflict later that evening. I'm wondering if anyone would be willing to move it to five? Or is that not possible?

I won't be back from work until probably 7 that night.

OK.

Unless your conflict is before or after 10 o'clock, I think it'd be a problem.

There should only be one thing on the next agenda. That's kind of a big thing. It was originally at 530 and yet Christie is asking if there's enough. We'd have a quorum for both entities at 5.

I'm available.

We have to have a quorum at the beginning, yes.

We can do quorum on that.

No, I can do it, yeah. I'll do it, fine.

Yes, yes. Chris, are you a... I'm good. Okay. I think we will have a quorum, and then obviously the meeting will carry on for probably several hours, and please join us as you can. Okay, number seven, let Tal go first.

I move we adjourn. Williams.

Second. Any discussion?

All those in favor, say aye.

Aye.

All right, from the village.

Motion to adjourn, Erlandson. I'll second.

JP. Motion and a second. It's non-debatable. All those in favor, say aye.

Aye.